At 7:17 AM -0700 8/6/07, Scott Fraser wrote:
>Yes, an ominous clicking or chattering can be telling you it's the=A0
>beginning of the end, (or it may already be too late.) Unfortunately,=A0
>many of us put our drives in soundproof isolation, so we aren't=A0
>always aware of the death cough.
I nurse the woes of 150+ students with personal
200-750GB external drives. We feel that the
top-end, "Mercury" OWC external enclosures have
proven themselves to be superior to other
enclosure options and even a few of these have
failed through the years. Of course, the drive
itself can be moved out of a faulty enclosure and
into a new one.
I agree that being alert to odd behavior of any
kind is probably the best protection against
loss. Disk Warrior fixes anything in the earliest
stages 99.9% of the time. There are several ways
a volume can become un-mountable and unreadable
long before hardware failure. One is a corrupt
file that cannot be deleted even with the most
stringent utility tools.
Partitioning a large drive, which essentially
creates separate directories or volumes, isolates
any serious or potential problem to only one part
of the drive. It also improves drive performance
and makes the drive contents easier to organize
and catalogue with no sacrifice of storage
capacity.
Its seems to be very important with Mac OS X to
initialize or better yes, "Zero-Out" format the
drive and not use the FAT 32 format that often
comes stock with USB/FireWire external
enclosures. After we initialize or format a brand
new new or old drive, we create four partitions
as standard practice. We get about 2-3 disasters
per year but, so far, none on drives we handle
this way, knock on wood. Rob D.
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