External hard drive worries.

[EGT]

I was backing up late last night to my Lacie rugged drive using superduper's smart update feature which took a good 15 minutes to transfer 11 gigs of data or thereabouts. I use FW800 and everything seemed to be working as normal.

As soon as it had finished, I closed supderduper and went online to check the news and weather for today. All of a sudden the external drive started clicking like crazy and I couldn't access it or disconnect. The clicking stopped after a few seconds and I noticed that all the apps. on the drive showed the default OS X app. icon, not their custom ones. They weren't arranged properly either, just scattered randomly across the window.

I eventually just pulled the FW lead out and reconnected the drive. It mounted as normal and I went back into the apps folder were everything was back to normal? All my important stuff is there and up to date.

What the heck is going on? Should I be worried about this drive?

 

[mad jew]

Have you tried verifying it (and possibly repairing it) in Disk Utility?

 

[EGT]

Ah yes, I opened Disk Utility last night when it was going nuts and tried to verify but it said something like ... can't unmount drive? I forget exactly what it said.

I will try again when I get home. Thanks MJ.

 

[EGT]

The drive passed verification OK and appears to be working no bother. I shall keep an eye on it.

Damn temperamental hardware.

 

[mad jew]

How very strange. If it happens again, try getting your hands on another case and see if the drive can mount from there. Hopefully it'll be fine as-is though.

 

[Mechcozmo]

Just as an FYI: Disk Utility doesn't support SMART testing over FireWire. Or, for that matter, anything else except for an internal bus.

Grrrr....

 

[mad jew]

I reckon SMART testing is a bit overrated anyway. It rarely finds anything wrong with a drive that is in fact failing. That might just be my limited experiences though.

 

[EGT]

Oh it works alright. When my internal drive failed last year, the status only showed "failing" when the drive was on the its last legs. 2 minutes later, it was dead. Very useful that was.

 

[Mechcozmo]

I reckon SMART testing is a bit overrated anyway. It rarely finds anything wrong with a drive that is in fact failing. That might just be my limited experiences though.

I've had good luck with SMART testing. It warned of two drives that were going to fail. So, like any good geek, I replaced them and then used those drives in some other non-essential role until they did die.



SMART testing isn't a replacement for good backups though.

 

[mad jew]

Interesting stuff. You've given me some new respect for SMART checking an I'll be sure to keep an eye on it. Having said that, I usually inadvertently check it when I'm using Disk Utility as-is. As you say though, I'll never rely on it.