Hard Drive Fever
Tisdale - Tuesday August 6, 2013
by:Timothy W. Shire
Regular visitors to this web site will have noticed that on Friday I left a note on the front page that said the stories would be posted Saturday. Well, that didn’t happen, nor did I get anything posted on Sunday, or Monday.
For some time, I have been experiencing mysterious problems with my Mini Mac computer. It just keeps falling on its face, crashing and doing it with remarkable regularity, with about four or five applications, all of which are essential to creating Ensign. I consulted with my technological magic men ( my sons ) and they drew a blank. The problems I have been having look very much like some kind of idiot is using my computer. Since only I use my computer things were looking pretty bad for me.
One night, a week ago, in the midst of the traumatic crashes, Andrew suggest we just scrap the software I am using and try out Google’s quite remarkable “Picasa” to organise the images for the picture stories. Seeming like an idea worth trying and I installed it and it went to work picking up the sixty-thousand pictures on my machine. After two days of it toiling away it crashed, so badly in fact it refused to start up.
To get Ensign posted, I put two computers to work, one looking after the pictures and the other the web creation software. This worked all right but my mini kept on crashing. The thing is, Macintosh computers don’t do this sort of thing and we were all confused.
Matthew, who is a certified computer repair technician had considered the issues involved and yesterday came up with the diagnosis.
My mini is one of the early versions and with each subsequent upgrade of software it was keeping up, but just barely. The latest version of the Mac OS is called Mountain Lion and it’s 10.8.4 variant simply pushed this little mini to its limit and it was not working well. In response, I doubled it’s operating memory, actually had to do that twice because of compatibility issues, but the hard drive I had installed some time ago was only 500 Gb and it was close to full, so I ordered up a new 750 Gb hybrid drive and we installed that.
It was yesterday that Matthew figured out the problem. The mysterious crashes I have been having, all related to applications that require large collections of thumbnails and connecting those images with the originals and variations. iPhoto, Aperture and Picasa, all have this structure and all were inoperative on my machine. The problem is the hard drive. The new hybrid drive is about to fail and these crashes are the early signs of failure.
So yesterday, I hooked up the drive which we had removed to installed the new hybrid and I am running it external on a USB connection. It is working and I am now putting this week’s issue of Ensign together.
Hard drives are mechanical and complex electronic devices, made as cheaply as possible and sometimes they die. It can be a slow death, as I am seeing with this one, or like Andrew’s server drive two weeks ago, with a huge amount of vital commercial data, it catastrophically failed taking its data with it.
The solution is not really all that viable. We can back up and rely more heavily on the “cloud,” but doing that, severely restricts mobile computing, where internet service is not so good. The other alternative is the very expensive solid state hard drives, which are now common place in Mac laptops, but they depend very heavily on being backed up onto a server, or conventional hard drive, so good luck.
Since hard drives fail, back ups and external drives will keep us all moving along. Such is the state of computers today. To make matters worse, applications and operating systems rely so heavily upon truly massive amounts of storage. It really seems like there is always a need for more storage, no matter how many terabytes you have available.