Dead Hard Drive

My 500GB external HDD on my Mac mini failed today suddenly. It was working intermittently and very hot so I unplugged it and open the enclosure to let it cool. Now when I turn it on, I hear the motor trying to spin up following by a faint clicking sound, but no steady whine of a spinning motor. This is the 2nd Seagate drive that failed on me; the first was a 32MB HDD I had on my Mac Plus. This one is a 500GB Barracuda 7200.10 drive that I got a few years ago.

Unfortunately, if it doesn't spin up later, I will have lost ~350GB of MP3s. Luckily I moved all my MVs to my PC a few months ago and most of my current MP3s are on my Mac mini, though only ~30GB.

Sigh... I'm never buying a Seagate drive ever again.

==========

To be fair, the Seagate drive still works. For kicks, I decided to plug the drive into my PC (power only) and it spun up. Since Windows can't read Mac formatted volumes, I had to run a long FireWire cable from my Mac to my PC and all my files are back! To be safe, I'm backing up all the file (33,000+ MP3s) to an external drive on my PC.



External drive is getting power from an internal power connector in the PC but the data connector is still plugged into the external Mac enclosure. Data is going back to the Mac mini via a long FireWire cable, and files are being copied over the network (both wired thankfully!) to the black WD external drive next to the PC. Still deciding what to do with the 500GB drive after everything is copied. :(

==========

Dang it. It take forever to copy files. I am copying 33,036 items (155 GB) at 10.4 MB/second... it that ~100 Mbits/sec? It's been copying for almost 5 hours... 10 MB/sec = 36 GB/hour so something is slowing it down; probably the 33k file count.

Time remaining: About 5 Minutes and 30 Seconds

Zzzz...