Well, not sure if it's an "extreme failure" or just a failure of a LaCie Big Disk Extreme. Either way, my shiny new 500GB backup drive decided to go on strike yesterday. Maybe the most depressing day of the year got to it. Maybe it thought, as a 500GB drive, that it should have been doing more exciting things than just backing up my crap.
I was copying over the latest MySQL dumps from our production servers, and got an interesting error - "write error" - meaning, of course, that the file could not be copied to the BDE. Mwaaaaah? So I fire up Disk Utility, and it greets me with this:
Great. I grab our copy of Disk Warrior, hoping to throw its advanced repair ninja mojo at the problem. No joy. It keeps finding errors, and complaining that it's running slowly because of a disk error. Great. So, I decide to reformat the drive to start fresh. Blowing away 110GB of backups to try to fix the drive that's supposed to be saving me this grief. I make 2 new partitions - one for a backup system, and one for data. I tell Disk Utility to verify each new partition. It chokes on the first one.
At this point, I'm guessing it's a hardware failure, so pack up the drive to be replaced. Now, I'm sitting here without backups, hoping that Nothing Bad Happensâ„¢ before the drive is replaced and I have a chance to rebuild the backups... To add insult to injury, the SMART status on my desktop's system drive temporarily flickered into "DRIVE FAILING" status, then returned to OK.
Update: I'm turning comments off for this post. I think it is just aggregating unhappy customers, rather than fairly representing what LaCie products are like in the real world. And, my blog isn't a therapy group for disgruntled consumers. LaCie fixed my drive very quickly, and it's been running as expected ever since. Give their support folks a shot - they did the right thing by me. Should be more productive that ranting into the night about a failed hard drive.