Mac Book Pro Hard Disk Failure
Posted on 30 December 2006 in
review
mac
hardware
A sad day for me… My prized Mac Book Pro just died only 6 weeks after arriving. I powered it up the day after boxing day to hear the lovely noise a Mac makes when you power it up… Followed by a rather unusual noise… A noise I've heard before… A noise that brought back memories of data loss… anger… and regret that I hadn't backed up…
A picture of what my Apple Macbook looked like
A picture of the inside of a hard disk
…Except this time I HAD backed up. Fortunately I have lost very little. What I have lost is the entire laptop for 2 weeks while Apple replace the drive.
My concern is that this is the second time in 2 months that machine has written of a 100Gb Drive. When I ordered it, the order was delayed by over 4 weeks due to the 100Gb custom option hard disk failing and there being a back log of orders on them.
This leads me to believe that the fault isn't coincidence. One machine writing off two identical (in terms of brand and model) hard disks in 2 months? A little odd…
I mean its not like I ABUSE the laptop. Yeah, its gets pretty warm when playing the odd game on it, but I treat it with Kid-Gloves - I'm not going to abuse something that cost me the best part of 1 months salary!
Update
I just found a link on the net which could provide a possible answer to why the hard disk died…
How to save your MacBook Pro hard drive
Basically, on the old Mac's you shut the lid and it went to sleep - everything stopped spinning and pretty much turned off. On modern Mac Laptops - this doesn't happen. It effectively does what windows calls "Hibernate" where it does a memory dump from RAM to the Hard Disk BEFORE going to sleep. With 2Gb RAM, my Mac Book Pro would take a good few seconds to go to sleep while it RAM dumps to the hard disk. The reason for it doing this is in case the battery does or there is sudden power loss - it can restore its previous working state from the hard disk image.
Good idea - but I wonder if that's what happened to it the night before it died. I wonder if I sent it to sleep and moved it into the bag before it finished using the hard disk…
Oh - and that site says that the Sudden Motion Sensor has no effect in this situation. Not sure why - maybe its only enabled when the OS is fully awake?