When the drive starts clicking…start with the kicking
Ok, it’s not quite true but this morning when I turned on the TV to get my dose of fantasy financial advice from CNBC I was greeted by a disappointing message from our Tivo.
I didn’t take a screen shot, the gist of the message was “This tivo was configured with an external drive which is no longer present. Presss Clear if you want to continue.”
I’d learned from a previous experience that once you press clear you’re hosed, there’s no recovery of the external drive.
So I unplugged the Tivo (which is the recommended way to reboot it). And still no joy. I unplugged the drive (a Seagate 1Tb FreeAgent drive) and plugged it in and heard the distinct sound of …
the click of death.
I remembered this sound from the heady days of my youth at IBM. Certain IBM drives would get stuck, generally on reboot or when the system was powered down. This happened once (“once”) to one of the drives backing www.ibm.com in 1995.
The recommended solution then? Firmly drop the drive on a solid surface.
So, I thought back to that experience, unplugged everything, allowed the Seagate to spin down, picked it up gently, and then firmly slapped both sides of it (it’s a vertically mounted drive).
Plugged everything back in and …voila, the whole thing works again.
I take this as a temporary reprieve. Tivo cautions you that any drive other than the approved Western Digital DVR extender drive has not endured the boot camp wilderness training required to support a Tivo. This Seagate FreeAgent has been on almost constantly since 2007, almost precisely two years. I don’t think that’s too bad, though I would have appreciated some notice from somewhere that the drive was about to go bad.
This is the third drive to fail on me in the past month. All three were bought in the last two years and have had little or no turmoil (haven’t been moved much if at all, not dusty, with the exception of the Tivo probably only a couple of hours use per day). I’m not sure if that means we’re cursed or if drive quality has gone down as capacity has increased or what.
And the problem with the increased sizes is the increased amount of data we end up carting around, it makes it harder to backup (I don’t back up these drives any more, I just configure larger and larger RAID arrays).
Of course, as with the last failure, this occurs the day I’m leaving on a trip. I do plan to get a drobo once we return but that would not solve this problem with the Tivo.
