My first hard drive failure

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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.

41BpCYQeDML.jpg
 
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pigoo3

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That is a nice dock. Nice that it can mount two drives at the same time. Very convenient for doing redundant backups!:)

Sorry to hear about the drive failure.

- Nick
 

dtravis7


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That dock seems very nice. Gets overall great reviews also. Might get one now that I have a USB 3 Mac.
 

Slydude

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That is a nice dock. Nice that it can mount two drives at the same time. Very convenient for doing redundant backups!:)

Sorry to hear about the drive failure.

- Nick
Agreed. that is a nice feature. I have a similar dok (not quite as nice) and use that feature all the time.

BTW Others reading this thread who may be looking for hard drive enclosures rather than a dock read the fine print. Some of these enclosures require you to reformat the drive once it is placed in the enclosure. That, of course, will erase whatever is on the drive. zi've been bitten by that a few times recently when buying enclosures. I've been looking for an example but haven't seen one. When I find the link i'll post it.
 

chscag

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Some of these enclosures require you to reformat the drive once it is placed in the enclosure.

None of the enclosures I have ever purchased required that. And I wonder what would be the reason for having to reformat the drive?
 

dtravis7


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None of the enclosures I have ever purchased required that. And I wonder what would be the reason for having to reformat the drive?

Charley, I think I know why. One example is a lot of the newer WD externals have Hardware Encryption in the hardware in the case before the drive. If you got an enclosure like that, you would have to format it I would think for that to take effect. That bugs me about the WD drives that do that as if the enclosure hardware fails and you get another case and put in the drive, you could not read your data as it's tied to the Encryption in the WD Enclosure! That is not good.

WD, Give me the option to encrypt or not.

That was why I bypassed WD last time I got a large External and got my Enclosure from OWC and my drive from New Egg. Bought the top of the line OWC case with a lot of ports and a 4TB HGST drive.
 
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Slydude

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I'm not sure what the reason was for reformatting the drive. It was one of the cheaper slections at the time and I can't find a link to one at the moment. IIRC the problem was that if you had info on a drive that was in one of these enclosures the drive would not be seen in a different enclosure until you reformatted it. I think it wwas somethhing called Turo or some such.
 

chscag

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Unless it was for encryption like Dennis said above, I see no reason why moving a drive to an enclosure should require a reformat. That just doesn't make sense, but I've seen stranger things in the world of computing.
 

Rod


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usagora, dont feel bad it's never happened to me either and I've been using (and sharing) Mac's since the 1980's.
Thats because I have always had the presence of mind to upgrade before it happened and obviously I've had luck on my side. Nowadays I'm prepared to push the limits a little further because of bootable clones.
My wife's 2011 MBP did suffer a drive failure about two years ago but we were able to run it from a clone until she got a replacement drive. She now has a new 2018 MBP but only because the old one was getting too slow for current programs and we weren't willing to invest in a RAM upgrade. Upgrading to the Retina screen was an consideration too.
Thanks for the idea though. I had been thinking about "bare" drives for a while but I had no idea the docks were so cheap.
 

Rod


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I received the dock and the two 4TB Seagate HDDs yesterday. The dock is plug-and-play, and both drives formatted just fine. One is being used for large file storage (mainly video) and the other is being used as a Time Machine backup of both the other drive as well as my internal SSD. So far both drives have operated very smoothly without any errors and are very quiet. I'm very pleased.

In case anyone didn't realize, this dock can clone a drive without being connected to the computer. You simply put the drive you want to clone in the slot marked "A" and then the drive you want to clone it to in slot "B" - you then hold the "Clone" button for about 3 seconds until the "100%" light flashes and then press the "Clone" button once more to initiate the cloning. 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% lights indicate progress. I haven't had a chance to test that yet, but have no doubt it works as advertised based on the great reviews on Amazon.

I forgot to mention in my OP that I also had ordered these nice storage cases for when I have to transport the bare drives:

61IXhNE%2BgwL._SL1200_.jpg
 

pigoo3

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I forgot to mention in my OP that I also had ordered these nice storage cases for when I have to transport the bare drives:

Those are some pretty nice cases...as you said very handy for transporting. Thanks for sharing.:)

Here's a bare-drive display box I got from a local electronics store. Holds up to 20 bare drives. Just got it recently...and only have 3 drives in it currently (but have more). Lol

Hard drive box.JPG

- Nick
 

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