Macworld USA – August 2019

(vip2019) #1
AUGUST 2019 MACWORLD 117

replacement
adapter if it thinks
that’s the problem.



  1. The drive’s
    case is going bad
    This is another
    hard thing to
    diagnose separate
    from the drive. A
    drive has its own
    operating system,
    circuit boards, and
    chips, but a case
    also has
    components, firmware, and a power
    supply (unless it’s powered via the USB or
    Thunderbolt 3 bus). If you think the drive is
    fine and the case is a problem, you may
    be able to swap the drive into another
    case to test. Cases for 2.5-inch (mobile)
    and 3.5-inch (desktop) drives can be very
    inexpensive—as little as $10 to $20.

  2. The drive is failing
    Often, there are signs ahead of time that
    something’s going wrong, and modern
    drives record diagnostic problems to an
    internal log. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t
    have a tool that provides easy and direct
    access or evaluation. I recenlty posted a
    review (go.macworld.com/drev) of DriveDx
    from Binary Fruit (go.macworld.com/drve),
    and it helped me diagnose not one, but


two external drive failures in time to rescue
data. One of the drives had corrupted files
and macOS would freeze when trying to
access those. But the other, seemingly a
little better off, began to unmount itself
suddenly. I had to replace both.


  1. The computer’s peripheral bus
    is failing
    While this seems unlikely, you can read
    about how I discovered this problem with
    a Mac mini a few years ago (go.macworld.
    com/evry), which led to enormous
    amounts of wasted time and massive
    data-recovery efforts.
    My best advice? Don’t put off
    troubleshooting mysterious unmountings,
    because either something’s already wrong
    or about to get worse.


DriveDX helped me diagnose external drive failures.
Free download pdf