MacLochlainns Weblog

Two posts in a row on hardware failures – whew :-(. Just after fixing my Mac Pro Video card, one of my 1 TB Seagate Barracuda hard drives failed. Naturally, it’s the one with half a terabyte of virtual machines.

First thing I checked was whether or not the disk still spun. It did but was not recognized by the Mac OS X or Windows 7 OS. Then, I swapped the disk controller card with another one of the same model numbered disks. The Mac OS X recognized it and launched Disk Utility but with a catch. I’d need to re-partition it, which would trash the important data.

I’m now working on recovering it byte-by-byte, big ouch! As time consuming as it is, I’m going to start performing weekly backups to DVD on my test and development machine.

To add insult to injury, I found out that Seagate knew about the problem but kept it quiet. Hoping the data recovery works, I’ll do an RMA afterward on the broken drive, which also makes a clicking noise after the disk controller failure.

This is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (1 Terabyte) Drive, Model #ST3100340AS, which was heralded for its breakthrough four 250 GB platters. It is prone to failure. You may avoid failure by applying a firmware update but only before the disk fails. I’ve got two more of these that require a firmware update. Also, my eroded confidence in Seagate causes me to worry whether they’re in my External Seagate drives. I use them for time machines. You can read the story from January 2009, which unfortunately I missed before now.

A quick update, you can download DriveDetect from Seagate if you’re running the Windows OS but they’ve not got a utility for Mac OS X. You’ll have to manually pull the drives. For the USB drives, it appears that you’ll need a PC to run their utility.