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The curse of the early adopter, part two

In late November 2006, I posted a blog entry entitled “The curse of the early adopter.” Unfortunately, this story did not end in November, as I had hoped. Since my posting, I’ve had two additional complete hard drive failures - one in my cursed MacBook Pro and a follow-up one in my replacement MacBook Pro that Apple Customer Relations was kind enough to send along. My latest hard drive failure over the weekend did not result in the pain of previous failures, as I became wise on backups. I lost perhaps two days of work, as I had not finished the transition to daily backups. But, this is nothing compared to the early January loss of 45+ days of work, during my grandmother’s funeral! I think losing data this many times has scared me into daily backups. I am impatiently waiting for Mozy to release the Mac client, which should be ‘any day now.’ Until then, it’s a script to a FireWire drive.

So, what is going on?! How does anyone have four complete hard drive failures on two separate computers in less than four months? Good question. I spent some time discussing this with an Apple Genius at the Portland Apple Store who knows of my plight. We have three theories…

1) Environmental: Some magnetic or other environmental exposure that is hazardous to hard drives. Unlikely, as my wife’s MacBook is just fine, and my co-worker has no problems at the office with his laptop or desktop. Those two locations account for the vast majority of my computer usage. This theory is the least likely of the three.

2) Heat Generation: A hard drive exposed to excessive, ongoing heat may fail. Two applications always generate excessive heat for me, causing the fan to turn on - Newsfire and World of Warcraft. To eliminate the heat issue, I have deleted both applications from my MacBook Pro. Newsfire is an RSS reader, and I migrated to Google Reader tonight for my daily RSS crawl. I don’t play World of Warcraft much at all anymore, so I can just use my iMac at the house when I have a scheduled game night.

3) Sleep Failures: When a computer is shutdown or in sleep mode, the hard drive heads should park to avoid damage during transport, and the computer should turn off to avoid generating heat. I carry my MacBook Pro around with me in a padded backpack. To avoid potential sleep problems, I will start powering off my computer during transport instead of relying on sleep mode to protect the drive.

Hopefully, the fourth failure will be the final one for many years to come. I am exhausted by this process, and the amount of time lost for both professional and personal pursuits is akin to having a major illness during the past few months. The number of hours lost on troubleshooting, backing up, reinstalling, configuring, mailing packages, visiting the Apple Store, making tech support phone calls, and everything else is in the hundreds of hours at this point.

I look forward to the day when these little mechanical spinning disks are replaced by flash memory and backups are as simple as browsing the Internet.

UPDATE 1 - 02/22/07: Have I found my explanation for burning through four drives in less than four months?! Take a look at the Mac Book Pro Hard Disk Failure post by Thingy-Ma-Jig and How to save your MacBook Pro hard drive post by Silver Mac. There are some times when I close my lid and then seconds later place it right into my backpack. Could this be killing my hard drives?

You crack me up, R.

Never would I have guessed that I would keep running across your presence on the Interwebs as much as I do. I still remember the evenings that you and I and others would use Maven and CU-See-Me long into the night—using thousands of dollars of bandwidth to chat and watch each other pick their noses.

Amazing to see how far it all really has come.

Glad to see your blog, and that you’re still cranking away with tech as I am—still passionately, and still with all the frustrations it entails.

All the best,
-b

Brian - so great to hear from you. Yes, video conferencing on the “Information Superhighway” back in 1994/5. I added you to my Twitter watch list. Keep in touch!

As you said in your comment on my blog (thanks for leaving that by the way) on my post about
Apple Mac Book Pro Hard Disk Failures, I’m starting to get more and more concerned about the life expectancy of these devices.

When I pay a premium for a top of the range device, I do not expect it to fail in that time frame.

I wouldn’t mind if I abused the laptop - but I treat it with great respect - its the most expensive thing I own and I’m not going to throw it around!

I was in the same boat as you in that I have the 100gb 7200rpm drive and they didn’t have any in stock, so I had to wave by bye to my laptop for a week or two.

Thanks for your insight. I lost my white MacBook’s hard drive yesterday… this entire semester of grad school papers/notes is gone, as well as the grades for the 2 classes I teach. I had backed up 3 weeks ago, but somehow my “school” folder didn’t get transferred to the external hard drive.

I too, have been relying on closing the lid and having the computer sleep to put it in my backpack - I will start taking the precautions you mentioned. My question is, what’s the easiest way to back up to my external drive every day, without duplicating information on the drive? You mentioned you run a script, but I’m not familiar with writing scripts. Do you have any tips?

I’ll be taking preventative measures from now on, since I know that I’m likely to lose this replacement hard drive as well… I have been plagued by problems since I bought this guy last June…

Do you notice now that the 7200 rpm drives are available on newer MBPs? I just burned through my 2nd 7200 rpm drive in less than 15 months. The Apple Store “accidentally” replaced it with a 5400 rpm one, before I insisted that I should get the 7200 rpm driver. I wonder if moving to the 5400 rpm drive would solve this entire problem, although it would be much slower…

Alright…soooo….

I stumbled in here because my MacBook has misplaced its hard drive for the first time since I bought it last August. BUT, I have a Toshiba Satelite not more than six feet away from me that is on its 4th hard drive failure. It hasn’t kerplopped yet, it is in its beginning stages.

I am beginning to think that it is a laptop problem. I think they are overheating and frying the drives. I think it is a universal problem and I think some of it experience it more than others because we use our laptops more.

I think the whole heat dispersion may be jacked in them. Ironically enough, I have an old Compaq laptop running Windows 1995 that is still kicking just fine aside from a useless battery. I have had problems with every laptop I have ever owned. Maybe we demand too much from them that technology cannot yet provide.

I am fortunate to be a serial back up artist, but I am losing two web sites, a catalog, and a plethora of photos that I have been working on. :o(

I need the damn thing to work and I don’t really feel up to visiting a “Mac Genius” today.

GRRR!!!

Just my uneducated $0.02