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- Jul 6, 2008
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Believe it or not, I've never experienced a hard drive failure before, but the external HD I've been using for only about 2 years for my Time Machine backup with my iMac (Fantom Drives 2TB External HD) has failed. The first sign was that it unmounted in the middle of the night when a Time Machine backup was starting. I got it to connect again, but it just unmounted again the next time Time Machine ran. Disk Utility would not load disks when it was connected, and when I ran Disk Utility in recovery mode, it didn't show up as a drive. I couldn't even boot into Safe Mode with it connected. Resetting SMC and PRAM had no effect. My last attempt was to try connecting it to my MBA, after which my MBA promptly had a kernel panic. I tried again after reboot with the same effect. Apparently the Mac's immune system doesn't like this thing anymore, LOL!
There was a thread not long ago where Nick and some others talked about how they simply used bare 3.5" drives with a dock, so that's what I've decided to do. I'm upgrading my other external HD (1TB Western Digital Elements) that I was using for extra storage to a 4TB Seagate Barracuda bare drive and replacing the failed 2TB drive with the another 4TB Seagate Barracuda bare drive for my Time Machine backups. Found this nice dock so I can use both at the same time. Hopefully these drives will last me for a long while.
There was a thread not long ago where Nick and some others talked about how they simply used bare 3.5" drives with a dock, so that's what I've decided to do. I'm upgrading my other external HD (1TB Western Digital Elements) that I was using for extra storage to a 4TB Seagate Barracuda bare drive and replacing the failed 2TB drive with the another 4TB Seagate Barracuda bare drive for my Time Machine backups. Found this nice dock so I can use both at the same time. Hopefully these drives will last me for a long while.
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