The Apple Thread - The Bear and Badger

tin_robot

Speaking of HDD's mine is completely borked.Â The iMac was running a little slow the other morning, then completely failed to boot up.Â Just got the spinning circle for eternity, even in safe mode.Â Disk Utility shows irreperable Hard Drive failure.Â Bugger.Â (Am luckily backed up onto Time Capsule, so let's hope that doesn't fall over whilst I wait for a new HDD...)

@Blue - assume you've run disk utility and checked/repaired the HDD status?

Blue Swirl

Not yet, I'll do that as soon as I have a minute. Cheers!

Turtle o Wurtle

My mac is running really slow. I have a 750 gig HDD with 135 gig available. Surely that's enough free space for caching or whatever? It's always spinning that fucking beach ball thing and going bzzzt bzzzzt bzzzt. Takes ages to close programs too.

imac 2.8ghz core 2 duo 4BG RAM

Mod74

I realise problems get highly concentrated in this thread but Mac HDDs have a penchant for going tits up huh.

Turtle o Wurtle

I've had three mac HDD's fail on me over the years. They're shite.

[Deleted User]

Turtle o Wurtle wrote:

I've had three mac HDD's fail on me over the years. They're shite.

Never had one fail in 6 years of using a MAC, must be lucky I guess

Turtle o Wurtle

I'm a POWA USER.

AJ

Turtle o Wurtle wrote:

I'm a POWA USER.

Yeah, there's your problem.Â Macs aren't meant to be used for anything serious any more, they just can't handle it; we're always getting those damned beach balls at work.

Funkstain

Hang on. An HDD is an HDD, pretty much. You've probably got a Seagate or Western Digital or whatever in your iMac. Surely the failure rates are consistent across any OS or set-up?

I haven't seen a beach ball since I upgraded my RAM to 8GB and HDD to an SSD for my 2008 macbook. Butter.

tin_robot

This is my first Mac HD to go belly up.Â Irritatingly both the iMacs I owned previously, and the two Apple laptops I posessed, all of which were donated to various worthy homes, are still going strong (one of which is a late-90s job.)Â Maybe it's just new iMac HDDs that are shit?

pantyfire

I suspect you will find the increased instances of HD death and the drop in prices of HD's plus the jump in GB'age per enclosure tally quite nicely.
And yes, they are Samsung or Seagate/Western Digital etc... in the apple stuff so you cant directly blame apple.
I went looking for a very reliable external HD a year or so back and I read tonnes of reviews online for all makes and they where all about the same, you get lucky and one lasts you years and you get a friday afternoon job that breaks 2 months out the box.

Turtle o Wurtle

Yup HDD's internal or external are a complete lottery in my experience, regardless of brand.

Funkstain

Scary shit. *goes to back up everything 3-2-1 stylee*

Mod74

Funkstain wrote:

Hang on. An HDD is an HDD, pretty much. You've probably got a Seagate or Western Digital or whatever in your iMac. Surely the failure rates are consistent across any OS or set-up?

That doesn't mean every drive WD, say, make is as reliable as every other model they do.

I don't suppose it's anything Apple do that causes them to go bonk, more the fact they'll place massive orders and shove the same HDD in (more or less) every machine they make, so if one of them turns out to be a bit pony or badly designed down the line all the faults are concentrated into one brand instead of being spread across half a dozen brands with 100s of models.

Blue Swirl

I've had problems with HDDs before because apparently some hardware manufacturers assume that the drive will end up in a Windows box, and this causes issues when it ends up in Macs or GNU/Linux boxes. Not sure how true this is but it sounds reasonable.

My old iBook G3 was solid as a rock, but my current MacBook Pro is always coming up with new little issues. Nothing too bad, the occasional Force Quit or something, but it's often enough that I'm wondering what I paid the extra cash for from time to time.

Turtle o Wurtle

How can the data that's put on a drive make it fail, or not?

Blue Swirl

No idea. That's why I'm not sure it's true, but it could be. I'm not an expert on how HDDs work.

Blue Swirl

tin_robot wrote:

@Blue - assume you've run disk utility and checked/repaired the HDD status?

I've verified the disc (well, the Mac partition) and it seems to be OK. Am verifying permissions as I write this. It's said six minutes estimated time for about the last 10. May have stumbled onto the problem.

Blue Swirl

Yup, lots of permission mis-matches. Fixing those. Hopefully that'll stop the occasional lock-ups/beach balls of doom.

Elmlea

Turtle o Wurtle wrote:

How can the data that's put on a drive make it fail, or not?

I thought it was more to do with how different OSs choose to address and access the drive, not just what data's stored there.

Blue Swirl

Elmlea wrote:

I thought it was more to do with how different OSs choose to address and access the drive, not just what data's stored there.

Aye, this sounds reasonable. EDIT: I remember it being something about how Windows and Mac differ on how they handle time between reading data. When you had a Windows-specific HDD in a Mac, it'd end up putting the needle right back to the start far more often than it should do. I'm probably making no sense...

Since repairing permissions things have been running much smoother. Still early days, but I'm glad that so far it seems to be software rather than hardware.

AJ

Quick Look has stopped working on both my (10.6) Macs, anyone one else having that problem or got any possible solutions to offer?

adkm1979

adkmette's dad's iPad Camera Roll has gone a little bit weird. Â Anyone seen this before?

igorgetmeabrain

Yeah, looks a little like a Mondrian.
A system restore might take care of that though?

adkm1979

I assumed he'd done the basic steps, but I'll maybe try things next time I'm around.

AJ

iPhone Chrome is well good.Â Embarrassingly so for Apple; it shits on Safari from quite a height.

Mod74

Doesn't particularly matter when clicking a link anywhere in the OS will always take you to Safari.

AJ

I know, fucking annoying that, it's the only reason I still use Safari as my main browser.Â Even disabling it in the settings doesn't give you the option to open links in something else.

AJ

Not sure how Google got it through the "must not duplicate functionality" rule for the app store, either.

adkm1979

What's so good about it, then?

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