Q about jolted and damaged LaCie drive

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited May 2014

Hi all. I have a 750G Lacie Quadra that I damaged today - - moved my laptop a little too far away and the firewire cable pulled the external drive so it tipped over and landed on its side with a thud, while it was running!

 

After that, it made sounds (something like clicking) so I disconnected everything, waited, and reconnected, but the drive wouldn't mount, an error message appeared on the Mac that the disk was not 'recognized'.

 

I've got Diskwarrior, using it I've made a new directory for the damaged Lacie, and I'm slowly now copying files onto another external disk. It's going to take forever, and some files aren't copying.

 

Good thing all my Macs are doing OK (despite occasionally suffering little bumps) because this Lacie disk is one where I've made my backups!

 

My question is; can anyone tell me exactly what was probably damaged by this tipover? I'd be interested to know what component(s) have been damaged.

 

Is there any chance it is something which can be repaired, allowing better file recovery?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    It sounds like this may have happened:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash

    Software is limited in what it can do when a physical problem happens. The sooner SSDs come down in price enough to get rid of HDDs once and for all the better.

    If the 750GB drive wasn't full, you could switch it with the likes of:

    http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-EVO-Series-2-5-Inch-MZ-7TE500BW/dp/B00E3W19MO
    http://www.amazon.com/Screw-Less-ORICO-2588US3-2-5-inch-Enclosure/dp/B00B0RD2RA

    The performance would be wasted if you don't have USB 3 but you can throw it around without worrying that it'll get damaged.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    blackburnblackburn Posts: 4member

    Thanks Marvin.  That 'head crash' dust storm and ensuing data destruction is terrifying reading...

     

    lol

     

    I tried a few things this morning, in desperation; have no idea if it made a difference, but now I've been able to make many more file backups from the Lacie disk without all the delays, noises, and very erratic 'on light' that I had yesterday - it looked and sounded at one stage as if there was short-circuiting going on.  Maybe by getting the disk to spin at the right speed the dust from the damage got spun off... I dunno.

     

    I'm beginning to hope I'll save most of the 700G's, all painstakingly edited video, which would save me hundreds of hours of reimporting all the original tape and editing again from scratch. I have a lot of edits in the form of 'reference movies' and those are opening now on the Lacie, allowing me to make hard copies to another disk.

     

    All in all things aren't as bad as it looked at first - but one thing for sure I've learned, all good material from my current camera (tapeless) is going to get 2 backups from now on.

     

    ; )

  • Reply 3 of 4
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,309moderator
    blackburn wrote: »
    I've learned, all good material from my current camera (tapeless) is going to get 2 backups from now on.

    It's a good idea to have 3 copies of everything minimum so that if you have a single failure, you always have more than one copy. You can even get portable drives up to 2TB now for just over $100:

    http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Portable-External-STBX1000101/dp/B008R7FC74

    Keep them in a drawer somewhere and sync them every so often with the attached drive.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    hmmhmm Posts: 3,405member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post



    It sounds like this may have happened:



    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash



    Software is limited in what it can do when a physical problem happens. The sooner SSDs come down in price enough to get rid of HDDs once and for all the better.

    They still encounter physical problems, just not mechanical ones. I guess they are more impact resistant though.

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