Thread: Hard drive overheating

my poor terrabyte rugged hard drive is overheating at a phenomenal rate.
I recently noticed whilst editing using it, it kept stuttering and crashing my computer or editing software.
When working on other drives, everything is fine..

This appears to be a sign of imminent death for this drive :/
I'm now backing all my files on it up, at a cost of having to loose original footage from past projects.

Anyone else had the same trouble?

You checked the fan is working?

the fan on my mac? Thats all fine. I do tend to push it quite hard but its working fine with everything else.

The drive however (its external, should have mentioned that) has had a habit of disconnecting for no reason no matter which leads I use and it has progressively worsened to this situation.
I've updated all my mac firmware and tidied everything up in general so the comp is fine, the only time I have any trouble is working on projects using this drive :(
Its still under warranty, so going back as soon as I'm sure everything is double backed up elsewhere.

This makes me wonder whether it's possible to cool the drive with a fan in some way, maybe cut a hole in the casing and fix a fan to it, not a good idea if still under guarantee of course.

its a lacie rugged drive, I wouldn't know where to begin, its all so compact :p

Sounds like a dud....send it back to em, Get a replacement.

Yep, it's a dud . . . . but the real issue is how to get that data off.
If you want to claim under warranty don't mess it about - you'll be blamed!

You could try putting it in a refrigerator for a hour (say) at near zero (where you store milk) in a plastic bag, as this should help extend the heating-up time.

Try to plan for the eventuality that the drive fails - it could corrupt yr PC as well - make sure you have some back-ups that aren't connected when this drive is about, even if not reading/writing.

Not clear what you mean about leads - they need to be plugged-in correctly, without strain which can encourage them to jump out. But I'm wondering if the leads are correct?

What is it that makes this "Rugged" as opposed to any normal drive?

I used my partners mac book with older FireWire 400 which forced the data transfer to run slower which meant it didn't overheat. So luckily the data is safe.
I dont trust it to work for much longer on his mac either but at least I spotted it early enough to save everything.

Leads / cables were always plugged in correctly, however as the drive kept unplugging itself (digitally, not physically) I assumed the actual leads /cables were faulty. Obviously this turned out not to be the case.

The rugged drives are bus powered portable drives, very compact with rubberised buffer on the outside to lessen impact of it getting dropped or bashed about

Thanks fuzzymuffin - not familiar with terms that mean two things. I guess the Computer recognised a bad drive before it overheated and was removing it so it couldn't cause corruption.

I thought as much, but rubberising the case isn't the whole answer, IMHO.


Glad to read you've extracted all the data . . .

When you're sure, you should delete the drive's data by overwriting a pattern, so your stuff cannot find its way onto . . . .
A (?) good use for an old PC that serves only as experimental back-up

Originally Posted by vidmanners

You could try putting it in a refrigerator for a hour (say) at near zero (where you store milk) in a plastic bag, as this should help extend the heating-up time.

?

not the best advice!