Time to Replace a Hard Drive

The 3TB FW hard drive where I keep my Adobe Lightroom catalog (about 1TB of images) has started to act up. I noticed a significant slow down in LR to and couldn’t pin point it. As soon as I ran some checks using Disk Utility I saw this:

iMac_Photos_HD

I ran some tests in Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and the needle barely moved. The drive is not performing well.

Blackmagic_DiskSpeedTest

I’ll order a new hard drive. Recovery will be slow but as least I won’t lose any data.

Before I spend money on a new HD I thought it best to check out some reviews. I found an article on the web site of cloud backup vendor, Backblaze. They wrote an article with their Hard Drive Reliability Stats for Q1 2015.

Based on that article I narrowed my choices to the Seagate 4TB Desktop HDD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive and the HGST Deskstar 3TB 3.5-Inch 7200RPM SATA III 6Gbps 64 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive. HGST is owned by Western Digital. Both drives have similar performance specifications and failure rates and the cost/GB. To me that make the Seagate 4TB Desktop HDD SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive a better choice. Time to order.