More fun with Hard Drives November 8, 2007 at 8:20 pm
I previously wrote about my woes with a Samsung drive in my Macbook Pro. I had decided to try a Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 drive, because 200gig is enough for me and the extra speed sounded nice. I ordered it online and it showed up about 2 weeks ago. I put it in the MBP and installed Tiger (OSX 10.4) on it. The install went somewhat slower then I expected and within a few hours (as I restored data) I started getting long hangs and there were error messages in my system.log file. From google hits for the errors it’s an indication that the disk is failing. That sucked.. brand new disk basically DOA. I went back to the Samsung disk and lived with the hangs every few days.
Last night I plugged the 7k200 into my linux box in my home office so that I could make sure it showed failures on there, and mainly wanted to write random data on the disk to cover over the data I had on there. However, it worked perfectly well in the linux host.. no errors, and I filled the complete disk with random data. I decided to try it in the MBP again, thinking that either maybe the connector was loose, or maybe it had something to do with the disk not being fully initialized in my system (I just used the erase setting in the disk utility vs a completely new partition).
Since then the host has been perfectly stable and I don’t see any messages in the system.log indicating any posible problems. It seems like maybe the fact that disk utility have to create the whole GUID table and partition the disk from scratch (I’d used fdisk in linux to create a DOS label and did a mkfs.ext3 and mkreiserfs on the disk under linux) somehow fixed whatever issue I was having last time.
Fingers crossed, but hopefully my MBP will stay stable now.
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