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 Mar 20, 2014 11:44 AM in response to R.K.Orion
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Mar 20, 2014 11:44 AM in response to R.K.Orion

     

    R.K.Orion wrote:

     

     

    1. It sounds to me like what you're saying is that many think optical drives and media suck, not because they're really bad, but rather because the media makers themselves are producing such rubbish that they don't work properly.

     

     

    2. Why would media makers deliberately produce  trash products, products so bad that

     

     

    3. some manufacturers start pulling optical units out of their systems because they appear to be unreliable when some of your data implies the media can be made to be reliable at a relatively low cost. This practice would basically be an exercise in self destruciton. 

     

     

    1. I made no such claim or implication.

     

    2. The need for fast cheap junk DVD blank media has been a market demand for many years, typically junker DVD blanks have about a 8% reject rate, but theyre made ultrafast and very cheap, and thats what the common user wants/wanted.

     

    3.   Thats because most all software and movies etc has gone to downloads, obviously. Not because DVD player are unreliable, ...however they ARE heavily mechanical and most computer mfg. (Apple included) dont want any moving parts IN a computer these day except for the fan, for obvious technical and logical reasons.

     

    Opticals MAIN need now is steering more and more into professional-only archival grade data storage.

     

    DVDs are far from dead, however there is nothing on earth for the consumer now more reliable and archival than optical, even though its storage capacity is of course LOW  (4.7GB in SL DVDR)

     

    also long long term, for data storage in optical is the most cheap. 

     

    So its

    A: the most cheap 

    B: the longest lived

     

     

    Facebook is implementing optical for storage due to huge cost savings and longevity, see here:

    http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/why-facebook-thinks-blu-ra y-discs-are-perfect-for-the-data-center/

     

    research the M-DISC online.

    http://www.mdisc.com/what-is-mdisc/

  • by HuntsMan75,

    HuntsMan75 HuntsMan75 Mar 22, 2014 11:14 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Mar 22, 2014 11:14 AM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    Maybe one of you guys can explain for me why the wide variation in life span of optical drives.

     

    For example, old notebooks with CDROMs seemed to me to be reliable, but similar notebooks with DVD RW seem unreliable. I have a commercial DVD player that I've used for probably about 10 years an no sign of failur, but I had a video DVD recorder that lasted 3 months the first time (returned it) and about a year the second time.

     

    There seems to be correlation between the RW  and a high degree of failure...or is this just bad luck?

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Mar 22, 2014 4:04 PM in response to HuntsMan75
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Mar 22, 2014 4:04 PM in response to HuntsMan75

    bad luck, only thing that changed is the laser diode and some firmware, everything else is pretty much the same as the really ooooold CD players.

     

     

    At $30 per new DVD burner, doesnt really matter

     

     

    DVD quality burners are cheap a firewood.

     

     

     

    The Apple "superdrive" is made by Panasonic

  • by ZV137,

    ZV137 ZV137 Mar 23, 2014 11:50 AM in response to HuntsMan75
    Level 1 (54 points)
    Mar 23, 2014 11:50 AM in response to HuntsMan75

    I read somewhere, and I don't have a link, that the lives of the DVD +/- RW heads had an extremely short lifespan, like a few thousand hours. I got that off an AV web set. A few years ago a lot of companies were making DVD recorders to replace VCRs. See any of them on the market now?

     

    What happened was that companies like Sony, Panasonic, JVC, etc. etc. figured they'd release these and people would use them to record things they wanted permanently. Their marketers had a different idea, tell everyone they were VCR replacements. People bought them and started treating them just like VCRs. Some people that record several hours of stuff a day found them starting to fail in about 500 hours and be completely gone by the time a few thousand hours were gone. That comes out to months. On the AV website you would read all these scathing reviews about companies that typically had a great reputation.

     

    I had one of them and the first one failed in four months, and its replacement might have lasted a year before it got useless.

     

    God bless VCRs

     

    The lasers used in the read-only devices last because they're not the high power type that acutally need to modify the surface of an optical drive. All they need to do is illuminate. I've got a CDROM player that's 20 years old and it still works.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Mar 23, 2014 12:10 PM in response to ZV137
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Mar 23, 2014 12:10 PM in response to ZV137

    Yes, the burning diodes burn themselves out faster than read-only CD laser diodes.

     

     

    however it still doesn't matter one bit.    The diode only section of DVD burners on some can be bought in bulk for $5 each.

     

     

    You can also use those DVD laser diodes inside modified devices and ramped up power output to burn thru physical objects like wood and paper (geek toy creations).

  • by ZV137,

    ZV137 ZV137 Mar 24, 2014 11:30 AM in response to R.K.Orion
    Level 1 (54 points)
    Mar 24, 2014 11:30 AM in response to R.K.Orion

    R.K.Orion wrote:

     

    This might be a little off topic for this thread, but the storage in an iPhone .... is that an SSD? Does it have a controller? Is it just flash memory? Do bad blocks map out of iPhone storage space?

     

    I put up a post in the iPhone section about this but several in this thread seem to know a lot about storage. I always figured the iPhone was basically a tiny "Mac" if you will, and the memory was essentially like an SSD. Unfortunately my iPhone might have what I'd consider a bad block in it, it hasn't mapped out, it's just ruining a song (iPhone freezes at the exact same point when it hits this song, just like a bad sector on a hard drive) Is there a way I can test this or get the system to map out the block?

     

    This leads me to a question about SSDs that is applicable to this thread. Just like in my iPhone, what's to stop a block in an SSD that's containing data from going bad, and what happens to the file associated with that bad block when this happens? You keep reading about SSDs mapping out bad blocks when they're getting too used up, but how can an SSD controller even spot a block on an SSD that goes bad for reasons the controller may be unaware of?

     

    I just responded to that with the following:

     

     

    "If I were you I would re-write the question generically and post it as being about SSDs in general. The iPhone for all practical purposes uses an SSD but this "miracle technology" just basically screwed up your system completely. What's to stop a bad block from occurring on ANY SSD while it's holding valid data. That's what happened in your case. The flash memory on your iPhone was holding valid data, and one of the blocks in the middle of the data, which in this case was a song, went bad.

     

    What's to stop the exact same thing from happening on any SSD on any system? This is potentially not just an iPhone problem. In fact,  I would thiink it would be more of a problem for full computers because they're reading and writing data all the time. If SSD blocks just decide they're going to go bad for some reason, especially in static data, meaning that which has been stored a long time, how does one deal with it? Is this something that's time related? For example, if a data is put on an SSD and left alone, is it possible for the cell to corrupt and go bad just sitting there, holding static data? Is this possibly a feature no one else knew about?"

     

    My point is this: an HD can lose a block -  if it gets damaged, and apparently SSDs do too...but not from damage. OK. From what then?

     

     

    Aside from speed, will someone please explain to me why SSDs are so "great"???????

     

    The iPhone basically has an SSD in it. This guy loses a block on it leaving a corrupt song. I assume the iPhone wrote that to the iPhone when it was put on and the OS didn't move it around. Why would it? So all of a sudden, for no reason, the block goes bad? It didn't have a head crassh because there are no heads. Did it just die because it can only hold data for so long? How often does this happen?

  • by Csound1,

    Csound1 Csound1 Mar 24, 2014 12:55 PM in response to ZV137
    Level 9 (51,231 points)
    Desktops
    Mar 24, 2014 12:55 PM in response to ZV137

    Aside from speed, will someone please explain to me why SSDs are so "great"???????

    Speed is the point, there is no 'apart from'

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Mar 24, 2014 1:06 PM in response to Csound1
    Level 9 (61,317 points)
    Desktops
    Mar 24, 2014 1:06 PM in response to Csound1

    Csound1 has it completely right.

     

    When you ask a rotating drive to get some data that is not in its internal buffer, about 20 milliseconds elapses while the drive moves the arm and waits for the platter to spin around to put the data under the Read/Write head. That is time that is usually completely wasted.

     

    Drive latency is a BIG DEAL.

     

    -----

     

    The magnetic regions on a magnetic rotating drive can go bad "just because".

     

    "Any Drive can die at any time."

     

    That's why we won't stop harping about having adequate backups.

  • by OGELTHORPE,

    OGELTHORPE OGELTHORPE Mar 24, 2014 1:09 PM in response to ZV137
    Level 9 (52,686 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 24, 2014 1:09 PM in response to ZV137

    A couple of additional points in favor of a SSD are they are more energy efficient and will create less heat than a conventional HHD.  The cost per unit of storage is not in its favor.

     

    Ciao.

  • by MrJavaDeveloper,

    MrJavaDeveloper MrJavaDeveloper Mar 24, 2014 5:29 PM in response to ZV137
    Level 1 (64 points)
    Mar 24, 2014 5:29 PM in response to ZV137

    Hard drives have been around forever, like Unix, and with that age comes experience, a lot of experience. (Side Note: MacOS X is a Unix variant for those who didn't know that). The technology in HD's is tried and true. Not perfect, but tried and true.

     

    SSDs on the other hand are the wild, wild, west, IMHO. The configurations and operations of the controllers vary widely from manufacturer to manufacturer. Even the storage technology itself is changing constantly. What was "hot" yesterday is almost completely outdated today. Along with the introduction of SSDs come lots and lots and lots of marketing hype. I think one could argue that the marketing hype is likely responsible for some of the "SSDs are invincible" feelings that some people have.

     

    One of the problems that I can possibly foresee coming to the surface with SSDs are situations where a bad block develops in the storage area and the SSD controller can't detect it. I'm not referring to a block that's nearing it's end of life stages due to write cycle depletion, I'm referring to a bad block that's gone afoul for some other reason, most likely a manufacturing defect. I'm not saying this is going to happen, I'm saying I'm not going to be surprised if it does.

     

    With hard drives, you have a long history and experience knowing what will likely fail, and how long it will likely last, but no such history exists for SSDs. About the time todays SSDs start going bad, a replacement will likely be available that's totally different. I would think that as time passes and vendors work out the kinks, stability and commonality will exist in the marketplace, just as it does for HDs today.

     

    With that said I built myself a little fusion drive setup, and it works fine. I used a SanDisk SSD and an Hitachi HD. I test it periodically with Scannerz, and there are no problems on either. I should add the Hitachi is now 4 years old and still performing like a trooper. The system will boot Mavericks in 30% of the time it takes to boot it off a hard drive, and yet I get the storage of the HD as well. If this was a standalone SSD, I suspect it would be even faster, but the same storage level would have cost a fortune if it was SSD only.

     

    Never the less, it is a new technology, and I still don't trust it completely. This is why I keep redundant backups and clones. Because of the way a Fusion drive swaps data between the HD and the SSD, at a given instant you can't be certain which unit is holding what data. If you're insane for not doing a backup on an SSD or an HD, then you're extremely insane if you don't do so with a Fusion drive.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Mar 24, 2014 6:22 PM in response to ZV137
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Mar 24, 2014 6:22 PM in response to ZV137

     

    ZV137 wrote:

     

     

    Aside from speed, will someone please explain to me why SSDs are so "great"???????

     

     

    Aside from speed not much.

     

    Theyre absurdly expensive

     

    Theyre fast approaching their theoretical limits in how much storage can be jammed into them.

     

     

     

    Other than speed their big plus is no moving parts,  you can slap a SSD around to the point which would ruin a conventional HD.

     

     

    Now with ultrathin 7mm thick 1TB HD,    SSD are in reality not any smaller per TB than are conventional HD

     

     

     

    The last days of old technology is ALWAYS better than the new days of new technology.

     

    SSD is new tech.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Mar 24, 2014 6:17 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Mar 24, 2014 6:17 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

     

    Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:

     

     

    Drive latency is a BIG DEAL.

     

    Depends on the HD and who youre asking

     

     

     

    Toshiba recently came out with a 15,000 RPM hard drive.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Mar 24, 2014 6:19 PM in response to OGELTHORPE
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Mar 24, 2014 6:19 PM in response to OGELTHORPE

     

    OGELTHORPE wrote:

    create less heat than a conventional HHD.

     

     

     

    Hitachi already solved that problem last year,     HELIUM FILLED HARD DRIVES.

     

     

    low friction, low heat.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Mar 24, 2014 6:21 PM in response to MrJavaDeveloper
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Mar 24, 2014 6:21 PM in response to MrJavaDeveloper

     

    MrJavaDeveloper wrote:

     

    With hard drives, you have a long history and experience knowing what will likely fail, and how long it will likely last,

     

     

    When it comes to long lasting, and archival storage, both HD and SSD are garbage.

     

     

    Its optical and nothing else.

  • by Grant Bennet-Alder,

    Grant Bennet-Alder Grant Bennet-Alder Mar 24, 2014 7:11 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 9 (61,317 points)
    Desktops
    Mar 24, 2014 7:11 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    Toshiba recently came out with a 15,000 RPM hard drive.

     

    I already own several very nice 15,000 RPM drives. They are SCSI drives.

     

    (And they are now considered obsolete.)

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