Fujitsu hard drive problem

I just went out and bought a new fujitsu 80gig 2.5" drive to fit inside a “HI-TECH” slim firewire/usb2 case. I’m using this with various Mac’s and its formatted with HFS+ (Journaled). I’m having some weird problems with it and thought perhaps someone might have an answer or an opinion.

Whenever I do a write to the disk that involves a large number of files, copied in one session, as soon as it reaches the ~700meg point the drive starts to make a high up and down noise and eventually stops writing. I just finished copying the same 160meg file to disk a dozen times and no such error occurred. Any ideas? And if the drive is to go back, how to explain this problem to the all too reluctant sales girl at Nova?

As this is going to the future home to my mp3 collection etc. (couldn’t afford an iPod) it sure would be nice to think I could trust it.

Thanks.

It’s quite likely the drive has a spot of bad blocks. A good store will be able to test it out for you. If you have a PC around or know someone who does, Drive Fitness Test is a good program for doing low-level hard disk checks.

Link: Drive Fitness Test

Thanx. It has me stumped. I tried to reformat and many times it failed. On the last try I reformatted to MSDOS and it appears to be working fine. I would much prefer to use HFS+ but not sure if for some strange reason this format introduces problems for this hard drive. I’d like to just take it back as it cost me $7000NT but somehow I doubt they would allow for an exchange without a very good reason.

just put it in your microwave… turn on the microwave 2-3 seconds… repeat until you see a spark, now you have reason to return to the store

Actually most, if not all, of the stores in Nova have an excellent returns policy. Their policies all seem to be the same and are stuck up on the wall and/or printed on the receipt you got. I’ve taken several items back for various reasons and had no hassle what so ever. To the best of my knowledge the policy is;

Bring it back within 24 hours and you can get a cash refund
Within 7 days and they’ll cahnge it for something else
Within 30 days and they will repair it (need to check this one)

Last item I returned was a VGA card that in my opinion wasn’t as fast as the spec’s suggested, they had no problems with replaced in and specially ordered the one I wanted.

Be warned however that you MUST have the original printed receipt and they are strict on the timescale.

Are you sure the drive is at fault? I sold many firewire case, in a past life, and more often then not the the board in the case was at fault. Check with the manufacturer for a list of compatible drives.

Chou

kelake, I think having it have write problems is a good enough reason to return it. As chodofu said, it might be the firewire case that’s to blame, but I’d really want to find out what is the problem. Hard drives with problems tend to only get worse. You’ll be kicking yourself if it dies later with something important on it. At least have someone who can run a low level scan on it check it out for you before deciding to keep it.

And the reason why the MSDOS format worked is that FAT keeps all the directory information at the beginning of the disk, so only a small portion of the first part of the disk is written during a standard “quick” MSDOS format. Other filesystems distribute the directory across the disk, so they touch more parts of the disk. Most format utilities do not look at the whole disk block by block unless asked to. Best bet is to use a low-level scanning utility like Drive Fitness Test which does a variety of low-level tests to ensure your drive is good or not.

To check for bad blocks/sectors, Tech Tool Pro or Drive 10 will also do the job.

If you go to Fujitsu’s website, there is usually a tool that you can run to check the drive for bad sectors or physical damage…run this tool first before bringing the drive in…this is the best way to determine if the drive is defective