External drive and MacBook Pro 2020

Hello,

I'm contacting you because I own a 2TB G-drive (WD) external drive, and when I was transferring images from my MacBook Pro 2020 to this drive, the computer froze. After 5 minutes, I decided to force the computer to shut down while the transfer was still in progress, and when I turned it back on, only the G-Utilities disk was visible after several minutes, but the sub-disk that hosts all my data was no longer accessible.

I tried connecting the hard disk to my friend’s Mac, and the problem was the same. I tried resetting the computer's SMC, but same. I've also tried Disk Utility's FirstAid, but nothing either.

I should also point out that when I plug in the hard disk, it takes many minutes for G-utilities to appear on the Finder, and sometimes the Finder starts to freeze, and stops freezing when I unplug the hard disk. Sometimes, after many minutes, G utilities doesn't even show up and I get a "hard disk not readable by this computer" message.

I downloaded Stellar Data Recovery (free version) and they told me they could recover 96 Giga from my hard disk, i.e. most of the files.

In your opinion:

1) is the problem serious?

2) do you think I should pay for the data recovery software, store my data somewhere and format my hard disk, or do you think the hard disk (and the data on it) can be recovered without formatting it?

Thank you very much in advance for your advice, I'm afraid of losing a year's work... :(

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.4

Posted on Jul 4, 2023 7:46 AM

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

143,281 points

Posted on Jul 4, 2023 1:16 PM

¿should I stash the files and try to re-use the drive?

years ago, when drives of tiny sizes cost Thousands of dollars, the prize after a failure was a working DRIVE.

Today we know the prize is your DATA, and drives are really cheap.

If you took this to a technician today, they would immediately replace it with a new drive. That is because the risk that the drive would not 'come clean' or would quickly fail again is too high for a technician to spend all afternoon fiddling with.

If your time is 'free' then go ahead and try to repurpose the drive, AFTER you have a good backup plan in place. You may discover the drive does not work, or it may work but not be reliable, or it may work perfectly well for many years. Drives have always carried a limited number of 'spare' blocks that the drive controller can substitute for blocks that go bad in the field. But these are only deployed when new data are provided for that Bad Block (typically when the drive is erased and re-imaged.)

--------

Researchers did a really huge study of consumer-calibre rotating magnetic drives used in google server farms.

They found that the most common failure mechanism was the drive accumulated errors, then more errors, then a huge number of errors, then was unserviceable.

A drive with multiple errors was unserviceable in an AVERAGE (over a very large sample with wide variation) in about six months of 24/7 operation.

step one: Buy more drives and get a backup plan in place.

step two: THEN you can fiddle with this drive all you want, and are never "working without a net"

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External drive and MacBook Pro 2020

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