Hardware :: Growing Pile Of Dead External Drives
Sep 13, 2009
I've got several drives that have died over the last year or so. I've got six or seven drives hooked up to my iMac that I use for storage, backing up etc, and it seems like one just dies every six months or so. Maybe one a year. What happens is it suddenly doesn't show up on the desktop anymore, and it never stops churning. I try connecting any of these dead drives to another one of our macs, macbook pro, etc, but it behaves the same way.
Is there anything to be done about this? I'm thinking of getting a Drobo system, rather than buying new drives so often. Is there any special software for dealing with drives in a state like this? Or a place you can take them to to see if they can be fixed? (I have all the data backed up, so that's not an issue. I've called the manufacturer (lacie) but I think they're all out of warrantee, though they're only a couple of years old.
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Mar 14, 2012
My trusty PPC g5 from 2004 has died, or at least it won't start. It shows the grey apple screen, but no spinner, and after a few minutes the fans kick in and build to a wind-tunnel noise.
I don't have a backup of this machine, or it's other drive, so I am nervous about taking it into Apple where they might just wipe it.
Also, I surprisingly CAN start it up in Firewire disk mode, and both drives seem to be OK when accessed from another computer.
So I've copied off the most important things, and I will probably try to make clones. But before I finally cart it into Apple (where it will probably cost more than its worth to fix it),
Info:
Powermac G5, Intel iMacs, Mac OS X (10.6.2)
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Feb 6, 2012
IMac Grey Screen with Apple icon....nothing has worked and I do not have the start up disk...
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
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Apr 30, 2010
Ever since I downloaded iTunes 9.1 my library has been growing out of control. The only problem is, I haven't added any music to it. It says it's 3,091.80 GB now and tends to get bigger every day. This would be a minor nuisance were it not accompanied by other problems (recently added music disappearing, library file error messages, etc.). Has anybody dealt with anything like this?
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Nov 30, 2009
I haven't backed up my macbook in a couple days since I've been out of town and did not have access to my external hard drive. A little while ago I plugged in the hard drive and told time machine to do a backup. The backup started at around 24GB, which I thought was weird because I didn't change that much. An hour or so later it is still climbing and is at 77.1GB. By the time I finish typing this it will probably be even larger. The weird thing is it says 77.1 of 77.1 but then both numbers just keep simultaneously growing. I'm using a Seagate Desk and bucking up and aluminum unibody macbook running 10.58.
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Mar 2, 2010
I have just installed Windows XP with VMWare Fusion (2.0.6) and every time I shut down VMWare and check the size of the virtual machine back in Finder in OS X (Snow Leopard) it has grown by 2GB or so. Why is it doing this and how can I stop it? (It's now 8GB+ even though there is no software installed on the Windows side). I am running these on a late 2007 iMac.
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Sep 11, 2010
I have a white 13" MacBook. I'm totally Mac illiterate. I bought the Mac because I just about to dig my eyes out in frustration dealing with MS Vista. I like the MacBook.....but about a year and a half ago, the right channel of my 3.1 speaker setup cut out. It worked fine for the 1/1.5 years of ownership.
Internal speakers? Work just fine. Headphones? Perfect stereo.
External speakers with subwoofer? Right channel is dead.
I've tried max laptop volume and creeping volume on the actual speaker up. I've tried max external speaker volume and creeping the Mac volume up. I downloaded a ToneTester program. Internal speakers and headphones just fine. 3.1 externals? Right channel dead. I don't have the red-light jack issue. My Sound Output toggles between Headphones and Internal Speakers output perfectly. About 7 months ago while putzing with all the settings, I got it all back out-of-the-blue. Perfect stereo with subwoofer. I had it for about 2 months and then poof - right channel faded again.
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Feb 26, 2012
User Event Agent has been taken up a lot of real memory and keep growing and take a lot of CPU usage. Is this related to the fact that the comp. gets extremely slow or completely irresponsive?
Info:
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Feb 20, 2012
My external hard drive doesn't show up in finder.Time machine can't find it. Does this mean my external hard drive is dead?
I borrowed a friends and switched mine with hers. My acted the same way in her macbook. I switched the cords on the external drives, no change.
Also, Is there a way to retrieve the information from my sick external hard drive?
Info:
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Dec 6, 2014
After some problems with Time Machine backup, I removed a bunch of stuff from my internal hard drive, reformatted my external HD used for backups, and started a new full backup. Time Machine has been running for about 24 hours and gives me a status of Backing up: xx GB of yy GB. Both xx and yy keep growing (apace) so that I don't believe xx will ever equal yy.
To cryptic? Here are real numbers. My internal disk being backed up contains 469.39 GB. Backup status now says Backing up: 685.78GB of 754.42 GB. Both numbers just keep growing. I'm happy to let Time Machine overnight (again) but, really, this can't be normal.
Info:
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
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Oct 11, 2007
Although they work fine on other computers, my external hard drive and USB key won't show up on my macbook. I know it gives power to them since my external lights up when it's plugged in, and I see that they're connected in the System Profiler, but they don't appear on the desktop. Also, my ipod shows up in iTunes, but the computer always says it's corrupted, although it works fine. I thought that was an iPod/iTunes thing but since finding out about my hard drives.
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Mar 1, 2009
What backup solutions are available for backing up two drives on to one backup drive without causing any confusion?
My setup consists of:
- Powerbook (80 GB)
- external Firewire drive (160 GB)
- external Firewire drive (500 GB) for backup
I'm running MacOS 10.4.11, so please don't suggest Time Machine.
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Oct 20, 2009
When I boot up, my external drives are not on the desktop. I discovered that if the Finder is relaunched, they show up and all is well. Another issue that may be related: When powering down, the computer needs a force-quit most of the time. It hangs on the spinning gear
OSX 10.4.11
PowerPC G5 dual 2.7
Finder 10.4.7
2 internal drives
1 LaCie 1TB Raid (formated JBOD)
1 CalDigit 1TB Raid
250 GB External
150 GB External
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Aug 24, 2010
I have a few external drives for my Macbook Pro. One of the drives is an Iomega MaxMini with USB ports on the back to add drives.
My question is; when I hook up the drives to my laptop I get about 4 drive icons on the desktop for each of the partitions, and when I need to remove them I have to eject them or move them to the trash icon.
Is there a way I can put the drives in a folder of some kind that I can just eject and make the desktop look less cluttered?
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Sep 11, 2010
[URL] Though I've never done it myself, I've gleaned that it's possible to partition/raid multiple HDs together to act as 1 HD Might it be possible to do the same to lots of Flash Drives serially linked with USB hubs? 1 USB port -> 1 hub (7 USB ports) -> 7 hubs (49 USB ports) -> 49 hubs (343 USB ports)
USB hubs /can/ be really cheap (given patience, they could probably be acquired for $3 per 7-port hub) If you go to conventions and stuff like that, they literally give away flash drives with the company's info on them. not the largest around, but I've seen 512MB (maybe larger now? that was several years ago) to get 343 ports, you would need 57 hubs ($171) 343 free 512MB flash drives cardboard box 18x18x18" (if each hub is 7x2x1", then 57 would take up 7x19x6") This would be big, but not ungodly so. This would give us 171.5 GB. (343 GB if each drive is 1GB) I'm not sure of the power requirements of these drives - might have to get hubs with own power supplies. anyways - is this possible? would it work how I think? USB 2.0 offers faster data transfer than SSD, but I don't know the speeds of flash drives.
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Oct 10, 2010
I am having issues with mu G-tech and Lacie external FW800 drives mounting to the desktop. The drives just spin and click and never mount. I tried different cables and both- front and back ports.
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Jan 11, 2011
i am very interested in buying a Mac. But I need an external hard drive for my stuff. What are the best 1TB or higher external hard drives for a Mac Book Pro?
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Jan 27, 2009
I did a computing job after being retired for many months, and I got paid in hard drives.However, I also want to plug in my SATA DVD burner to the card at the same time. is that possible? A RAID set and a DVD burner on the same controller?I've never done anything above a RAID-0 before so ANY info would be appreciated, especially having to do with this particular model (others are out of my price range!
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Feb 2, 2009
I currently have a 2TB WD mirror edition that is setup in RAID 1 so it will mirror all my data. Now I also have a bunch of other drives laying around which I also feel the need to back up and currently I am doing this by doing a whole bunch of dragging and dropping and copying and pasting etc etc etc and this is making me very tired. I know that a setup is possible in disk utility but I am not at all sure about how to configure it so I wont lose any of my data.
Some details about my setup:
Mac OS X 10.5.6
PowerPc G5
Harddrives: two 1TB WD MyBooks, and two 500gig WD Mybooks --> these pairs need to mirror each other and make my life less of a hassle.
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Feb 19, 2009
I'm currently using the 2TB drive as my time machine backup and the other drives for mostly media files (lots of movies, tv shows, etc.). What I would like to do is combine the non-backup drives to show up as a single drive in leopard. Is this possible? RAID 0 is out of the question since they're different sizes. Is there a way in Disk Utility to do this?
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Feb 23, 2009
I have purchased a MBA (love it!), and I am about to sell my Windows desktop. I will be duel-booting OS X and Win 7 on my MBA, and I might add a Mac mini or a self-built Windows box to my network down the road (mostly to serve video and other files). I am getting an Airport Extreme to add to my current wireless G router/DSL modem. The AE will serve as my wireless N access point (N for the MBA, G from the other wifi router for my iPhone), and I will use it to connect my printer and an external 1TB drive. I can't decide whether to built a cheap Windows box to be my file server (and to perform random tasks when the MBA is with me) or to buy some NAS system to serve my files.
My other question is what format do I use for my external drive and a couple of pen drives I use as backup for my documents and pictures. They are currently formatted NTFS, and I realize I cannot modify them from OS X. But Mac formatting isn't visible in Windows without an added program, right? I often have files above the size limit for Fat32. So which format do I chose? One of the pen drives is used for school where I transfer Visual Studio programming files; another is a photo/document backup that I keep in a fireproof safe. Will I just need to keep one pen drive only for my programming classes formatted to NTFS? What do other people do?
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Feb 25, 2009
I often use external hard drives to back up my work. Recently I purchased a 1TB Lacie drive. I took a week to build a lovely new file structure for my work. At the end of this week, I began deleting the old files on other hard drives so as to transfer my new neatly structured work back on. In the midst of this, the brand new hard drive crashed, illiciting only the clicking sound of death.
That hard drive, some of my work (a very small amount but still) and a week's worth of sweat and blood was gone in an instant. The person I took it to to look at it mentioned a power surge as being a possible cause for the crash. Anyway, I returned the lacie and bought a 1T Western Digital Mybook (silver). I then began dumping the old back ups onto this.
A week in and this one is crashed too. No clicking sound of death. It calmly sits on my desk with it's unceasing unblinking blue light and refuses to show up in utilities no matter what I do. So I assume it's a goner also. I'll return it also of course. Is something causing these drives to fail...that exists in my walls? Are there power surges causing my drives to die...? OR is it simply a case of bad luck with my choices of new drives?
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Apr 7, 2009
I just inserted a brand new flash drive into my macbook, a 16 gig sandisk cruzer. I thought the system would ask me to reformat it, but it didn`t. It looks like i can add and delete files without any problem, though. Is it ok to use this same drive to share files between my windows and mac? will there be any kind of format issues or problems? Just asking to be sure I won`t do anything wrong before I pop it in my pc lol
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Sep 8, 2009
I have two USB hard drives connected to my iMac. Since installing SL, I have experienced data loss on both. Example: I open a folder in the Finder. I then CMD-UP to move to the next level up, only to find that the folder I was just viewing is no longer in the list.
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Oct 4, 2009
Why is this? I can't changed it mac won't let me. What do I do?
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Dec 29, 2009
Every time I reboot my computer my external drives are all set to "read only". I have to eject them, and remount them and things are then fine again, but this is an annoying step and the fact that a reboot is causing them to switch to read-only is having me worried.
Anyone else have this problem/know of a solution?
I've been trying to figure it out over at the official apple forums but we're not getting anywhere... the thread is here:
[URL]
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Apr 19, 2010
I was done doing various tasks on the iMac and when I decided to plug in the external hard drive for a Time Machine backup, the drive spun, but was never shown on the desktop.I also tried another external drive and had the same thing happen.
After rebooting (hey, this sounds like Windows!), the drive again showed up on the desktop and Time Machine worked fine.Is an external hard drive not showing up on the desktop a somewhat common issue?
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Aug 1, 2010
My G5 PowerPC will not recognize any external drive, on the desktop or Disk Utility. One showed up briefly, but the computer locked up . I've tried each drive on my Imac and they all show up and work perfectly.
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Aug 4, 2010
I know there's an option for this for your internal drive under energy save, and it makes my computer loads faster, but I still use 4 external drives, and when they fall asleep it takes a few seconds before they wake up and it makes my computer feel old again.
Is there away to keep them awake permanently? And if there is, is this a BAD thing? I imagine it's better than the moving parts going over and over when it's waking up multiple times a day.
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Mar 4, 2012
when i connect my external hard drive (2 partitions, 1 for timemachine 1 for storage) it keeps disconecting it self unapropriately.
I have the same problem with a couple of usb flash drives. There are no usb hubs involved they are inserted directly in to my mac!
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
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