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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
External drive dead...did I kill it?
Matt Cashore, Photographer
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South Bend | IN | USA | Posted: 7:29 AM on 10.18.06 |
->> One of my two Lacie 500GB drives began making what another thread once referred to as "Bad Clicks" last night. Sure enough...several folders are unable to be copied or opened, and the ones that I can open have corrupt files. I double back up everything on DVD, so I still have the data. I'm posting this not to hit the panic button but rather to ask if my particular habits in the way I use the drive could have caused this. I use two Lacie 500GB drives as my primary archive. One is about 2-3 years old, and the one that crashed is just over 1 year old. Here's how I use 'em:
If I get a call from an editor saying "Do you have shots of XYZ player/event/landmark?" I'll just turn on whichever drive and grab the folder(s) and drag them directly from the external hard drive onto the Photo Mechanic icon, WITHOUT copying to my G5 desktop first. Why not? I'm sometimes grabbing several gigs worth of files and I don't have the time or desktop space on my G5 to copy them before browsing in PM. Convenient, yes...but by reading directly from the external hard drive I imagine I'm making the little platter and stylus thingy inside the Lacie drive do quite a bit of work. Is this practice accelerating the drive failure? Or is it simply a case of "Things that spin at 7200 rpm eventually break and this one simply picked last night as the time to do it."?
I don't want to re-load 400+ gigs of photos only to kill this drive's replacement. Help me figure out if I'm being a complete bonehead or if it's just a random case of bad luck. Thanks. |
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Ian L. Sitren, Photographer
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Palm Springs | CA | USA | Posted: 8:14 AM on 10.18.06 |
->> After something like two years of reading posts across forums here and elsewhere, I know that I will never buy a LaCie drive. I know that all brands of drives fail and that some of you have LaCie drives that have been working 24 hours a day since the Civil War. But I am sure without question that it is LaCie drives that I recall failing over and over.
Anyway I suspect that your use over one year should not be a cause for drive failure. |
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Alan Look, Photographer
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Bloomington | IL | United States | Posted: 8:31 AM on 10.18.06 |
->> Matt, that "little platter and stylus thingy inside the Lacie drive" would be working just as hard if you copied everything to your desktop. It's not the way you are using the drive, it's time was just up.
YOu could try running the MAC equivelent of detect and repair on the drive. It would find the bad sectors and try to move the data to sectors that aren't bad. It may not help, but it can't hurt.
As far as brands? LaCie isn't my favorite, but dealing with hardware everyday, I know all too well that any brand can fail. Failure rates do vary, but I'm not sure it's as wide a disparity as it used to be.
Good thinking to have a back up. Be sure to spin both drives occasionally. Some that sit too long can "freeze" and become unusable just from sitting. |
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Debra L Rothenberg, Photographer
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New York | NY | USA | Posted: 8:59 AM on 10.18.06 |
->> I have been using Lacie for years WITHOUT a problem (knock on wood) I currently have 9 of the 250 GB ones full and am using 2 more. 11 total and not a single problem, all bought thru Mac Mall.
I have friends who use Western Digital and all the other brands and everyone of them has had a problem.
Oh-one of my first LaCie's did have a problem that was spotted early on. I returned it to J & R (and I believe this is where I met fellow SS member Matthaius from Brooklyn) who had the same problem.
Debbie |
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Allen Lester, Photographer
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Norfolk | VA | USA | Posted: 9:11 AM on 10.18.06 |
->> Debbie,
Luckily you are the exception :) We have had nothing but problems with Lacie drives. I agree with the others that any drive can fail, but Lacie drives have not been good to us.
And I’m still not sure to leave ‘em running of turn 'em off when not in use.
Allen |
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Kent Opdahl, Photographer
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Urbandale | IA | USA | Posted: 9:25 AM on 10.18.06 |
| ->> I was told that any external hard drive over 320gig has actually 2 hard drives on the inside. double the drives, double the chances of something to go wrong. |
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Chris Schwegler, Photographer
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St Clair Shores | MI | USA | Posted: 9:34 AM on 10.18.06 |
->> I had a 250GB Lacie die on me about 3 years ago, but it was due to a faulty power supply. I think the non-raid lacie drives just get too hot.
After the 250GB died, I decided that it would be better to get a raid setup for added protection. So I bought the 1TB (4 250GB drives) Lacie external that is in a raid 5 configuration.
my 2 cents,
chris
schwegweb |
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Mark Davis, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Barcelona | ES | Spain | Posted: 10:52 AM on 10.18.06 |
->> Matt,
I use my drives the same way you do and have wondered the same thing. I'm actually very superstitious about it and will eject my drives and unplug them when not in use. The problem is that I have an enormous iTunes library on my external drive, and even though I tell myself not to I have the bad habit of playing my music from the drive. Perhaps it doesn't make any difference, but everything I've heard about external hard drives makes me uneasy.
For the record I own a Maxtor 250gb and a G-drive 160gb drive, and have yet to have any problems. |
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Walter Calahan, Photographer
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Westminster | MD | USA | Posted: 6:45 PM on 10.18.06 |
->> Always back up
Always back up
Always back up
Always back up
Everything fails
Always back up |
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Paul Montague, Photographer
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Swisher | IA | USA | Posted: 9:39 PM on 10.18.06 |
->> Matt,
Using a drive in the way you describe is absolutely NOT abusive; that's what they're made for.
Folks tend to move external drives around a lot... When a disk is spinning, the heads are floating over the platters and they're vulnerable to sharp knocks, like plopping one down on a desk top. When the disk is off, the heads are "parked" and less vulnerable. That may be the cause of some of these failures.
Chris may be onto something with the "heat" idea. I've noticed that too.
LaCie doesn't make the actual "hard drive". I have a spare drive tray for one of my LaCie RAID drives in my hand, and this one uses a Maxtor DiamondMax drive.
We probably have 30 external drives, lots of 'em are LaCie, and I've seen failures from every manufacturer. I echo what Walter said 5 times. |
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Todd Corzett, Photographer
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Livermore | CA | USA | Posted: 9:48 PM on 10.18.06 |
->> "I was told that any external hard drive over 320gig has actually 2 hard drives on the inside. double the drives, double the chances of something to go wrong."
Some cases have multiple drives striped into a single large drive. Just because they are over 320GB doesn't mean that it is two drives though... there are now 750GB drives on the market.
As for the two drives, two things to fail... it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. If the drives are striped (RAID0) then yes, failure in either of the drives will result in total loss. But, two drives mirrored (RAID1) will require two failures to loose any data (so it's two drives... twice the protection).
As for the original question... where you copy the information isn't the problem. IMO, it's the turning on/off of the drive. The greatest time of failure is power-up. But, it could also be part of "things just break".
-Todd... |
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Matt Cashore, Photographer
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South Bend | IN | USA | Posted: 10:20 AM on 10.19.06 |
->> Thank you for the insights and advice, on- and off-message board. A bit of quick-n-dirty math tells me I have to retrieve about 80 DVDs' worth of data...at 15-20 minutes each to copy...yeaaahhhhh, I think a few of these
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/ProRAID/
would be a smart investment. The consensus seems to be that browsing directly from an external drive isn't putting unreasonable stress on it, so I'll keep doing that until I can get a Mac Pro packed to the gills with hard drives. Now if I can just teach the cat how to load & copy DVDs... |
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