LaCie external USB-C drive I use as my secondary backup has just died. Poor quality crap.

So. I use a 4Tb Thunderbolt drive with Time Capsule (always connected when I’m using my laptop), and create a weekly drive image to this second drive using Carbon Copy Cloner. So it’s had minimal use since I bought the laptop in 2024. Say 100 uses.

Except this is a replacement for the original which failed inside six months. So two drives from LaCie fail, both under 2 years old, both minimal usage.

No more LaCie for me then.

#LaCie #DriveFailure

Apparently wiping the failed drive to send back to Seagate takes a while. I'm using the three-pass from diskutil in macOS where it writes all 0s, then all 1s, then random data.

This has been running since last night and it's only half way through pass 2!

#CosplayAsSysadmin
#NAS
#DriveFailure
#CheckYourBackups

Now for the nerve-racking period of time when the volume is rebuilding...

#CosplayAsSysadmin
#NAS
#DriveFailure
#CheckYourBackups

Wow, two failing HDDs in one calendar year, I wonder if the batch is bad.

I bought all four of the original drives at one time and I think they all had the same lot code.

I wish ASUSTOR was a bit more active about sending me SMART failure notifications, this one I found because I was looking for something else in the ADM interface.

#CosplayAsSysadmin
#NAS
#DriveFailure
#CheckYourBackups

Code of Amor 💘 (@[email protected])

@[email protected] @[email protected] The program for disk recovery I used was something that works at the disk sector level. It's called ddrescue I think, and has nothing to do with dd. It's brilliant. It creates a map file of your disk's sectors, then repeatedly tries to read sectors, forward, backwards, random read, for hours on end. It keeps its progress in the map file so you can cancel and resume it at any stage, and it applies different methodologies to try to scrape data back from a dying drive. #linuxtip

Mastodon @ Code of Amor
Good news, I figured out why my Linux box died: Western Digital messed up.

I did a lookup of my SSD and came across an article. The SA510 has a critical update to address a firmware bug that will randomly brick the drive. Fantastic. If you have an SA510, please please please back up your stuff and update the firmware.

#WesternDigital #DriveFailure #SA510