How often should I replace a Hard Drive? I recommend you do this every 3 years, as I do, because experience has shown that modern Hard Drives usually fail some time after 3 years and I want to minimise the risk of inconvenient down-time and file-loss, so I plan ahead.
I also believe that Hard Drives have a harder life, nowadays, because they are storing more data more often - especially when used for video. I use G4 towers because they are available cheaply via eBay and because they make it relatively esy to change internal hardware. In contrast, the Mac Mini and iMac are a pain to take apart. I also have an external Firewire drive connected to each G4 for automatic backups. In my opinion, the computer system is incomplete without this and the risk of file loss is high - unacceptably high in my case. Anyway, I ran out of space on one of my G4s last week. I had 3 internal Hard Drives fitted. One 80GB was partitioned for OSX (the "boot drive") and for my iTunes music files. One 120GB drive was used for camcorder uploads. One 160Gb drive was used for storing photos and my daily "working files". This is connected via an ATA PCI card because the early G4 can't "see" a drive larger than 120GB. Clearly, the 80GB had to go, so I bought a 320GB from DABS.com and daisy-chained it to the ATA card. I used Disc Utility to format and partition it. I used Prosoft "Data Backup" to clone the partitions from the 80GB drive to the new. I had been variously advised to use "Superduper" and "Carbon Copy Cloner" to achieve this but I had received Prosoft "Data Backup" for Christmas and I was determined to find a use for it! The transfer went without a hitch and I was able to select the new drive as the "boot drive" and the computer worked normally. However, there were some problems: 1. the G4 tower lets you stack two drives next to the PCI card rack and fit two more drives side by side. There is space to stack them but if you do so, you can't close the side panel because the mother board fouls on the upper drive. However, although you can install four drives, there are only three power supply connectors! I took this as a hint that the power supply wasn't man enough to run four drives, so I discarded the old 80GB drive. 2. the fact that the new drive partitions had different names from the originals meant that iTunes and iPhoto couldn't find their libraries or music/image files. I use "MorePhotoLibs" to organise several image libraries and this couldn't find them, either. However *I* knew where they were so I simply dragged the library folders back into "MorePhotoLibs" and that solved the problem. iTunes was a different matter. I was able to enter the location of the iTunes music folder into the "Preferences" window in iTunes. That resulted in my play lists reappearing. But there were no podcasts and no audiobooks listed and no obvious way to get them back. I don't recall how I got the podcasts back. I do remember that it was fairly easy but that I had to click the "subscribe" button for each one. I had copies of all the .m4b audiobook files so I simply dragged them all back into iTunes. I thought that was it, until I noticed that dozens of music files were "orphaned". Each had an exclamation mark next to its name, indicating that iTunes had lost its location. It seems that it's possible to import a song then delete it from iTunes library but still have it play becaue iTunes remembers where you imported it from. But, if you change the name of the Hard Drive where it resides, iTunes (logically) can't find it. The upshot was that I had to manually search for every missing track, drag a copy into the relevant iTunes music folder and show iTunes where it was located. This took about two hours and I was cursing myself. Some of the files weren't even on the internal drive and I had to drag them from the external backup drive! I haven't tried iMovies yet. I suspect it will be OK because my camcorder drive is untouched. Anyway, the moral of this story is "plan ahead". Know when your Hard Drive is due for replacement. Know where all your files are. Keep a backup of everything. If you have an iMac or Mac Mini, you might extend the life of the internal drive by keeping all working files and movies on an external drive. But this should be physically separate from your external backup drive. Now, I know some of you will retort "I've been using the same Hard Drive for ten years!" I won't dispute this. I have used Hard Drives for ten years, too. But ten years ago we weren't handling massive video files. Also, I can assure you that ten years is not typical. Ten years is an "if you are lucky" timescale. You need to ask yourself how lucky you feel today. :-) Martin (UK) ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
