That moment when you think your Lightroom storage hard drive has failed.......

[rob-nikon]

So I started up my Mac this evening and everything seemed fine until I tried to open Lightroom. It was taking longer than normal so I check the Lightroom icon and it had 'not responding' listed when 'right clicking' on it. I closed Lightroom and restarted it. This time it opened by was blank. My catalogue hadn't loaded up. I chose the catalogue manually and it opened but the folder list was greyed out. I'd already noticed my G Tech drive hard had an unusual intermittent clicking noise but both hard drive Lightroom icons were up so I thought nothing of it. I had a quick look in them and whilst I could see the folders there was nothing inside the folders. I closed Lightroom then tried to eject the G Tech hard drive. It wasn't ejecting so I had to do a hard eject by turning off the power. I know that's bad of me but it wasn't ejecting and just hung there doing nothing. On restart of the G Tech drive everything was fine, the clicking noise was gone and Lightroom opened up fine.

Now this had me worried not because I could have lost my Lightroom catalogue and RAW files, but because I thought I'd need to buy a new drive! I have enough backups with two back up copies onsite and another off site but it still makes you slightly apprehensive because there is that thought its failed and you've lost the data on the hard drive. I guess its a good remind for anyone that hard drives will fail at some point, and if you don't have back ups to sort that out and for people with back ups to make sure your back ups would actually work ok.

Now the question is was this just a poor start up and everything should now be fine or is the hard drive potentially on the way out?

 

[Pound Coin]

It's not advised anymore, I think, but cooling the drive as you take data off it helps. One reason behind the failure can be overheating. The advice used to be to put the drive in the freezer, but in my experience it warms up, and gets damp.

I've successfully got data off a failing drive by putting freezer blocks on top of it(a tea towel between the block and the disk housing) as I copied it. As it took several days, I had a sequence of them refreezing as necessary.

 

[rob-nikon]

Thanks for the replies. I will start to look at options for replacing it. I have automatic back ups so I’m not worried about transferring the data over if it does fail.

So far options to replace it like for like seem limited. It’s a G Tech Pro 2TB thunderbolt 480MB/s drive. I think it’s 4 separate 7200rpm in a raid configuration to give the 480MB/s transfer speed. It’s the older thunderbolt connection so they aren’t available anymore.

Potentially I could look at a 1TB portable SSD for the lightroom catalogue and the last couple of years RAW files and more the other RAWS to the Mac slower internal drive.

 

[rob-nikon]

I’ve had a look around, I think my best cost effective solution will be a 2.5 inch SSD in a USB caddy.

I’ve been thinking of upgrading my Mac and I was considering a PC again. The failure of this hard drive has highlighted the problem where a hard drive can’t easily be replaced. A PC may not be as nice looking as a Mac but at least it uses standard parts that are cheaper and easier to replace yourself when you need to. I could also reuse the 2.5 inch SSD in a PC in the future to hold the working lightroom files.

 

[LongLensPhotography]

Sometimes there is a problems with x.lrcat.lock files if the app didn't close properly last time. Just delete it if present and try again. Just another thing to keep in mind.

Thanks for the replies. I will start to look at options for replacing it. I have automatic back ups so I’m not worried about transferring the data over if it does fail.

So far options to replace it like for like seem limited. It’s a G Tech Pro 2TB thunderbolt 480MB/s drive. I think it’s 4 separate 7200rpm in a raid configuration to give the 480MB/s transfer speed. It’s the older thunderbolt connection so they aren’t available anymore.

Potentially I could look at a 1TB portable SSD for the lightroom catalogue and the last couple of years RAW files and more the other RAWS to the Mac slower internal drive.

Yes, I would get some sort of SSD, maybe even a less fancy one for cats and current files and keep moving everything to archival snail HDDs once you are done with them.

There seems to be a big difference in speed importing and even editing some files from ext SSD over HDD. I only bough 240GB one to experiment and I wish I had gone for a bigger one.

P.S. That 2tb drive sounds like it's optimised for speed and will be at least 4X more prone to failure. Also 4TB is nothing these days when a single PSD file is likely 3-600MB and even 50mpix raw files is probably a 100MB. I've got nearly 6TB full from my edited 5D3 files.