- Joined
- Dec 12, 2007
- Messages
- 57
- Reaction score
- 2
- Points
- 8
- Location
- Pittsburgh.
- Your Mac's Specs
- See "Signature".
This concerns the G5 in my signature. At the time of this story, I was running two 400GB WD Caviars, RAID 0.
I came downstairs Friday at 7am to print out a revision of a paper on my way to class. My machine froze up. I rebooted it to a grey Apple logo and a grey circular thing.
I went to class. The professor believed me, sort of.
I came home and ran Apple's Hardware Test. Good. All good. I booted from the OS disk. Bad. Disk Utility would not recognize one of the HD's. Law of probability: 1, RAID 0: 0.
I have (but more importantly, HAD) several projects, reports, and labs in the works. In addition, I lost three full semesters of work. When you're a mathematician, that tends to sting a little.
I went out after work and purchased two WD Caviar 1TB "Green" HD's. They are now living life as a RAID 1 set. The probability of both of those units going kaput in tandem is <0.25%.
The moral: I had a few warning signs that I ignored. Or misjudged. A few times when awakening the machine from sleep, it froze up. I even posted about this around Christmas time. Second, I had a few random freezes. I presumed that this was either from the logic board going bad, or from a faulty HD controller. In either case, S.M.A.R.T. status showed that the disks were alive and kickin'. Additionally, the freezes seemed to go away with me adding a UPS / Conditioner. How wrong I was. I should have backed my data up then and there. Don't let this happen to you. Back that thang up.
Then, reformat and go RAID 1.
I came downstairs Friday at 7am to print out a revision of a paper on my way to class. My machine froze up. I rebooted it to a grey Apple logo and a grey circular thing.
I went to class. The professor believed me, sort of.
I came home and ran Apple's Hardware Test. Good. All good. I booted from the OS disk. Bad. Disk Utility would not recognize one of the HD's. Law of probability: 1, RAID 0: 0.
I have (but more importantly, HAD) several projects, reports, and labs in the works. In addition, I lost three full semesters of work. When you're a mathematician, that tends to sting a little.
I went out after work and purchased two WD Caviar 1TB "Green" HD's. They are now living life as a RAID 1 set. The probability of both of those units going kaput in tandem is <0.25%.
The moral: I had a few warning signs that I ignored. Or misjudged. A few times when awakening the machine from sleep, it froze up. I even posted about this around Christmas time. Second, I had a few random freezes. I presumed that this was either from the logic board going bad, or from a faulty HD controller. In either case, S.M.A.R.T. status showed that the disks were alive and kickin'. Additionally, the freezes seemed to go away with me adding a UPS / Conditioner. How wrong I was. I should have backed my data up then and there. Don't let this happen to you. Back that thang up.
Then, reformat and go RAID 1.
