It was due. During a routine restart after a software upgrade, I lost a hard drive. Fortunately it was an external, backup hard drive. The most disappointing part, sadly, is that this is possibly the fourth external hard drive I’ve had crash in as many years. Why do external hard drive suck so badly?
Like all the external hard drives I’ve lost, this one was only a few months old. It was an Iomega Silver-something, 500GB external USB drive. I bought it with my Mac OS X “Leopard” upgrade. The drive served as the external Time Machine (backup) drive. (Remember, Time Machine was the reason I suffered through the Leopard upgrade, and I still think it’s awesome.)
One morning the Mac needed to restart after a software update. Restarting is a common ordeal for software updates, though it seems less common on the Mac than on Windows Vista.
When the Mac started again, the external hard drive’s icon failed to show up on the desktop. I did some quick troubleshooting:
- I used the Disk Utility. It showed the drive, but not the volume. That meant that the drive itself was recognized by the computer’s USB system. But the volume, which means the disk (as opposed to the drive), was missing. That’s bad.
- Because the drive was warm (hot, actually) I let it rest. I tried starting it again. Nothing.
- I tried plugging the drive into a PC to see if the problem was the interface. No luck.
Those three steps confirmed the worst. The drive died. RIP.
A quick check of the system logs confirmed that the problem wasn’t new. By using the Console application in Mac OS X, I was able to review what the operating system experienced with the drive; it had suffered numerous errors before it finally died. So even if the drive didn’t kick the bit bucket, odds are slim that I would have been able to reliably use it to backup.
A replacement My Book drive was secured and it backed up all my stuff. Time Machine was once again up and running again on the Mac. I’ve had good luck with the My Book drives on my PCs (also for backup), so perhaps using one on the Mac is a better solution.
Lesson to be learned: Always keep and use an external backup drive. Backup often. Backup frequently, especially when your computer is having other, incidental problems. Be safe. Be happy. Compute wisely.
I have a Seagate FreeAgent 250GB HDD (a Christmas gift, and a damned good one at that! The 8GB and 6GB HDD’s in my computer thanked me!), and I use it to store all my documents and stuff. I’ve used almost 32GB on it (not much, but, meh), and it’s pretty good. It’s quiet, and it’s had a couple of unfortunate accidents, while it’s on, no less, and still works fine. The cool glowy light is nice, too. I’d reccommend these ones.
The MyBook ones are supposed to look like books, and be stored with real books, aren’t they? Or is that some freakish dream I had?
It’s funny that Mac OS didn’t tell you that the disc was suffering from errors before it died. Odd. Oh, well.
(By the way, who made the Iomega’s hard drive? I didn’t think Iomega made hard drives. But I could be wrong ;))
Comment by Douglas — April 12, 2008 @ 5:27 am
The drive inside the Iomega case was a Seagate. I forget the details; I seldom pay attention to part numbers and such, especially on failed gizmos.
The MyBook drives look like fat, squat books. One interesting thing to note is that they orient the drive vertically. The Iomega, as well as the other external drives that failed, were oriented horizontally.
To my knowledge, I’ve never seen a hard drive access error in a GUI operating system, at least not specifically as such. I remember them from DOS. You know that the drive internally has to detect something like a dozen errors before the drive’s electronics actually report an error to the OS. Still, it’s odd that the OS didn’t say, “Uh, I’m having a wee bit o’ trouble with that damn external drive.” (That’s how I’d write error messages.)
Comment by admin — April 12, 2008 @ 9:58 am