S.M.A.R.T. Status : Failing

V

Vince

Registered
Tiger's Disk Utility app says that my PowerMac G4's internal 40GB harddrive has 'S.M.A.R.T. Status : Failing'.

I have a very large external firewire drive and was wondering if it would be okay to just use that as my boot volume.

Is there any downside to not having a working internal harddrive?

When the drive does eventually fail, will it cause any problems staying installed ?
 
1) Your drive will almost certainly fail catastrophically at some point so back up your data NOW!!!!

2) Depending on whether or not your PowerMac has an AGP slot you may be able to boot via firewire (if it has an AGP slot you're in luck, if it hasn't then you're not). It should be fine to use this drive as long as the drive's fairly modern and fast.

3) There is no real downside in usage terms to not having an internal HDD. I mean, external drives are easier to steal but that's about it.

4)I'd recommend that you pull all the cable from the back of the drive (it's not hard, just turn your machine off, open the door and pull the leads out) when you're not using it. If it works intermittently it could cause problems so I'd rip it out and bin it but as long as it's not connected once it's dead then it should be cool.
 
ziess said:
1) Your drive will almost certainly fail catastrophically at some point so back up your data NOW!!!!
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I'd agree with the need to backup and replace this drive as your boot volume, and the sooner the better. Strangely, though, my wife's old Sony laptop had SMART drive warnings for two years without any loss of data or visible failure. I'm not sure this was a 'false posititive' since I'd say that hardware failures happen with varying degrees and speeds. Given another 10 years, perhaps the drive would have finally given up the ghost. Personally, I'd rather be safe than sorry.

ziess said:
4)I'd recommend that you pull all the cable from the back of the drive (it's not hard, just turn your machine off, open the door and pull the leads out) when you're not using it. If it works intermittently it could cause problems so I'd rip it out and bin it but as long as it's not connected once it's dead then it should be cool.
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I have almost no exerience working with Mac hardware, but I've torn apart plenty of other computers. Personally, as long as the case were open, I'd pull the drive out and replace it -- I know that Firewire is fast, but it is so much faster mounting a drive on the motherboard. Then I'd put the faulty drive into a external USB drive casing and access without having to crack the case each time. Vince, it all comes down to how much experience you have (or want) working in the guts of a computer.
 
Much faster than firewire? In most cases FW400 is more than fast enough to cope with the max transfer rate of any HD. The guy's already got a FW HD so it's no great drama to use that over an internal HD.
Why make life complicated? All this talk of Sony Viaos is making me shudder!

Edit: PowerMacs are also sooooo easy to work inside. If God layed out computer guts....this is how they would be.
 
ziess said:
Much faster than firewire? In most cases FW400 is more than fast enough to cope with the max transfer rate of any HD.
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What now who there? Please correct me if I am wrong, but Firewire 400's maximum rated speed is 400Mb/s, or 50 MB/s. Parallel ATA sits at at least twice that speed (an ATA-133 drive should pump out at least 133 MB/s). Also, I have read a lot of things about Firewire not performing as rated in real life (specifically, FW400 petering out at only 35 MB/s). So unless I am really wrong, I don't see it coming even close.
 
The issue isn't the speed of the bus. Undoubtedly an ATA 133 bus is faster than firewire. But that doesn't mean that the drives are any faster.
At present most decent drives top out at around 35-40Mbp per second so whether it's ATA or firewire, the speed of the drive is the determining factor.
In effect bus speed does not = actual speed.
 
That would depend on what is on the drives (seek times and fragmentation), how they are being used (heavy r/w or read only) and what else the computer is doing at the time (bus use and CPU load). I would agree that it would probably be hard to tell Firewire 400 from ATA-100 when used as the main OS drive during heavy multi-threaded use. But that's not to say that "FW400 is more than fast enough to cope with the max transfer rate of any HD". The max transfer rate of an ATA-100 slave is 100 MB/s. That's why it's called ATA-100 and not ATA-133 or ATA-66. A user doing a sustained read on an idle channel will feel it if the max throughput is less than 50MB/s.
 
I agree with you fully there but I looked into this quite deeply before getting a drive for my music recording and the differences between FW400 and ATA drives of the same calibre are negligible in performance terms. Pretty much nothing pushes your average HD harder than multi track audio recording and simulataneous playback (except maybe DV editing) and for 7,200rpm drives the performance is near identical for ATA and FW400.
But yeah you'd be right to say that a lot of that depends on what's happening on the computer at the time.
 
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