In today's edition of P2TD, I'm going to convey the perils of my Mac over the course of the past few weeks!!
That lasted for a solid 5 months.
The stock hard drive was essentially as low as they come: 500 GB spinning at 5200 RPM. For some unknown reason, the drive up and failed. The previous night, I had been dual-booting into Windows, and shut the computer down for the night from there. The next morning when I wen't to boot up the computer, it gave me a flashing folder with a sad face, indicating that there was some error that prevented the computer from starting. Turns out, the drive had completely failed, and OS X offered no reasoning as to why.
This was 3 weeks ago.
Luckily, I had another drive from a previous computer at the ready to pop into the computer. It is almost as baseline, the only difference being that it has a 1 TB capacity. That drive ran fine, and I didn't notice any performance issues (even though it is SATA II as opposed to SATA III), other than that it was considerably louder than the previous drive that came with the Mac.
Everything was fine and dandy until I went into Disk Utility to make another partition for Windows 10. Apparently, the drive had failed the SMART check; a diagnostic check that is built into most drives. Disk Utility offered me no other information or guidance other than that it had a hardware failure, and that I should replace the drive.
That was 1 week ago.
Turns out, there are a couple issues going on. Firstly, OS X doesn't know much of anything about the drive, so it can't properly interpret everything that the drive does. Secondly, there are a little over 16,000 bad or reallocated sectors. (For more info on bad sectors, check out the article HERE) Those two issues combined set of SMART, thus preventing me from making any changes to the drive.
The drive is still working fine, though I have noticed some minor issues with grinding, though, that was present when it was in my old computer too. After doing some research, and acquiring some software, I conclusively don't have too much to worry about yet because the number isn't increasing, nor is the problem going to result in a failure in the near future.
Just to be sure, I did order a 500 GB 7200 RPM drive that is keeping a copy of my current drive so that as soon as it fails, I'll be able to swap them out and continue like normal.
The whole ordeal has successfully thrown me for a loop, though I am glad that I will have a backup plan if this drive fails too.
Have you ever had issues with Hard Drive Failures or Bad Sector Counts? If so, be sure to share your perils in the comments below!
With that, I sign off, bidding Power 2 YOU!!!