Awwww FRAK! My external drive died. (1 Viewer)

[Rickboy]

I've got a 250GB LACIE drive with FW800 that houses all of my virtual machines. It died a slow death this morning.

I've been having problems with it for the last few months. I've had to stop and restart it several time to get it to be recognized by my Mac. The Mac would see the enclosure but not the drive itself. Several drive restarts would eventually get the drive to come up and run normally..

Well today it decided to give up on life. I turned it on and it made a the clicking sound of death. That's all it does now.

Fortunately I've been backing up my VM files with time machine on a USB drive.

Now I'm wondering it it is best to replace the hard drive in the enclosure or upgrade to something that has eSATA. I certainly wouldn't mind having a lot more disk speed for my VMs.

 

[Cajun Mike]

my internal died yesterday, i luckily got a copy of the c partition before it died, but have some bad sectors so i can't do anything with gparted to enlarge partition on new drive. did a chkdsk and it does nothing.

 

[Saint77]

I've got a 250GB LACIE drive with FW800 that houses all of my virtual machines. It died a slow death this morning.

I've been having problems with it for the last few months. I've had to stop and restart it several time to get it to be recognized by my Mac. The Mac would see the enclosure but not the drive itself. Several drive restarts would eventually get the drive to come up and run normally..

Well today it decided to give up on life. I turned it on and it made a the clicking sound of death. That's all it does now.

Fortunately I've been backing up my VM files with time machine on a USB drive.

Now I'm wondering it it is best to replace the hard drive in the enclosure or upgrade to something that has eSATA. I certainly wouldn't mind having a lot more disk speed for my VMs.

eSATA rocks the planet, but I think if I were you, and I am gonna look into this myself, I would consider a NAS with RAID

 

[Rickboy]

eSATA rocks the planet, but I think if I were you, and I am gonna look into this myself, I would consider a NAS with RAID

NAS = 1 gigabit max.

eSATA = 3 Gigabit max.

Remember, this is to house my virtual machines. Speed matters. RAID isn't really important. This isn't exactly an enterprise environment

I think I'm going to go ahead and buy a new hard drive for the LACIE enclosure but I'm going to make that my time machine backup drive. I'm going to Fry's tomorrow to get a new setup with eSATA.

 

[eaux-yeah]

I think I'm going to go ahead and buy a new hard drive for the LACIE enclosure but I'm going to make that my time machine backup drive. I'm going to Fry's tomorrow to get a new setup with eSATA.

Have you tested the drive itself? The LaCie enclosure is probably the culprit. Most of them are due to inadequate cooling (no fans) and cheap components.
In the past 10 years, If I added up all of the bad LaCie products from all of my clients, it would number in the hundreds, seriously.
LaCie = CrapWare

It's cheap and you do get what you pay for.

 

[Rickboy]

Have you tested the drive itself? The LaCie enclosure is probably the culprit. Most of them are due to inadequate cooling (no fans) and cheap components.
In the past 10 years, If I added up all of the bad LaCie products from all of my clients, it would number in the hundreds, seriously.
LaCie = CrapWare

It's cheap and you do get what you pay for.

Thanks but I already gave that a go. It's definitely the drive..

but you're right, LaCie does seem to be pretty bad from a quality perspective.

 

[Boopa]

If I may put y two cents in. I work at Office Depot in the Tech Dept, we have a external Mac drive with eSATA. My opinion its the best way to go. Plus its got a firewire connection. Makes it even faster. Come see me, I can get fixed up.

-B

 

[Rickboy]

If I may put y two cents in. I work at Office Depot in the Tech Dept, we have a external Mac drive with eSATA. My opinion its the best way to go. Plus its got a firewire connection. Makes it even faster. Come see me, I can get fixed up.

-B

I appreciate the thought but you're in NOLA, I'm in North Texas


Just an FYI. Firewire 800 is slower than eSATA

 

[Rickboy]

I guess I should mention this.

I'm putting off buying a replacement drive. I want to build a lot more virtual machines than my Mac would be capable of supporting. So I'm going to build a new linux box with VMware Workstation 7 on it. Then I can build out an entire virtual vSphere 4 environment for testing purposes.

I do this kind of thing because VMware's products have become my specialty at the data center level. That skill has made my job as recession proof as it is going to get, so I'm always trying new things in my lab to expand on that skill set..

 

[inetnawlins]

Have you tested the drive itself? The LaCie enclosure is probably the culprit. Most of them are due to inadequate cooling (no fans) and cheap components.
In the past 10 years, If I added up all of the bad LaCie products from all of my clients, it would number in the hundreds, seriously.
LaCie = CrapWare

It's cheap and you do get what you pay for.

I second that. I don't recommend Lacie to any of my clients. I've seen too many of those drives go belly up. G-Tech makes a good product for an external, they also offer eSATA, firewire 800, 400, and usb connections on the same drive.