Imminent Lacie D2 drive failure?

[blaqhole]

Hi all. I could use your expert advice. I have a Lacie D2 250GB hard drive hooked up via FW800 to a Dual 1.83Gzh G5 Powermac.

Recently the Lacie drive has been writing really really slow. I tested it with a Kona Speed Utility and saw that was only writing between 4MB and sometimes only 1MB/sec.

Is this drive about to fail? I ran disk utility on it and hit repair disk and it says the disk health is fine.

I ran diskwarrior on it and it said there was a major error in the directory and as I replaced it, Diskwarrior quit in the middle of it.

Right now, I am backing up everything on the drive. But, moving forward, does it sound like the drive is about to fail or do you think with zeroing the data and formatting the drive will get back proper writing speeds?

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have.

Thanks in advance.

 

[MacTech68]

If the drive is fairly full (heading over say 75%) then available space becomes more and more fragmented. That's one cause depending on how big the files are that are being read/written though I wouldn't expect to see that kind of performance.

If the drive has bad blocks, then this could be the cause, and I'd expect to possibly see a read error or two when you attempt to copy everything of of it.

Writing zeros can actually mask bad blocks (ie, a block that is marginal can be recovered only to go bad shortly thereafter).

Also, you can't access the drive's SMART function over firewire. It needs to be connected natively over PATA or SATA.

The best course would be to:

1. Copy off ALL data (which you're doing)

2. Run a full read test over the drive (can take time) BEFORE you write zeros.

If it comes up with bad blocks before writing zeros I wouldn't trust the drive.

Other things might be virus scanners, Spotlight indexing, Time Machine etc using the drive in the background. Other utilities like TechToolPro's Protection extension that backs up the drive's directory structure periodically can also cause slow down.

You may simply have a drive that has corrupted directories which causes issues/conflicts with the Volume Bitmap vs. the B-tree entries.

If you manage to get all your data off, I'd try a full read test first, then try repairing the directories again (with Disk Warrior or Disk Utility), and then re-test the performance.
________
Nanni Galli

 

[blaqhole]

Thanks MacTech68! That is incredibly helpful.

I don't use the drive for anything else other than manual backup. No Time Machine, no virus scanning. The drive was about 80% full.

Can you suggest a good program to do the full read test? I was trying to use Techtools but for some reason the drive doesn't show up on Techtools when selecting a drive.

Thanks for your continued help.

 

[MacTech68]

Thanks MacTech68! That is incredibly helpful.

I don't use the drive for anything else other than manual backup. No Time Machine, no virus scanning. The drive was about 80% full.

Can you suggest a good program to do the full read test? I was trying to use Techtools but for some reason the drive doesn't show up on Techtools when selecting a drive.

Thanks for your continued help.

It should show up under Tests --> "Surface Scan" in (TTP v5) and

Tests --> Drives in TTP v4.

If the drive is mounting on the desktop, it should show up there.

TechTool Pro is usually what I'd use myself.
________
Honda E series