External Hard Drive Failures: Bad Luck, Bad Karma or?
 

In the last two years I've experienced six external hard drive failures. The first was an Iomega drive that was several years old. The second drive to fail was a nine-month-old OWC Mercury Elite-Al Pro that replaced the Iomega. I put a known-good drive in the OWC enclosure, but that just verified that both the drive and the enclosure failed simultaneously.

The drive that failed last night is a Seagate Barracuda in a generic (Chinese) enclosure. That drive has already been replaced (not repaired) three times by Seagate. This is the fourth failure in less than a year.

The only thing that all these drives have in common is that they were used as target backup drives by Carbon Copy Cloner. Is it at all possible that CCC is causing these failures, or do I just have horribly back luck?

Bad luck or a Bad firewire port if you are using FW.
CCC is NOT doing anything to break drives ;-)

These six failures have happened on two different machines:

- An old 17" iMac. Firewire 400 used for the Iomega drive failure and the first of the four Seagate failures.

- A 2009 MacMini. Firewire 800 used for the OWC drive failure, USB 2.0 used for the most recent three Seagate failures.

My regularly scheduled CCC backup failed last night. I reran it this morning. It failed again and completely crashed the MacMini (multi-language restart screen appeared - first time I'd ever seen that). The drive was hosed after that. Disk Utility refused to try to repair it. I reformatted it by writing zeros to the entire drive. (A DU option.) This took over two hours but seemed to work. I reran the CCC backup job. It took six hours to backup 190 GB.

But now I'm gun shy on this Seagate drive. When's the next failure?

Sounds like Directory problems. Diskwarrior may have fixed this and also will tell you if there are hardware errors.

I guess I have to break down and buy Disk Warrior.

Of course, all the previous failures have been hardware - the disks simply refuse to mount. The OWC and all the Seagates simply stopped spinning up.

I find with a lot of cheep drives that the week point tends to be a the "power brick" if they have one. That is a lot of failures though.

Diskwarrior is an indispensable tool. When a computer locks up while writing to a drive it can screw up the directory. Also it can be that the system has put a ugch flag on drive which can stop mounting etc.

shows info on permissions of mounted/unmounted drives

Just had another drive failure. This on a bus powered Seagate external USB drive. This is now seven drives in about 30 months.

Is there possibly a problem with your electrical power?

Well, if it were a power problem, then why only hard drives are affected? And, would a power problem cause a bus powered drive to fail while leaving the computer OK?

And, I do have everything behind robust UPSs.

having had similar problems myself - i really sympathize.

i have had 4 failures in the last 3 years and i thought that was excessive. 2 were lacie, 1 seagate & the other western digital. on 3 occasions it was the bridge that failed - the HD's were still ok when re-fitted into new exterior casings.

however as i have to travel 150 kms to the nearest computer warehouse - its extremely inconvenient to sort out. all these drives were bus-powered & my system also runs through a UPS.

as i use time machine - not CCC - that rules that one out.

i notice you are in thailand - i am in india. i know that the climate here plays havoc with IT stuff, i seem to need to get the motherboard replaced yearly in my MBP. i put it down to large fluctuations in temp, humidity & dust ( i look after a few macs locally here & this problem is endemic. ) before i came here - i lived in uk and never had so many problems.

i have just come to accept thats part of the price of living here. i wonder whether SSD's might be the answer, when the price comes down enough to make them viable.

Before I moved to Thailand I lived on Saipan. The power there was awful with fluctuations, brownouts, surges, etc. And, it's hotter, more humid and gets more rainfall than here in Korat. I lived there 26 years. During that time, almost all of which I had a personal computer, I had exactly one hard drive failure and zero motherboard failures. The hard drive failure was a La Cie external firewire drive. During those 26 years I had many other power related failures: numerous refrigerator and aircon compressors, washing machine motors, etc.

Although I'll never know for sure, I don't think my current spate of bad "luck" can be attributed to either climate or the power supply. Something else is at play here. I just have to live with it. Fortunately, external drives are wonderfully cheap and readily available.

Incidentally, one of my neighbors is a production engineer at the nearby Seagate factory. He's on the same power main as I am and he reports zero drive failures at his house! (I didn't mention that my most recent failure was a Seagate drive that he got for me with his employee discount!)

Any chance you can get ahold of an oscilloscope to see what's coming out of the wall?

And how is the UPS wired? Switchover or full-time inverter? Sine or square wave?

Oscilloscope: No.

It's this model series:

Powermatic BNT

The manual says "Simulated sine wave at 220Vac ±5%".

More Bad Luck
 

In the past two weeks I've had two previously reliable Time Machine backup drives stall out after switching to Lion. Reformatting one drive seems to have worked. Time Machine is backing up normally. This on a bus powered external USB drive.

Not such good results with the other drive. This also a bus powered external drive which has been making reliable Time Machine backups of my wife's MacBook for the past eight months or so. Today it just got stuck for hours on "backing up xxx of xxx". I tried DU to repair the disk but it found no problems. I reformatted the drive, but TM still gets stuck. At the moment it's stuck on "Backing up 590MB of 86.3GB".

I guess this drive is hosed.

This is now the seventh drive failure in about 30 months.

Hardly seems normal. I know there's no such thing as "bad luck", but I seem to be getting the short end of the probability stick.

Another One Bites the Dust
 

My step-daughter's 14 month old MacBook died last night. It would not boot from the internal drive. It would start up in single user mode, but fsck could not repair the drive.

The machine will not boot from any of my Disk Warrior DVDs.

The machine will boot from the recovery partition, but DU cannot repair the drive. It fails with the multi-language restart your computer screen.

The machine will boot from the original install DVD, but crashes early in the installation process.

I'm guessing I've lost another hard drive. That's 8 in three years.

It has to be environmental. Apple, LaCie and Seagate don't ship junk. Describe your area in detail - nearby businesses, overall climate, your carpet, pets, appliances within several meters of the computer equipment....

And ask the guy at Seagate if he has a power line monitor - Powertronics is one brand, Fluke is another; the Fluke 43B will do nicely.

And maybe check if the local temple does house calls.

I live in a relatively new subdivision with very modern, underground wiring. The only users on the transformer which serves the subdivision are residences. I watched while they put in a substantial grounding rod for my house and I've tested all the circuits. All of the computers and peripherals, except for the laptops, are on UPSs.

When the PowerBook failed it was on battery, not connected to the mains.

Other than a few mom-and-pop grocery stores there are no businesses in the area. There are no big power consumers anywhere near my house.

Generally, the power here is rock solid; much more stable than it was when I lived on Saipan and had very few hard drive failures in the 25 years I was there.

I don't have any big appliances in the house. A small fridge, an electric oven, a few countertop appliances in the kitchen, three split type aircons (10,000 btu each) each on their own circuit and two point-of-delivery water heaters, each on their own circuit. We also have a few electric fans. Our electricity consumption ranges from about 350 to 400 kilowatt hours per month.

No carpet in the house. It's all ceramic tile. Never notice any static electricity; even on the driest of days. Today is very dry. Humidity is 62% as I write.

Climate is tropical, but right now the high's are in the high 20s and the overnight lows in the teens. (That's Celsius.)

I'll ask him after work this evening.

Sounds nearly identical to my place in Tokyo, and I've had zero hardware issues in 10 years. No obvious problems I can see, but they said the same thing in Guadalajara a few days before 8km of streets exploded.

We have septic tanks here, so, with luck, any similar explosion will be highly localized.

BTW, I managed to get DU to format the internal MacBook drive with the 'write zeroes once' option. DU now reports that the disk is OK. I booted from the recovery partition and am now, with even more luck, reinstalling Lion. (Although the install progress bar shows zero progress after 20 minutes.)

Turns out that the drive is OK. What was wrong was a bad memory stick. After getting the hard drive reformatted I still couldn't install the OS on it. Ran the Hardware test and found that one of the 2 GB RAM modules was bad. Pulled it out and now all is well. (Except that the MacBook now has 2 GB RAM instead of 4....)

"Simulated sine wave at 220Vac ±5%" = modulating a switcher to look like a sine wave. A UPS output (unless well filtered) can have some nasty high-frequency crap on it and it tends to get worse as you approach the full power rating. A good downstream power supply can ignore that although it tends to heat its transformer, but power bricks are not so good -- typically rather cheap -- and pass some of that on. Could it be that the drive power supplies and bridges are just suffering from that? That's probably why AMO suggested a scope.

Assuming that you are at Suranaree, given that you live in Korat, I'm wondering if you can't ask a friendly engineering prof, technician or student to have a look at the output of the UPS under load. When I was there many years ago, they had an Engineering School.

That's very possible and perhaps explains why it's only drives and why none of the other gear (computers, routers, TVs, etc) have had any failures at all. I only have one drive left that's not bus powered.

Were you working at Suranaree? I'm retired and don't have any contacts there.

I didn't work for them, I was part of a Canadian International Development Agency team as Dean of Engineering at a school here in Nova Scotia to help Suranaree mount a graduate program in Engineering. Brutal trip from here though -- last time I went it took 29 hours counting wait times but not an overnight. First Toronto, wait, Vancouver, wait, Hong Kong, wait, Thai Air to Bangkok, overnight, early flight over the mountains to Korat. On the way back, we did the tourist routine in Bangkok.

Loved Thailand (and I'm very fond of Thai food). People were wonderful.

You must have done well. Suranaree is now ranked very highly among universities in Thailand. Pretty decent given that it's only been around for a couple of decades.

I'm glad to hear that -- I haven't followed that since I retired 9 years ago. The folks there were extremely gung-ho and very easy to work with -- the credit is theirs.

Why do you have several UPSs if the power is rock solid?

Because the power does go out now and then; hence the use of the word "generally". Lightening hits a transformer. Drunk hits a power pole.

If I'm home I like to gracefully shut down the machines if the power goes out.

If I'm not home. Well. Too bad.

Perhaps I've been very lucky, but I've had the power go out over a broad range of machines I've owned and as far as I could tell afterward, I've never lost a byte. Is that just luck? There's no risk to my backups because they're only powered up while a backup is in progress.

What's luck?

About a year ago I started getting flat tires on my bicycle about once a week. None of them were punctures; just what seemed to be manufacturing flaws: tiny pinholes in the tube, lamination failures at the valve, etc. I tried tubes of various brands from several manufacturers. The flats continued for weeks. And then they suddenly stopped and I haven't had an unexplained flat in six or eight months. Luck?

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Maybe my use of UPSs dates from my time (25 years) on Saipan where the power was really awful. Constant outages, brown outs, spikes, etc. I had protective devices on anything with a motor and a compressor and voltage stabilizers and UPSs on the computers, TVs, etc.

In my office we had a massive UPS that took up an entire room and used 30 or 40 car batteries.