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Two drives failed at once – could my computer be at fault?
Hello Everyone -
I had two G-raid 8tb external drives fail on me at the same time last night. Neither of them will mount, and Mac disk utility returns an “error code 8” when I run a “verify” test. One external drive was brand new, in use for less than a week, the other was just six months old. Of course it’s possible both drives were faulty, but it seems like a pretty unlikely coincidence. So I’m trying to understand if my Mac Pro could be at fault.
I have a backup, so that’s not an issue – but before I plug in the backup plus a new drive (to make another backup) I’d like to conclusively determine that no other factors could have contributed to this. My questions are:
1) Is it possible for a firewire port on the tower to damage, burn out, or otherwise cause an external drive to fail? What about a USB port? In other words – could my computer itself be causing drives to fail?
2) Just a few days ago I installed a Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0 PCIe card into my machine. I used it to access and transfer data from both drives, but I don’t think either drive was plugged into it when they finally crashed. Could the ports on the PCIe card have damaged, burned out, or otherwise caused my drive to fail?
3) Could I have installed the PCIe card wrong in some way? Could it be wrecking some other kind of havoc on my machine?
4) Are there any other factors besides sheer bad luck that could have contributed to this?
Again, since two drives died at once, I’d like to rule out any other factors before I plug in my final backup and risk killing it too.
I’m running a Mac Pro 4,1 (early 2009) with 10GB of RAM (8 of which were installed by me), a Sonnet Allegro Pro USB 3.0 PCIe card (as mentioned), in OSX 10.10.2. It’s worth noting that I have a dual boot system which is also capable of starting up in 10.6.8 (for a handful of long term documentary projects that are running in an older version of Avid) however the OS being used at the time of the drive failure was Yosemite.
Many thanks! -
2 Replies
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Eric,
You might find this useful:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/file-system-check-exit-code-8-disk-wont-repair.1819660/It’s probably not a problem with the drives themselves, rather, something else going on in your setup.
Thx
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If you have backup thats great 😉
I have never had an issue with 2 drives failure and we have thousands system sold..So could be its just a system hiccup, but could happen that you had issue with power and damaged HDDs, raid controller etc..
I would delete whole volume, and run volume check (check for bad blocks etc) and once you are sure that volume is OK, copy data back.
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