Western Digital My Passport Studio dead after a month

[Richard Dale]

 

I bought a 500 Gb 'My Passport Studio' on the 8th May, and just under a month later it has died. I hadn't done anything violent with it, and it had just sat on an equipment stand next to my MacBook for a month without being moved. I only bought my first computer DAC a couple of months ago, and by and large I feel my experiment has been a great success. But obviously completely losing about 360 CD rips and about 15 B&W Society of Sound downloads is a bit of a disaster.

 

 

 

I had been thinking about a backup strategy as I played with the new format and got the hang of ripping CDs with XLD or iTunes. I thought I would be quite likely to have some sort of disk failure over a 1-3 year time frame. What I wasn't expecting was to lose everything after only a month. I shouldn't have even bothered starting without assuming that hard disk reliability is a major consideration.

 

 

 

I actually want to use eSATA disks with a small Linux plug server, but they are hard to find in the shops where I live. You can have any sort of disk you want as long as it is USB 2.0. So although I saw plenty of nice disks I could have used for backup I didn't buy any. How dumb is that? I probably spent about a man week of my time, and have now lost everything for the want of 120 euros or so for a 1 Tb USB 2.0 backup.

 

 

 

Some of my LPs are 40 years old and still play fine and sound better than ever. Copying a CD to a 170 euro hard disk seems cheap until you consider how much you might have to pay to keep that CD backed up for the next 40 years in terms of time and money.

 

 

 

I've gone back to listening to my CD player for the first time in two months, and it doesn't sound bad. But my HRT Streamer II+ sounds better - the CD player (with a lesser interconnect) is a bit murky, less dynamic and doesn't image as well. But what I am not going to do, is to sell that CD player and stop relying on those plastic disks anytime soon after today's experience..

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi Richard - Sorry to hear about the bad luck.

 

I highly recommend using an external disk that contains hitachi or seagate drives. I've had great luck with both of these brands over the years, including home and enterprise models.

 

I'm willing to bet your 40 year old LPs have been stored in a very nice environment that enables them to last decades. The same can't be said for your hard drive based music :~(

 

Hopefully you'll get back up on the horse and have another go at it. Please let us know if we can help.

 

[wgscott]

Assuming you have the CDs, etc, at least you can replace the contents of the disk. Also you should be aware that there are outfits that specialize in disk failure recovery. It probably comes as no consolation that you can probably just re-download the B&W stuff. There don't seem to be any restrictions that I have found at least.

 

As far as backups go, you should have at least two:

 

1. Local, incremental backup system that is fully automatic. Apple's Time Machine does this. I find the hourly backups annoying, but with the free third-party Time Machine Editor, you can set it for daily backups (or fewer).

 

I don't do this with my music. I should.

 

2. A manual (or perhaps automated) backup in which you take the disk to a different physical location, and preferably put it in a fireproof safe. I strongly advise you do this with irreplaceable stuff like photos, critical documents, etc. I have a 1.5 TB My Passport Studio disk for this. I am now officially worried again.

 

[ldolse]

I'd recommend RAID for your primary storage, and then have a single disk as your backup. That way you're covered from both a single disk failure as well as a catastrophic failure.

 

I wouldn't use time machine or similar to back up audio - every time you change a tag you're going to have a seriously unmanageable amount of backup data. I'm not sure what you're using on Linux, but this is my setup:

 

- Network attached storage (Drobo/Airport extreme in my case)

- Linux music server running mpd

- iTunes on another Mac/PC for library management

 

The music server and iTunes point to the same music directory over the network. Tags are rarely perfect when I get data from downloads, ripping, etc, so I use iTunes to clean this up when new content gets added.

 

Finally I use a program called Chronosync(any backup util will do) to periodically sync/mirror my music directory to an external 3.5" hard disk. The key point is you want to do sync/mirroring, not incremental backups to prevent data duplication. That disk doubles as my library when I'm on the road in addition to backups.

 

[Audio_ELF]

Chris commented that he would use Seagate (or Hitachi drives) but my experience has been more problems with Seagate than with Western Digital - always just basic home drives. Just shows how different people have different experiences.

 

Someone's suggestion of Mirror'd pair for your main storage and using single drive for your backup (even better to have two backups) is a good one. If at all possible, move one of your backup's away from your home too.

 

Eloise

 

[ziggyzack]

Bad luck Richard

 

Some thoughts...

 

RAID is really there for high availability and performance.

 

High Availability: As you can probably survive being without music for an hour or two (a guestimate of how long it may take to replace a failed non-RAID drive with your backup (sorry!), do you really need the seamless failover provided by RAID? If you're taking your music out to DJ with professionally, for example, RAID's a good idea, but for home use?

 

Performance: Today's hard drives can sustain the data rates needed for HD video, and can sustain HD audio many times over, so for a single audio stream, there's no need to read from many drives at once. High demand systems utilise the extra throughput of RAID (as the interface from computer to drive can sustain higher throughput than can a single drive, so RAID squeezes many drives on the end of an interface).

 

Meanwhile, some questions I don't know the answer to, but would want answered before I bought into it: If a two-drive mirrored RAID array fails, but the drives are ok, can you take the drives out and plug them into a new RAID array? Would it have to be an identical model? What if it took one drive with it, would the other drive plug in alone to another RAID array and work? Would it be readable from a non-RAID controller? With a RAID 5 array, you may have 5 drives, striped and mirrored, so that if 1 drive failed, you replace it with another one and it rebuilds - but can you take those drives out and use them in another array?

 

My point is, while the appeal to sellers of promoting domestic RAID is obvious, there's a lot of complexity for little benefit, and the complexity could have a net negative effect (conjecture). This isn't against NASs, because you can run multiple drives as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks).

 

Off-site (office drawer, nearby family, the West Wing) backups are definitely the way to go, especially as big drives are cheap. I would use two as a minimum. One recommendation I have for NASs is that they should have an eSata port - this is very similar to the internal Sata interfaces, and promises the best throughput. Firewire is also pretty quick, USB can be slow (USB 3.0 promises a big improvement, but you need it on both ends). This is significant for manual backups because copying large amounts of data can take a considerable amount of time, and the more of a hassle it is, the less likely you are to maintain at least two backup copies.

 

I agree with the suggestions above regarding off-site backups, and by all means use RAID if you fancy it, but eyes open!

 

ZZ

 

edit: btw Richard, you can buy drive enclosures, cheaply, and then buy any hard disk you like. Pick an enclosure with an eSata interface, firewire, USB, or any combination - certainly an eSata + USB combo is easy to find online. Two enclosures, two hard drives, and then a manual backup of each every month or so. Or, more usefully, after you've put an amount of time into updating your music library that you want to protect. That maybe every few hours when doing your initial rips, and then again just after you've made some bulk changes to tagging, and then maybe not for a few months, if you've only added a few cds during that time.

 

[iamimdoc]

"Pick an enclosure with an eSata interface, firewire, USB, or any combination - certainly an eSata + USB combo is easy to find online."

 

I have used a product by Iocell (351 une) that lets you plug any sata drive into the the iocell box and use the drive as

 

a NAS device

or

 

USB

or

 

ESATA (I think).

 

I have 3 of them and they all have worked flawlessly without problems for 1 year

 

The price of them is very favorable compared to other NAS type devices and the ability to plug into any USB outlet makes transfers and backups very easy

 

 

 

[Duke Weber]

I've had to return so many dead Western Digital products that for a time I was on a first name basis with the RMA email people. Full size drives, small drives, NAS. It didn't matter. If it said WD on the box, it died young.

 

Never had a problem with Seagate, IBM, Hitachi or any other disk brand.

 

[I. G.]

Western Digital My Book external drives are fanless so the hard disks got more heat than in active cooled cases - the price of less noise. It may decrease the lifespan of these disks. I have a MyBook Studio 500GB that went dead after 6 months.

 

[Richard Dale]

 

I took my first dead My Passport Studio back to the shop and exchanged it for another one. I ripped about 130 CDs onto it, and today it has lost all the data. It isn't dead altogether, and I can still access the 'WD Smartware' that I don't want to use. But Disk Utilities can't repair the disk or retrieve anything from it:

 

 

 

 

Verifying volume “Music01”

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Invalid key length

Checking extents overflow file.

Checking catalog file.

Invalid record count

Invalid node structure

Invalid record count

The volume could not be verified completely.

Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.

Verify and Repair volume “Music01”

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Invalid key length

Checking extents overflow file.

Checking catalog file.

Invalid record count

Invalid node structure

Invalid record count

The volume could not be verified completely.

Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

 

 

 

 

When the first disk failed I was willing to give Western Digital the benefit of the doubt, and just post a note on this forum about my experience to see if anyone else had had similar problems. After two failures, I really think this thing is a total lemon.

 

 

[wgscott]

I bought one a month or so ago at Costco and backed up my music collection and put it in a firesafe, but then I read this and also got bored so I hooked it up to my mac mini in a home office (attached to some MM-1 speakers I am warming up to) and am now using it as my primary music library in my office. That should give it a workout.

 

If I would have to guess before looking, I would have thought audiophiles would be buying SSD for their external music libraries, for stability reasons, rather than (or in addition to) internal drives for the OS.

 

[Richard Dale]

 

It turned out that it was quite easy to repair my disk. I just needed to run this command from within a terminal:

 

 

 

 

$ fsck_hfs -rd /dev/disk2s3

 

 

..and all was well. I think Apple's Disk Utility just runs fsck which in turn runs fsck_hfs if it finds the disk is formatted as HFS+. However, that way it can't use the '-rd' option which was needed in my case.

 

 

 

So sorry for being rude about Western Digital when this seems to be more some kind of Mac OS X problem. How do superblocks get corrupted in normal use, and why doesn't the disk repair utility do something simple and obvious to fix things?

 

 

 

I've seen an IOMega USB powered 500 Gb disk in a sale for 80 euros yesterday, and I'm going to buy one of those and keep frequent backups of the Western Digital disk on that.

 

 

[wgscott]

The HFS+ filesystem is somewhat fragile. Something corrupted my MacBook Air filesystem (immediately after I tested "PureMuzak", sure hope it was a coincidence) and even though fsck reported no error, I was getting kernel I/O errors and it took forever to do anything. Finally after spending hours on this in despair I zeroed the whole hard drive and reinstalled 10.6, and it works fine. I was convinced the hard drive was borked, since I dropped the air on its edge on a cement surface a couple of months ago. But it is fine. It was clearly a filesystem problem.

 

The plan is to move to zfs, which is much more robust, but apparently there are glitches with the boot partition.

 

If you feel like playing around, try it on the external drive:

 

http://zfs.macosforge.org/

 

Edit: Apple shut it down over licensing issues. Dang.

 

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-mac-os-x-project-over-licensing-issues.ars

 

I don't think there is any particular reason a music library has to be on an HFS+ formatted disk. You might want to try the flat UFS format.