HuntsMan75

Q: Hard Drive

I have a 2007 MacBook Pro. I never had prooblems with it until recently. While running i'd get delays and Spinning beach balls. Never having had to deal with this or for that matter Apple support, I just took it in to Apple. For a price they diagnosed it as a bad drive.

 

Repairing it through them will cost almost as much as some of these units are selling for used. I want to do this myself. I'd also like to be able to test this thing in the future myself so I don't get stuck with this problem.

 

I'm looking for advice on a) drives for this system, b)repair instructions or online guides, c) test/evaluation software.

 

Thanks.

Posted on Oct 5, 2013 12:16 PM

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Q: Hard Drive

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  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas May 15, 2014 2:29 PM in response to OGELTHORPE
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    May 15, 2014 2:29 PM in response to OGELTHORPE

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

     

    it is just that there are more negatives associated with it when compared to alternatives.  Many roads lead to Rome but I get the sense that you feel yours is the only one.

     

    One of those "roads" needs to be "repaved" every 5-8 years.

     

    the other "road" will LONG outlast you and me combined.

     

     

    What are the many negatives of DVD?  

     

    Slow to burn?  YES

    Expensive? absolutely NO

    "bulky" compared to a 2TB drive, yes. In the scheme of things 1TB of DVD media takes up 1.3 square feet.

     

     

    What are the many negatives of HD?

     

    Crash Yes.

    Fail Yes.

    die  Yes.

    depolarize Yes.

    short lived Yes.

    shock fragile Yes.

    magnetic field fragile Yes.

    very heat sensitive Yes.

    many moving parts Yes.

    head crash Yes.

    access radomization Yes.

    read failures Yes.

    humidity sensitive Yes.

     

    HD are literally the "quick and the dead"     always quick, often dead.

     

    Nobody here "likes" burning DVD,

    its about data protection and longevity

    secondly its about data protection and longevity

    and finally is ultimately about data protection and longevity

     

    I await a superior "new" data storage medium change as well, until that time, all is speculation

     

    You have 2 options. HD and DVD

     

    its not  either or.   Its BOTH.

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

    On external HDDs, I have 1995 GB+ of data on 5 separate HDDs.  All of this is backed up on other HDDs.  Assuming that the data would fit neatly on a DVD (100% usage) that would be an equivalent of 617 disks (minimum).

     

    You didnt listen earlier. DVD archival are not for putting movies and random downloaded HUGE files on.

     

    Its for protecting the "cant lose at any costs ever , period and double period"

     

    My main collection is 48 Terabytes, ....obviously I havent even got 5% of that on DVDs.

    So, the point has been missed.

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

    I have 900GB of data.  On external HDDs, I have 1995 GB+ of data on 5 separate HDDs

     

    Then you have ALL your data on a ticking disaster, a genuine mechanical and magnetic depolarization disaster-in-wait.

     

    Put your ear next to any HD you can 'hear it ticking down to failure'.

     

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

    You seem to suggest that DVD storage is fool proof and I reject that proposition.  My doing so seems to elicit from you responses that are indicative of a degree of hostility on your part

     

     

    Absolutely no hostility at all, if you think there is any, then its merely a communications error typical of typing on any board

     

    Never said DVD are fool proof,..... i said archival DVD are LONG LIVED,

     

    and said there are only 2 "holy carved in stone" forever rules

     

    1. redundancy

    2. longevity

     

    (#3 simplicity / compact east of use)

     

    HD fit #1 and #3 perfectly.......NEVER #2

     

    DVD fit #2 perfectly ........and #1 with difficulty on BIG data.

     

     

    "both" means covering #1 and #2

     

    a pile of HD is only covering #1......leaving #2 exposed with your digital backside hanging in the wind, so to speak.

  • by OGELTHORPE,

    OGELTHORPE OGELTHORPE May 15, 2014 4:00 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 9 (52,511 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 15, 2014 4:00 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    Repeating the same points again never strengthens an argument thus there is no need for me to rebut any of your comments.  I must give you credit for the tenacity you display in defending your viewpoint, even when your position is an inferior or archaic one in relation to the subject matter at hand..

     

    it is not my purpose to try and dissuade you from your opinions but rather present to third parties what is a more practical and manageable strategy for backups.  I have enough confidence in my position that most astute and insightful persons will opt for HDD storage over that of disks.

     

    I'm certain that you will take exception to that, but you do have the right to continue your clarion call for DVDs.  As I have alluded to earlier, in the world of technology, your propositiona are in the 'middle ages'.

     

    Ciao.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas May 15, 2014 6:04 PM in response to OGELTHORPE
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    May 15, 2014 6:04 PM in response to OGELTHORPE

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

     

    ]As I have alluded to earlier, in the world of technology, your propositions are in the 'middle ages'.

     

    The 800 pound gorilla in the room you haven't seen yet, is that in "the world of technology"...

    NOTHING supercedes optical in longevity. 

     

    Absolutely 100% nothing.   period.

     

    You can make 1000 redundant HD copies,  ....

    ALL of which will croak like a toad in a rainstorm in a short span of a handful of years.

     

     

    Heres a secret, the archival DVD market (and bluray archival, a new market) is hot.

    and it has nothing do with burning disks being a pain, and slow, and wearisome, and not packing massive amounts of data.

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

    practical and manageable strategy for backups.

     

    The point is not to question how EASY or PRACTICAL HD backups are.

     

    Ive got 120 or so hard drives.    This is not a point of debate.   

     

    HD are practical, are easy, are fast.    Yet another point of no debate.

     

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

    your viewpoint,...... your position is an inferior or archaic one.....it is not my purpose to try and dissuade you from your opinions

     

    There are no viewpoints here, just stone cold facts.

    Hard drives fail on a VERY broad spectrum, their nature is a very well known entity.

     

    You can count on their failure 98% of the time in under 10 years.

     

    .............Youre entitled to your own views, but not your own facts.

     

     

    As Clinton pointed out to you some time ago, hes got Optical running 100% at 25+ years.

    As YOU yourself can point out (rather NOT point out), you havent got a single HD you stored data on and stashed away with data retention at 11, 12 etc.  years.

     

    The absolute rock bottom, etched in stone for all eternity fact is, you cannot use the terms:

     

    "archival" and the term "hard drive" in the same sentence.  Nobody can.

     

    You see, correctly,  the necessity of Redundancy,

    alas however you fail to point out, or see the need for, or are oblivious to the paramount necessity of Longevity.

     

    Longevity is no more so an "archaic" principle than is breathing air.

    The fundamental principle behind MOST of human history has been  "ok, how can I make it LAST"

     

     

    If someone spends 20+ years making a package of data, and you tell him to "slap it on a few HD that will croak in a few years"...

    then a serious error is being comitted.

     

     

    If however you had said to Clinton, or to others in this thread:

    "I suggest hard drives for EVERYTHING you have, and have some redundancies..........but if you spent a great deal of time on some data, or its extremely important, spend $40 on a 100-pack of archival DVD and burn that specific bit of data to those for the sake of archival longevity!"

     

    If you said or suggested something remotely close to this, the thread would have ended some time ago.

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

    in the world of technology, your propositions are in the 'middle ages'.

    When technology makes an archival NON-OPTICAL storage medium, I will be one of the first to know about it.

     

    Right now, it 100% does not exist.

  • by ZV137,

    ZV137 ZV137 May 15, 2014 6:57 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 1 (54 points)
    May 15, 2014 6:57 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    Since I raised a stink about the life expectancy of optical drives, let's take a shot at HD's this time.

     

    We pulled a 2.5 inch drive out of an older system about 2 years ago. I'd guess it was from 2005 or 2006 because it was one out of the last Aluminum PowerBooks made. At the time the drive was in working order...no bad or weak sectors. It was put in  box and stored.

     

    A few weeks ago I thought it might make a handy litte transfer disk so I put it into an enclosure, formatted it and got ready to start copying stuff over. About 3 seconds into the copy, the spinning beach balls show up all over the place. I ran Scannerz on it and now there are two large sections of the drive that are failing. One is at the start within the first few gigabytes of the drive and the other is right in the middle. I'd estimate about 20 G of the drive is now either reportiing weak sectors or flat out bad sectors. Tons and tons of weak sectors, like I've never seen before. It's like the media is losing its ability to retain information.

     

    So, the question in this case is, what happened and why? The drive wasn't in service, it was put in a box on a top shelf of the storage closet and hasn't been moved, and yet it's gone from working to basically being useless.

     

    Do you need to keep drives operational? Do they constantly need to be re-writing information, or is this some type of normal failure.

     

    The damage was so bad that I even thought maybe a huge magnet got in contact with it, but if it did I'd like to know when.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas May 15, 2014 7:46 PM in response to ZV137
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    May 15, 2014 7:46 PM in response to ZV137

     

    ZV137 wrote:

     

    So, the question in this case is, what happened and why? The drive wasn't in service, it was put in a box on a top shelf of the storage closet and hasn't been moved, and yet it's gone from working to basically being useless.

     

    Do you need to keep drives operational? Do they constantly need to be re-writing information, or is this some type of normal failure.

     

    The damage was so bad that I even thought maybe a huge magnet got in contact with it, but if it did I'd like to know when.

     

    heat or hotter conditions cause rapid depolarization.

     

    define "top shelf"   heat rises, was it in a hot spot?

     

    operational? yes

    constantly re-writing......yes and yes

    normal failure............also yes and yes

     

    A pair of HIGH GAUSS magnet were already in contact with it, the neodymium iron boron N55 or N50 gauss magnets that drives the actuator coil

     

    see:

    http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u90693/crop_full.jpg

     

    Ive stripped a lot of HD, these 3mm thick (roughly) magnets are absurdly powerful.

     

    The magnetic BLOCH WALL can over time ruin the binary stored on the platters namely near the edge. The magnetic fields rebound off the dielectric aluminum hard disks (which are coated) and disturb the write-layer

     

    that and normal depolarization of the write-layer.

     

    also the magnetized layer itself rebounds off the aluminum core dielectric HD disks and the disks actually depolarize their own write layer.

     

    dielectric barriers rebound against magnetic fields  and cause minute Lenz law-like counter-induction.

     

    In short, HD disks are literally magnetically and dielectrically in conjugate, self-destructive .

     

     

     

     

    Ohh, I forgot to mention, the actuator coil warps the BLOCH WALL magnetic geometry of the magnets, which makes the actuator move in less than perfect motions given time, meaning its reading and writing in the slightly wrong spots

     

    which causes heinous errors.

  • by MrJavaDeveloper,

    MrJavaDeveloper MrJavaDeveloper May 16, 2014 9:14 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 1 (64 points)
    May 16, 2014 9:14 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    In other words....

     

                   ....the drive died!

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas May 16, 2014 2:24 PM in response to MrJavaDeveloper
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    May 16, 2014 2:24 PM in response to MrJavaDeveloper

     

    MrJavaDeveloper wrote:

     

    In other words....

     

                   ....the drive died!

     

     

     

    Yes, belly up like a fish on dry land.

     

     

    ....like they all do.   without fail

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 May 16, 2014 2:27 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 9 (50,806 points)
    Desktops
    May 16, 2014 2:27 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    PlotinusVeritas wrote:

     

     

    MrJavaDeveloper wrote:

     

    In other words....

     

                   ....the drive died!

     

     

     

    Yes, belly up like a fish on dry land.

     

     

    ....like they all do.   without fail

    Just like everything else.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas May 16, 2014 2:48 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    May 16, 2014 2:48 PM in response to Csound1

     

    Csound1 wrote:

     

    Just like everything else.

    hyperbolic and reductionistic.

    That point was never up for debate.

     

    Any failure to differentiate redundancy from longevity, however, is itself a failure of insight.

     

     

     

    We can always set up a 'race' between HD and archival DVD about which will far outlive the 10 year data-retention survival mark...by several decades no less.

     

    predicting the future with 100% certainty in such a 'race' requires no prognostication skills.

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 May 16, 2014 2:50 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 9 (50,806 points)
    Desktops
    May 16, 2014 2:50 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    PlotinusVeritas wrote:

     

     

    Csound1 wrote:

     

    Just like everything else.

    hyperbolic and reductionistic.

    That point was never up for debate.

    It was as soon as you brought it up, or are you 'special'?

  • by R.K.Orion,

    R.K.Orion R.K.Orion May 19, 2014 9:05 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 1 (14 points)
    May 19, 2014 9:05 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    You guys should all get together and combine the contents of this post into a book.

     

    ...minus the verbal fist fights, of course!  

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas May 20, 2014 1:54 PM in response to R.K.Orion
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    May 20, 2014 1:54 PM in response to R.K.Orion

     

    R.K.Orion wrote:

     

    Some people dont take data longevity serious or care about it at all,

    ...which is a known factor among some computer users.

     

    confusing redundancy for longevity is a well worn common (and serious) computer/data mistake.

     

     

    nobody buys books anymore, all content is online

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 May 21, 2014 12:44 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 9 (50,806 points)
    Desktops
    May 21, 2014 12:44 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    PlotinusVeritas wrote:

     

    nobody buys books anymore, all content is online

    Do you have any facts you can link to in order to support that claim?

     

    I don't believe it is accurate.

  • by CaptH,

    CaptH CaptH May 23, 2014 12:33 AM in response to Csound1
    Level 1 (59 points)
    May 23, 2014 12:33 AM in response to Csound1

    I think the little wink at the end of the comment implies the comment isn't supposed to be taken literally.

  • by CaptH,

    CaptH CaptH May 28, 2014 9:15 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 1 (59 points)
    May 28, 2014 9:15 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    @PlotinusVeritas

     

    Out of curiousity, since you're the optical media proponent, if the life of the optical drive itself is short and unpredictable, how do you tell when the optical drive itself isn't causing errors while it's writing data? Do you just retire it after so many hours of use, or do you just wait until it can't write anymore? What happens in the mean time while failures aren't obvious but are quite possibly occcurring without the end users awareness?

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