Even if your Mac has plenty of volumes, losing an important one can ruin your day - or at least your regular backup schedule.

 

The other day one of my backup drives went south - the one holding my photo backups, to be exact. I have about 100GB of photos, and since losing them to a hard-drive failure would be a tragedy, I back them up daily. Well, I actually back everything up daily, but it's the photos I worry most about. Losing photos of my daughters' early years, Rox's performances, Carey's athletic events, my folks, our family vacations, and more would be far more painful than losing my iTunes collection - and besides, that's still on my 'Pods.

 

But since I'm well-protected by backups, I could actually perversely enjoy the death rattle of this particular drive - at least in a pseudo-scientific way: It died in what was easily the loudest fashion that I've ever heard: loud chirps 'n' sqeeks, clicks noticeably louder than an Iomega Zip Drive's classic Click of Death, and the occasional parrot-like squawk. After this sadism began to bore me, I ejected and disconnected the offending drive - but didn't toss it.

 

When hard drives die, it's easy - and cheap - to simply replace their innards rather than buy a whole new external FireWire drive. Follow along and learn how - and, by the way, if you're not interested in learning how to replace a drive's guts, cut ahead to the last page of this blog entry to learn some Fun Facts to Know and Tell about hard-drive evolution. Trust me; it's interesting stuff. Really.

 

Next: The Point of No Return, then The Screws

 

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Step 1: The Point of No Return

 

When you're digging through this how-to, remember that although all drives' cases are different, the basics of how to replace the drive inside that case is essentially the same: First, open the case; second, find out what kind of drive is in the case; third, order a new drive that's based on the same connection technology; fourth, when the new drive arrives, replace the old drive with the new one; finally, button everything up and get back to work. I'm replacing the drive inside a LaCie d2 case in this article, but if you're putting a drive into a case supplied by WiebeTech, Other World Computing, or whomever, just adapt. It's easy.

 

But before you crack open the case, first look to see if the back, bottom, side of your drive's case has something similar to this message:

 

 

If it does, look at your warranty then look at your calendar. If your drive is still under warranty, get in touch with the drive vendor's customer service folks, and ask about their return policy. Policies vary widely around the industry, with the best being what's called "cross-shipping" and the worst being the dreaded "restocking fee." A vendor who cross-ships will put a replacement drive into the mail as soon as they receive confirmation that you're shipped the bad drive to them - some even pay your shipping fees. Vendors who charge restocking fees require a percentage-of-original-cost payment for taking a bad drive back.

 

Let me rush to explain that I buy from restocking-fee folks all the time. Why? Two reasons: The first is that because I've religious about backup, I don't need the "gotta have it now!" service that cross-shipping provides. The second is that vendors who require restocking fees generally offer better prices. I'm willing to take the gamble - and after around 25 years of buying parts for various home computers, I've had to pay a restocking fee exactly zero times.

 

But you pays your money, you makes your choice.

 

To return to our gutting: That warranty-voiding sticker is almost certainly either hiding a screw that you'll need to remove to open the case or bridging two parts of the case that you'll need to separate to open it. In the case of the LaCie d2 (pun intended), it's the former - so I peel off the sticker and break out my Phillips screwdriver. (Your trivia for the day: in Japan, a Phillip screwdriver is called a "plus driver;" what do you think they call a standard slotted screwdriver? Yup...)

 

Next: The Screws, then The Culprit

 

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Step 2: The Screws

 

On my LaCie case, the screw revealed by removing the warranty-voiding tag is matched by another screw at the bottom of the back of the case:

 

 

After removing these two screws, the back plate simply lifts off to reveal the back plan of the drive carriage:

 

 

Note that your drive's case may open in a completely different way. For example, an old WiebeTech DesktopGB case that I have opens by simply sliding the two halves of the case apart, no screws involved at all. Whatever - I'm 110% certain that you're smart enough to figure it out.

 

Next: The Culprit, then First the Plugs

 

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Step 3: The Culprit

 

Slide the drive carriage out of the case (LaCie), slide the drive carriage open (WiebeTech), or whatever you need to do. You'll now be able to see the drive itself, nestled in its carriage and connected to its support electronics by two cables: a data cable and a power cable. Here's what I saw when I slid my dead drive out of its case:

 

 

Now it's time for the official "Statistically Unsupportable Personal-Bias Rant:" As soon as I saw that my dead drive was manufactured by Maxtor, its death made sense to me. Y'see, in the past three or four years, I've had three drives die on me - an unusually large number, even for a multi-drive geek such as myself.

 

There was a pattern to their deaths, however: All three of those drives were manufactured by Maxtor. When, a year or so back, I asked a Maxtor product manager about this high failure rate, he did admit that the company's drives have had some reliability problems. Since my LaCie d2 drive used a Maxtor mechanism that was manufactured a couple of years back, I'm hoping that more-recent Maxtor drives are sturdier. Maybe so - but maybe not.

 

See the "you pays your money..." reference, above.

 

Next: First the Plugs, then More Screws

 

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Step 4: First the Plugs

 

This step is the only one in this entire process that could be remotely regarded as tricky: You need to remove the drive's data and power cables (circled in the image below), then remove the drive itself from its carriage. When removing the plugs, it's perfectly fine to leverage them out with a small slotted (or "minus") screwdriver, but don't - I repeat don't - use any of the drive's electronics as a wedge point or leverage point for the screwdriver. If you crack something green or something with circuit tracings or tiny electronic parts on it, you may destroy the entire drive. Also, try to pull both plugs out straight, not angled, to avoid bending the pins that they're attached to. Start with the power plug (the white one), since it's huskier and, therefore, provides less-dangerous practice. And whatever you do, never, ever pull on a cable - pull only on the plugs themselves. But you knew that.

 

 

Next: More Screws, then The Purchase

 

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Step 5: More Screws

 

Okay, so the plugs were a little bit tough, so now it's time for something both easy and satisfying: removing the screws that hold the drive to its carriage. These screws can be on the bottom of the carriage (as in my LaCie case), on the sides, or even completely missing in cases that kindasorta snap the drive mechanism into their embrace. Find them (or not) - they're big and easy to remove, so remove them. When you've unscrewed them all, simply lift the drive out of the carriage (you may have to angle it a bit to do so, but that should be no problem).

 

 

Next: The Purchase, then The Reassembly

 

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Step 6: The Purchase

 

If you don't have a replacement drive lying around, it's time to buy one. To buy the right one, you need to know what kind of connection your dead drive had with the electronics on the drive carriage. Ninety-nine percent of the drives you'll run into use one of two basic types of connections: the older ATA (short for advanced technology attachment, and also known as IDE, which stands for intelligent drive electronics or integrated drive electronics, depending on whom you ask) and the newer Serial ATA. The former is also sometimes known as parallel ATA or PATA, and the latter as SATA.

 

It's easy to tell the difference between the two. PATA drives, such as the dead one in my LaCie d2 case, have a wide ribbon cable that transmits all of the drive's data to its support electronics in parallel. SATA drives have a much thinner cable since they transfer their data in serial fashion. Simply put, think of a PATA connection as a multi-lane freeway clogged at rush hour, and a SATA conection as the high-speed diamond lane.

 

There's another way of finding out what kind of drive you have - look at its label:

 

 

You'll notice that this Maxtor MAXLine Plus II drive is listed as a 250GB ATA/133 HDD.You can figure out the 250GB part, HDD simply means hard disk drive, and I just told you about ATA, but what's the "133" after ATA? Simple: The ATA connection has had a long and fruitful life, and has improved in performance over a few generations from, for example, 33 megabytes per second through 66, 100, and 133 megabytes per second. This drive is one of the fast ones, so I want to replace it with an equally fast one.

 

If, however, I had an old ATA/100 drive lying around, I could simply use it, instead, and the drive carriage's electronics would adjust to the drive's slower speed. Unfortunately it doesn't work the other way around: If you put an ATA/133 drive into a case that only supports ATA/100, the drive's performance will ratchet down to the case's slower speed.

 

So I went shopping for a 250GB ATA/133 drive - and I didn't want to get one from Maxtor. You can go to your local CompUSA or other raw-equipment dealer, but I'm a big fan of the convenience of online shopping - and, fortunately, I discovered that Other World Computing offers a 250GB Hitachi DeskStar T7K250 for a mere $83.95.

 

If you've received your AARP solicitation letter, you may remember when DeskStar drives had (deservedly) bad reputations. Don't worry about that - it's history. DeskStar drives have vastly improved since their spotty record in their early IBM incarnation and now - IBM having sold their hard-drive business to Hitachi - are some of my favorite drives.

 

So I dropped in on Other World Computing's website, made the purchase, and waited for the drive. I trusted my non-backed-up primary Photos drive until the DeskStar arrived - but backed up some extra-crucial photos to DVDs, just in case.

 

Next: The Reassembly, then Done.

 

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Step 7: The Reassembly

 

After taking apart your dead drive, bringing it back to life by reversing the process after you get your new drive mechanism is child's play. One piece of advice, however. Some cases - such as the LaCie case - make it somewhat difficult to snap the power and data cables back into their respective sockets due to tight clearances with the carriage's various protruberences. When replacing drives into LaCie d2 cases, I personally find it easier to screw the drive into the carriage before attempting to reattach the cables - though with some other cases, the reverse is true. Your call.

 

After carefully recabling the cables and rescrewing the screws, simply slide, drop, or whatever the carriage back into the case, reattach any protective plates - if any - and your drive is as good as new. Or, in my case, better.

 

 

You'll also notice that many cases - such as the LaCie d2 in this article and the WiebeTech DesktopGB I mentioned earlier - simply make it impossible for you to slide or snap the case back together incorrectly. So if something doesn't seem like it's fitting together smoothly, it's entirely possible that you're trying to insert the carriage upside down and/or backwards. Don't force stuff together - the fault is probably not the case's, but yours.

 

Next: Done (then Fun Facts):

 

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Step 8: Done

 

After your drive-fixing is complete, simply hook up your drive to your Mac as it was hooked up before, use Disk Utility to partition it (if you want) or initialize/erase it (if necessary), and you're good to go.

 

One caveat - and I'm not the only person to have noticed this. Apple's implementation of FireWire is, shall we say, less than perfect. Sometimes drives aren't immediately recognized after being worked on as I've just described. Sometimes reshuffling different drives on a FireWire bus makes perfectly healthy drives that mounted just fine before another drive was worked-on now refuse to mount. I've discovered that this "now it works, now it doesn't" problem is exacerbated when, as with my multi-drive set-up, one is using both FireWire 800 and FireWire 400 drives. It can be thoroughly infuriating.

 

I wish that I could say that over the years I've developed a bulletproof, works-every-time method for getting a complex FireWire chain to act rationally at each and every boot-up - but I haven't. If your drives refuse to mount, simply shut them off and unplug them (from FireWire, that is), reboot, then turn them back on and replug them - or shut down your Mac, shut down your drives, turn them back on, then reboot - or some other gal-derned combination of shutting down, unplugging/replugging, and rebooting. I've had my best luck with shutting down my Mac, unplugging my drives, then rebooting the Mac and replugging the drives - but sometimes other methods work, instead. %$#@!

 

However, if all your drives are healthy, they'll eventually all appear on your desktop. Or, at least, they should.

 

Oh, and then there's the old FireWire reset trick: Shut down your Mac. Remove each and every cable attached to it - AC, USB, FireWire, whatever. Then wait 15 minutes or so, reattach everything, and reboot. This worked for me once, and ex-MacAddict editor and current Mac|Life contributing editor Niko Coucouvanis swears by it.

 

I just wish I could figure out why it does any good.

 

 

So, here's a photo of my newly resuscitated hard drive, second from left, nestled in amongst its peers. And, yes, you observant ones, that is, indeed, a Newton MessagePad 120 hiding over on the right. I never use it, but can't bear to part with it.

 

Now, before you go, click on to the next page for the above-promised Fun Facts to Know and Tell.

 

 

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Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics:

 

When I bought the 250GB Hitachi DeskStar from Other World Computing for the repair job described in this article, I was - as I often am when buying new computer equipment - amazed at how inexpensive storage has become. However, mere "Wow!" isn't enough (just ask Microsoft's marketing department). I wanted some sort of comparative benchmark on exactly how cheap is cheap, and how far prices have dropped in the past, say, 20 years or so. So I did what I often enjoy doing: I created a set of Meaningless Statistics™.

 

In December of 1986, my wife and I bought our home here in San Francisco for $199,000. It was small - just 935 square feet - but in a nice neighborhood and close to transportation. (Incidentally, after some extensive renovations and 20 years of appreciation, it was recently assessed at $1.5 million - but that's another story entirely.)

 

"Hmm," thought I, "A home's square footage can be considered to be loosely analogous to hard-drive capacity, and money is money. If I find out what hard drives were selling for in December of 1986 and how much they cost per megabyte, I can compare that info with my house-buying info and see what bubbles up." Could be fun. Well, geeky, math-wrangling fun, at least.

 

So I traipsed over to the San Francisco Main Library, and dug into the December 1986 issues of MacUser and Macworld. Merely strolling down that particular memory lane was enjoyable enough: MacUser was 208 pages and Macworld clocked in at 232; and I was reminded of an early Mac game that had entirely slipped my memory: Infocom's Leather Godesses of Phobos, which included a "scratch n'sniff card and a 3-d comic book," with gameplay that featured "3 levels of naughtiness, for the prude to the lewd." Ah, the 80s. But I digress.

 

The five top-selling hard drives in Macworld's Best Sellers list were all 20MB models, with the euphoniously named Apple Hard Disk 20 the top seller. It listed for $1,199, and while there were less-expensive 20MB drives to be found, there were also more-expensive ones. So I chose the Apple Hard Disk 20 as my benchmark drive.

 

A little Excel-wrangling then revealed the following FFtKaT (aka MS™):

 

> Each megabyte of storage on the Apple Hard Disk 20 cost $59.95.

> Each megabyte of storage on the Hitachi DeskStar cost around three-one-thousandths of a cent ($0.000336).

> That's a percentage improvement of about 17,852,789%.

 

If the price-per-square-foot that we paid for our home in December of 1986 changed at the same rate as did hard-drive prices in the past 20-plus years, we would have two choices today:

 

> Spend the same amount of money and get a house that was 166,923,574 square feet (about 1,855 football fields).

> Get the same-sized house, but pay only $1.12 for it.

 

What does this all prove? Simple: If we want to solve the downturn in the housing market, all we have to do is turn the problem over to hard-drive engineers.