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Hard drive on the way out?
#38252 01/13/16 09:30 AM
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One of my four internal hard drives "failed" yesterday. In Bay 2, I have a Seagate 3 Tb drive with three partitions. The first two are 100 Gb partitions with system backups. The third partition is my main storage for all files, including music, photos and my Microsoft User Data folder. So, It's VERY important. I do a daily backup to the drive in Bay 3, and weekly backups to a couple external drives.

On booting, the first indication something was wrong was there was no information in my Outlook window. I opened a Finder window to see what was wrong and none of the three partitions on the Bay 2 drive showed. Disk Utility did not see the drive, nor did DiskWarrior.

I replaced the drive in Bay 2 with a new drive and shove the "failed" drive into a dock. I was surprised to see the first two system backup partitions mount on the Desktop, but not the Data partition. In Disk Utility, the drive was now visible, but the Data partition was greyed out. I clicked the mount button and Data appeared. I ran Repair Disk and DiskWarrior successfully, then put the drive back into Bay 2.

It has been performing as normal for 24 hours now.

Finally, the questions: what happened? The drive is 18 months old, should I trust it? It does not make any odd noises - runs normally.

The only unusual activity is that I have been upgrading Suitcase Fusion on three different systems and doing a lot of system boot changes via the alt key on startup.

Thanks for reading this far. smile


iMac (19,1, 3.1 GHz i5, 12.7.4, 40 Gb RAM); MacBook Air (1.8 Ghz, 8 Gb RAM, 10.14.6, 256 Gb SSD) Vodafone router and Devolo Wi-Fi Extender, Canon TS8351 printer/scanner.
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
freelance #38253 01/13/16 09:42 AM
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I think you ought to run a surface scan with TechTool, either Pro or Deluxe, another such app, or Terminal.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
freelance #38254 01/13/16 10:14 AM
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What Artie said.

I have read many posts about Seagate drives being failure-prone. I have always had good luck with Hitachi (now HGST).


Jon

macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
jchuzi #38256 01/13/16 10:28 AM
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I've had great luck with Hitachi HDDs, but my experience with HGSTs, their Western Digital incarnation, has been far from the same.

For the moment, they're riding the wave of Hitachi's almost non-existent failure rate, but I suspect that when they've been out there long enough to establish their own stats they'll tell a different story.


The new Great Equalizer is the SEND button.

In Memory of Harv: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. ~Voltaire
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
artie505 #38257 01/13/16 12:18 PM
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Good to know, Artie. Does anybody have experience with Toshiba?


Jon

macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
freelance #38263 01/13/16 06:08 PM
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I ran TechTool Pro surface scan and (after 5 hours) there were no bad blocks to report. I guess I'll call this glitch an abberation and just make sure I stay backed up. The drive passes all tests and SMART status.

I was using Samsung drives and never had a failure. However, I've been replacing smaller drives with higher capacity drives and my supplier stocks Seagate, WD, Hitachi and Toshiba. I usually buy on price.


iMac (19,1, 3.1 GHz i5, 12.7.4, 40 Gb RAM); MacBook Air (1.8 Ghz, 8 Gb RAM, 10.14.6, 256 Gb SSD) Vodafone router and Devolo Wi-Fi Extender, Canon TS8351 printer/scanner.
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
freelance #38265 01/13/16 06:21 PM
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This is a case where I prefer TechTool Pro 8 over the other alternatives. TTP's SMART test reports each of the SMART variables individually and not just the summary pass/fail. I have had a drive fail an individual test, but pass the summary results reported by Disk Utility and others. It turned out the drive really had failed. Secondly it does perform a full surface scan which is an even better indication of drive health than SMART.

If the drive passed both the TTP SMART and surface scan I would put it back in service. There is always the possibility something besides the drive was at fault such as a corroded SATA connector that was cleaned by removing the drive from the bay.

I would also keep a close eye on it. I use Checkmate for that purpose — it performs almost daily surface scans of all attached drives as well as SMART.


If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
freelance #38267 01/13/16 07:39 PM
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Originally Posted By: freelance
. However, I've been replacing smaller drives with higher capacity drives and my supplier stocks Seagate, WD, Hitachi and Toshiba.
From what I have read, larger drives have a greater tendency to fail than smaller ones. I gather that 2 TB is the sweet spot, and anything larger may be problematic.


Jon

macOS 11.7.10, iMac Retina 5K 27-inch, late 2014, 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 1 TB fusion drive, 16 GB RAM, Epson SureColor P600, Photoshop CC, Lightroom CC, MS Office 365
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
jchuzi #38269 01/13/16 07:52 PM
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For all the Seagate drives I have owned, I never had any issues with them. (One of them did eventually fail, but that was after 6 years of fairly constant use). And, right now, I have two external, 1 TB Seagate Drives in external enclosures, and they perform flawlessly.

I do have the original 1 TB (slow), 5400 rpm Hitachi Drive that was inside my late 2012 Mac Mini in a nice, slim external case, and so far, it is fine (I don't use it much on a day to day basis, only using it together with my mid 2013 13" MacBook Air when I travel).

Re: Hard drive on the way out?
freelance #38304 01/15/16 01:10 PM
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if you plug in a drive that has three partitions on it and only two mount, there is a problem with one of the partitions on the drive. Although it may be a hardware issue, it's usually not. Run disk utility and it should show you what's going on.

It may list three partitions, all named properly, with the one that did not mount showing up greyed out because it's not mounted. If so, select it and try to repair it.

It may also show the missing partition using a generic device name like "disk3s5", indicating more severe damage. You can try to repair it with DU also, but are more likely going to need to go with DiskWarrior or something else more capable.

If you launch disk utility and it doesn't list any drives on the left, or pinwheels, it's either waiting for an automatic disk check to complete (it's trying to repair the missing partition before automatically mounting it) or it may be getting hard IO errors on one of the drives as it tries to scan the partition tables to build the list on the left. Coping with hard errors is a bit difficult to walk you through remotely, you may end up needing to take it to someone to look over.


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: Hard drive on the way out?
Virtual1 #38308 01/15/16 01:38 PM
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Thanks for the feedback. The problem partition has been behaving for the past two days after running Disk Utility, DiskWarrior and TechTool Pro. Fingers crossed.


iMac (19,1, 3.1 GHz i5, 12.7.4, 40 Gb RAM); MacBook Air (1.8 Ghz, 8 Gb RAM, 10.14.6, 256 Gb SSD) Vodafone router and Devolo Wi-Fi Extender, Canon TS8351 printer/scanner.

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