Hi Everyone,

Hope this is a suitable sub-forum for an external hard drive question!

I have 2 x LaCie d2 500GB eSATA-II 3Gbits External Hard Drive's connected to a Mac Pro. They have had flawless performance for over a year. Until yesterday....

I have these drives set to go to sleep when not in use. Every now and again they power up and spin up. One of the drives kicked-in and I could hear the disc spinning. I could then hear a very faint grinding. Very faint....but definitely a grind.

I turned the disc on and off again. It loaded fine.

Today i load my computer up and the hard drive attemps to spin. It doesn't grind, but it doesn't get past a low speed attempt to boot up. It repeats this until i shut it off again.

Is this a terrible sign? There are about 40gb worth of project not backed up and i'm beginning to get the fear.

Thanks for any advice.

Cheers,
Neil

Panic over!

I'll post my fix just for anybody else's reference. It turns out the power supply to the drive is faulty...not sending enough juice to spin the disc fast enough. Swapped power supply over and it works fine!

LaCie - External Hard Drives, DVD±RW Drives, Monitors (http://www.lacie.com/support/faq/faq.htm?faqid=10159)

This has been a very common problem for us and our LaCie drives. We've had at least 4 power supplies replaced by LaCie (free of charge). It's sure scary when it happens, but then relief when everything is good again.

There are about 40gb worth of project not backed up and i'm beginning to get the fear.

Now that it's working again, make your backups immediately and dread nought.