Lost two drives yesterday

[peterkrogh]

Just a reminder for those who get complacent.
One drive, the external that drives my music server, went down, bummer.  The case might be bad, or the drive. In any case, everything's well backed up.

I also lost the drive in my MacBook yesterday. Well, on the way to lost.  It started to stall as I was teleconferencing with Beardsworth about the Blog attack. Disk utility showed some i/o problems - not good, but it still did not report SMART problems. SMART Utility, however, saw that it was failing. It looks like mostly the files that were toasted were some bluetooth support files - so no big deal.  But the number of bad sectors on the drive climbed significantly in the course of several hours, so it was going south fast.  I'll use the clone I made off the failing drive, but I mugh need to do an archive and install, or maybe grab some files off another backup if more bad files show up.

Keep those backups running.

Peter

[danaltick]

Peter,

Do you know if Active Hard Disk Monitor under Windows would have detected it failing?

Dan

[danaltick]

Peter,

Actually don't worry about this one.  Probably no way to tell since you can't hook it up to Windows.

Dan

[peterkrogh]

Dan,
Yeah, the problem is getting a connection that shows SMART, which is a hardware need.  Since my PCs are all laptops, I don't have a way to test these drives. If I could connect through a bus that supported the transfer of SMART data, I would be able to answer.
Peter

[peterkrogh]

Two more today - one brand new WD Green 2TB drive that would not mount in the MacPro, and another 2TB WD Green with escalating bad sector count.
Jeez, this is a lot to keep up with.  I'd be freaking out if I did not have optical disc backups.
Peter

[R. Neil Haugen]

Peter,

It's amazing to see how many drives you have going down so fast. Jeepers.

My new laptop is a Toshiba Satellite ... and it's got an eSATA port as well as the FIREWIRE 800 and several USB's. One of the main reasons I got it was 'cause of that eSATA port, which has a Kingwin EZ-Dock attached to it, that mounts "raw" internal HD's on it.

I'm still rolling throuhg the new book, and it's so well laid out, thanks a bunch.

Neil

[peterkrogh]

Neil,
Only one of these has been a real loss of a working drive (the laptop drive).
1 was a bad power supply (internal drive is fine)
1 was bad out of the box (mounted in an external enclosure, but not internally - I'll call that a defective drive)
1 has creeping bad sectors - a sign of increasing likelihood of failure.

I could easily have been unaware of two of the problems (no internal mounting, and bad sectors) if I was not performing some additional tests. I think the bad sector problem is probably a lot more common than people think.

Peter