2TB G-Drive Corrupted, Laptop won't read it any longer

[Jimmy Pierce]

I have a 2TB G-Drive, formatted for Mac. I've been daisy chaining it to two other identical drives. Not the safest way of doing it, but we're working on a budget, and I've been trying to convince my boss to invest in something more safe and efficient. Now after working a month with this drive, it has become corrupted. Tomorrow we're supposed to be screening some of what I've edited together. Disk Utility won't repair the drive. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, especially ones given before tomorrow morning, 7am PSD.

 

[david_p]

disk warrior has been my best choice for many years for drive maintenance and/or simple pulling a drive that appears to have no hope of ever mounting again. i just pulled a boot drive off of my son's 8 core back from what i thought would never mount again. it had so much software with bundles of plugs from FCP/AE & photoshop. would have been a long nightmare reconstructing that system back to where it was. even with DW it was flaky and at times wouldnt mount. with multiple attempts i finally got it to show and i ran the multiple repair processes multiple times and got it to pop back to perfect working order. even with my positive experiences with DW i didnt think i would pull this one off but DW did.

to be fair though ive had a few drives that DW couldnt fix.

david

 

[Jimmy Pierce]

This thread is old but I thought I'd post the current status of the drive. I formatted it and now it works perfectly. The drive must have been corrupted somehow, which made it unreadable. But all is well.

 

[wgzn]

this kind of thing is sometimes a power supply issue. the drive gets enough power to apparently spin up but not enough to complete the process.
id go find a replacement power supply and rule that out before jacking around with software fixes

 

[henryqiu]

this kind of thing is sometimes a power supply issue. the drive gets enough power to apparently spin up but not enough to complete the process.

Very unlikely, if the drive is powered by its own dedicated power supply.

 

[TheDingo]

If you`re looking for something affordable and reliable, I highly recommend the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 RAID box, which can use up to 4 standard SATA hard drives, and be configured as a single RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 drive. It works with both Macs and PCs, and is completely self-contained, so you can use it with any Mac or PC computer that can connect via USB / eSATA / Firewire connections. I`ve been using one for 2 years now, and it has worked flawlessly. Fill it with 3 TB drives and you can have up to a 12 TB single RAID drive to work with. ( All aluminum construction, with large built-in temperature controlled fan )

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 : $250

 

[henryqiu]

If you`re looking for something affordable and reliable, I highly recommend the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 RAID box, which can use up to 4 standard SATA hard drives, and be configured as a single RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 drive. It works with both Macs and PCs, and is completely self-contained, so you can use it with any Mac or PC computer that can connect via USB / eSATA / Firewire connections. I`ve been using one for 2 years now, and it has worked flawlessly. Fill it with 3 TB drives and you can have up to a 12 TB single RAID drive to work with. ( All aluminum construction, with large built-in temperature controlled fan )

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 : $250

I would not call a $250 hard drive enclosure affordable, and I would not consider 2 year use experience enough to claim a hard drive enclosure is sufficiently reliable. For $250 or so, I could buy a very decent barebone computer and slide 4 or even more eStata III hard drives into it. In fact, a $250 enclosure without fire-proof feature is a very expensive one.

 

[TheDingo]

I would not call a $250 hard drive enclosure affordable

If you can recommend something that is cheaper that has the same feature set then I am all ears.

1- Able to use up to 4 low cost SATA drives ( 3 TB SATA drives or larger )
2- Stand alone RAID controller ( no computer or software required to operate or re-build RAID )
3- Supports RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 10 configurations
4- Able to connect to any Mac or Windows laptop using standard USB 1 / USB 2 / FireWire 400 / Firewire 800 / eSATA ports
5- Large and quiet temperature controlled fan
6- Self-contained power-supply
7- All metal construction
8- Compact size

Please tell me what is your cheaper solution is that offers these same features ?

and I would not consider 2 year use experience enough to claim a hard drive enclosure is sufficiently reliable.

So how many years is considered enough experience ?

I have used more than 60+ computers since the early 80`s, and I have found that reliability varies quite a bit.

For $250 or so, I could buy a very decent barebone computer and slide 4 or even more eStata III hard drives into it.

The problem with using a barebone computer is that it is NOT a 100 percent hardware controlled RAID, so it requires software and software configuration to function correctly, and this software can be corrupted much easier than a hardware based OS that will never change unless you upgrade it`s firmware. Also I haven`t seen any barebone computers that are cheaper, smaller, able to hold four full size SATA drives, with all metal construction.

When a drive goes bad in the OWC RAID box I listed previously, you just swap out the defective drive with a replacement, turn on the RAID, and walk away. The RAID box will automatically rebuild the RAID. No user intervention, nothing to click on, no OS to boot. Once the rebuild is finished, you just connect the RAID box to your computer and start working again.

I have built many computers with RAID capability ( either built in to the motherboard or via a plug-in RAID card ) and most of them suck in the long run because they are easy to corrupt. If you lose your software stored RAID config, and do not have it all written down or saved through a back-up system, it can be a giant pain in the *ss to try and rebuild your RAID. Stand alone RAID boxes are much more reliable.

 

[wgzn]

Very unlikely, if the drive is powered by its own dedicated power supply.

are you referring to an internal supply as opposed to an external ac adapter? as ive seen very, few if any drive enclosure that didnt use an ac adapter (or bus power)...

since this has become a drive brand reliability discussion. ive been using the OWC mercury elites (in a number of their raid and single drive configs) for about 8 years. and ive yet to have any significant reliability issues

 

[joesh]

I wish I didn't have experience with the Qx2 but alas I do. I've been an OWC fan for many years and was happy to upgrade to what I thought was a very reliable storage unit. For me - and quite a few others on the OWC blog - that was not the case.

I'm not sure if this is true for all hardware RAID controllers but the Qx2 has a very simple (read unsophisticated) management policy for the filesystem it holds. If it sees an error on a drive it "degrades" the RAID by INVALIDATING THE WHOLE DRIVE OR STRIPE. It then tries to "rebuild" the RAID by copying the valid drive or stripe onto the invalid one. This takes a LONG TIME and during this time your data is unprotected and the unit is running constantly trying to copy all the data from one set of drives to the other.

The Qx2 doesn't do anything smart like DiskWarrior, CHKDSK, or fsck would. After all, it doesn't even know what filesystem is on it so how could it? Thus the rebuild is all or nothing. If anything goes wrong with the rebuild, then it's NOTHING.

I've had this happen twice. Many others have as well. Why does it go awry? I don't know. As far as I can tell OWC doesn't know either. Sometimes they say it's a bad drive. Sometimes a bad power supply. I just know it's the least reliable storage solution I've ever used and I wish they'd refund my purchase. I had a 3 month honeymoon with this unit and then nothing but trouble. It's been back to OWC twice and I just can't trust it anymore. Seems to me a PC that knew about the filesystem on its drives would be a much safer alternative to this box.