Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

iMac Going Offline

Well, after 3 and a half years of 24×7 service, my G4 iMac’s HD is making repeated Clatter-Clunk-Tick noises, every minute or so, sometimes several times repeatedly.

Its “S.M.A.R.T.” status says “Verified”, but I strongly suspect it’s on the way out, and that it’ll die soon. I’ll be investigating a replacement at soonest opportunity, and found several web resources to help with that – cracking open the hemisphere, necessary tools, etc.

All I need to do is identify a big enough, cool enough hard disk to live within the confined space of the iMac enclosure, for a few more years’ worth of service.

[Sigh] … more hassle. At least it won’t be expensive, but I use the machine as my main server. I suppose I can offline it and swap to the iBook in the interim. 8-(

Any suggestions on the drive?

⊞

Comments

9 responses to “iMac Going Offline”

  1. cowbutt
    re: iMac Going Offline

    Back up your data, and run dd from some kind of boot CD to blank the entire disc. Any failed or failing blocks will be remapped by the drive’s firmware, to the limit of the number of spare blocks. Consider running smartctl from smartmontools to get more info from the drive afterwards, and/or run a S.M.A.R.T. long offline test.

    Regarding new discs, Seagate offer 5 years warranty on all their drives, WD offer 3 years on their Special Edition (JB) models and these therefore rate as my ATA drives of choice right now. Maxtor are currently on my ‘run away’ list.

    Reply
  2. someguycalleddave
    re: iMac Going Offline

    disk is cheap. but a few and failing anything else soft mirror your treasured filesystems (soft mirror being the lowest common demoninator).. but you don’t need me to tell you that. it’s the equivalent of telling you to go and suck eggs.

    happy data migration. 🙂

    Reply
  3. Stephen Usher
    re: iMac Going Offline

    rsync is your friend?

    Reply
  4. alecm
    re: iMac Going Offline

    I’ve had double-or-treble redundant soft mirroring backups for three years now, so data loss is not a problem.

    It’s the nuisance of finding and swapping suitable parts, that is.

    Reply
  5. Darren Moffat
    re: iMac Going Offline

    Do you really need to replace the internal drive ? After all being a Mac it will happily boot from an external firewire drive. That way you will be able to get a bigger drive, for less money and don’t have to worry so much about cooling.

    Sure it takes up more deskspace but is that really an issue ?

    Reply
  6. alecm
    re: iMac Going Offline

    The primary concern is I/O bandwidth for video editing, which ATA thrases compared to the 400Mb Firewire.

    Reply
  7. Nik
    re: iMac Going Offline

    I presume you know about CCC (http http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html)?

    Also, not sure about the iMac but my eMac was *very* fussy about the exact model of disk. I originally upgraded it to a Hitachi drive and had all sorts of weirdness with it not booting etc. Put an 80G Barracuda in (original was a 40G Barracuda) and it was fine.

    Reply
  8. Albert
    re: iMac Going Offline

    Check out this: http http://www.silentpcreview.com/article29-page1.html

    Reply
  9. Chris Samuel
    re: iMac Going Offline

    Gotta say, rsync snapshots are fabulous if you’ve got the space to spare..

    http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

    Chris

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts