Failing Hard Drive...

On Thursday afternoon while working, I noticed that I heard a few short instances of a slight clicking sound coming from my computer. Having heard the "click of death" from hard drives before, this sounded eerily familiar, but not quite the same. Frighteningly, at the same moment, I noticed the active application (at this time, Adium) froze and I received the beach ball of death. Wondering if it was just Adium acting up, I tabbed over to Firefox, but received the same result... and the same with Finder. Crap... This lasted maybe around 10 seconds or so, and then the beach ball went away and everything caught back up. This happened twice over the period of about an hour. I checked the S.M.A.R.T. status of my internal drives and all checked out, but I was still concerned. This is my primary computer and since I work from home, it would be enormously inconvenient to have the system down.

For the sake of completeness, this is a Mac Pro. I've had it for about a year and a half with no hardware issues at all. It includes the default 250GB drive that came with the machine, which holds the operating system and my applications folder. Additionally, I have two 1TB drives in a mirrored RAID that holds my home directory- this includes all of my preference files, documents, music, etc. I have a few external drives for data and Apple's Time Machine backup utility, but they're not important here. I'm led to believe that it's the primary boot drive that's the problem, as when I heard the clicking, applications froze. I wasn't actively accessing data from my home directory, so I don't see a reason why the RAID drives would be at fault.

My first priority right now is replacing the drive before it's too late. I want as little downtime as possible, because as I mentioned, I need the system to work.. and going from a machine with multiple monitors to a small laptop screen is inconvenient, to make a gross understatement. I immediately began price checking hard drives to see what I should get as a replacement. I tend to prefer Seagate simply for their awesome warranty- 5 years. That's the longest available for any hard drive manufacturer, and I really like knowing I should be able to get it replaced if it fails within 5 years. Also, I mentioned having a RAID... the two drives in the RAID are Seagate, and they've been performing wonderfully.

Since my computer is running 24/7, I want a drive that not only is covered, but will be resilient and not break down due to continuous use. Seagate has what they call to be an enterprise-class drive, the Barracuda ES series. This is what I used in my RAID, and I think it's what I would prefer for my new boot drive. The drive Apple put in was a standard Seagate (kind of disturbing, but we'll see if I can get it RMA'd) with an 8MB cache. The ES drives have a 32MB cache, which should be quite an improvement. I was going to go with 250GB since that's plenty for a boot drive, and the cheapest I found at the time was $87 shipped. I was about to place my order, when I decided to check the prices on other capacities... what I found was quite interesting. I could double my capacity to 500GB for the same-class hard drive for only $13 more. Wow... why WOULDN'T I do that? Sure I'm looking to spend the least amount of money possible, but this is quite a bargain when you consider what you're getting... plus I'm a firm believer that you can never have too much hard drive space. So within a couple hours my 500GB hard drive was ordered and I expect it to be here early to mid next week.

Once I get the drive I'll get it swapped out and hopefully all will be well. I haven't witnessed anymore problems since Thursday, but I'm not about to take a chance... if the drive turns out to be fine, then at least I'll have a spare. Next week I'll post an update with my procedure involved in making the hard drive replacement as painless as possible. Assuming all goes to plan, this will be incredibly quick and simple and my downtime should only be as long as the length of time it takes for a system reboot.