1TB HD failure...

[matd2100]

I'd like to share with you guys a situation I have with a 1TB Maxtor Onetouch III external Hard Drive.

Unfortunately while defragging my Macbook Pro using Tiger on the external drive, suddenly it decided to fail on me, making the typical monotonous clicking sounds that failed drives often do. Luckily the defrag had just about finished so at least my files on the laptop are safe. Even though i've now lost all the data on the external drive and it not being recognised by the computer, that doesn't really bother me as most of the content were simply movies, Games and my massive itunes library, which in time I can get back anyway on another hard drive.

It looks like these Maxtor Onetouch III have higher than average failure rates from online reviews of the drive. My drive is also out of warranty now. I don't want to pay for data recovery/drive repair really because i can get it all back anyway eventually. So I've bought myself an internal 500GB drive for my Macbook Pro CD for £100 (it'll be good because I can now have Windows 7 on there whereas I am stuck with XP on the currently relatively small 100GB drive) and I'll be installing it myself.

Now then, here is where I'm not sure what to do. Since the onetouch is actually a dual 500GB drive, that means that only ONE of the drives has actually failed on me. So I was thinking to buy a cheap external drive holder for a few ££ and then take out the good 500GB disk and put it into the new holder. Unfortunately I don't know if this will actually work because I'm not sure if the drive will still be recognised by the computer because of its "missing-half" if you like. If it isn't recognised, then I should be able reformat it right? Does this sound like a good idea to you guys? What do you think?

 

[Tumbleweed666]

Since the onetouch is actually a dual 500GB drive, that means that only ONE of the drives has actually failed on me. So I was thinking to buy a cheap external drive holder for a few ££ and then take out the good 500GB disk and put it into the new holder. Unfortunately I don't know if this will actually work because I'm not sure if the drive will still be recognised by the computer because of its "missing-half" if you like. If it isn't recognised, then I should be able reformat it right? Does this sound like a good idea to you guys? What do you think?

I dont see why it wouldn't work, its just a disk, nothing magical about it, it will be the controller that 'knows' its half of a 'pretend volume', without that the working one should be a 500MB disk you can reformat like any other.

 

[lorductape]

popping the drive from the enclosure will bypass the controller and allow disk utility to reformat it as an independent disk. you should be square. use something like techtool pro to determine which drive is bad.

 

[matd2100]

thanks guys much appreciated

 

[uberamd]

RAID 1, RAID 5, but never RAID 0.

Its sad but you should invest in a external enclosure that supports RAID 1. Build it yourself, buy an enclosure and two drives. Sure you might feel like the second drive is wasted, but redundant data is a great thing. I used to scoff at the idea of spending my hard earned green on a drive that is solely there as a backup of my USB drive, but after working in IT for a while now and watching hard drives fail all the time, I have learned to appreciate the value the spare drive really has.