You would be stoned to death by all the people tossing dead drives around.
I can't explain it.
So in some free time today, I made plans to go to the Apple Store just to look at some stuff. Now bear in mind that this was one of the first times that I didn't have a real reason to go to the Apple Store, but my iMac saw to that. Today, Time Machine prompted me with a message that said something like this: "Time Machine has not made a backup in 10 days. Please connect your external drive...".
I did just that to keep the iMac "happy", and lo and behold, the iMac indexed the drive and started to hang on the "Preparing backup" phase. A few minutes of waiting and soon enough, the whole system locked up. After I managed to get the iMac back to normal (relaunched the Finder, stopped the backup, etc.), I decided to go ahead and eject my FireWire drive and deal with it later. Big mistake... See, I ejected the drive like I would with any other drive, but the drive failed to eject. The drive, a Western Digital, wasn't doing anything and looked like it was going to shut down, so I disconnected it. But, when I reconnected it a few moments later, the drive failed to mount.
Both Macs could not mount the drive. System Profiler detected the drive through USB, FW400, and FW800, and Disk Utility occasionally picked it up, but I could not manage to mount the drive at all. I did notice that when I connected the power cable to the drive, the drive would start spinning. Since I was going to Apple anyway, I made a Genius Bar appointment and took my portable gear with me. After waiting an hour, I talked with one of the "Genii" and we determined that the drive had not failed completely, but the "connection board" went out. We both agreed that the drive itself worked, and he said that it could be possible to salvage the backup data on it if I cracked it open, but I decided not to as the enclosure would be gone forever (see the link above). Luckily for me, he walked over to their peripheral shelf and handed me a new one with a receipt. The return date was in February, and I had my original receipt to prove it, but he was nice about it and all. So that was all taken care of.
But here's the thing: Time Machine was partly responsible. If Time Machine would actually work half the time I needed it, it could be useful. Now my iMac could be at fault too; it has 768MB of RAM on Leopard, it's somewhat outdated, and it lacks the processing power of the newer Intel Macs. But for it to lock up the system and cause the whole drive to die (so to speak)? Amazing. Honestly, I could care less about this since I got a brand new replacement free of charge, and the Macs themselves are fine. But it is disappointing that I had to go through with this, and all of my backup data was there too... I don't know if Apple is going to open it up and attempt to do something on the drive or not though. I doubt it since it would be a waste of their time, but they still have it all. They'd find my applications and multimedia projects, etc., which doesn't bother me too much, but then there would be my emails and personal documents and records. ![]()
Time Machine is nice, but for it to break an external drive, or help cause it, is unacceptable on Apple's part, but Western Digital could work on their hardware quality too. Course before today, the drive had performed quite well, so I blame Time Machine... Then there is the user factor but I didn't do anything out of the ordinary.
And get this. A friend called me just as I got to the store. Apparently, MacFixit just posted an article about FireWire drives not mounting in 10.5.3; good timing I suppose. I asked the Genius about it, but he assured me that it must have been the drive for it to have not shown up on either of my Macs, so who knows. Nevertheless, this is very disappointing.
-BMF

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