Another Drive Failure – this is getting old

I turned on my computer this morning and got a warning that my hard drive’s SMART data indicates a pending failure. Crap. Shown below is the message from SMART Utility.
FailingDrive

SMART Utility tells you when your drive is failing before your system may alert you. In this case, the relevant numbers are the Bad Sectors. It was 0 yesterday, 16 when I booted up in the morning, and 40 after I updated by backup drive. This should be considered notice of impending failure.

This is the second time in 6 months. The first time was caused by rough treatment of the computer on my part – this one just seems to be drive malfunction. I had a full bootable clone from a week ago on a desktop drive, and another one that was on a small drive from a month or two ago. I updated the older clone, and swapped that drive into the laptop. In all, less than 90 minutes from start to finish. For those keeping score at home, these were Seagate drives. I’m looking forward to installing WD Black Squared drives my laptops soon (combo SSD and Spinning Disk!).

driveswapping2
It’s wise to have a clone of your drive handy so that you can swap out a failing drive. Unibody Macs are very easy to work with – less than 5 minutes to swap drives and put the computer back together. You’ll also want to have another backup, like a Backblaze cloud backup or daily Chronosync backup to a local server. 

Let this be your reminder to have a fresh backup.