On September 6th, 2013 my 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 SATA SSD stopped working properly. This is an account of what happened and the lessons I learned along the way.
After a long video render I came back to my computer to see a blank screen. As usually, to get out of my computer’s power saving mode I type a few keystrokes like shift or spacebar. This did nothing so I started to tap my trackpad and hit more keys. I soon realized something was wrong so I did a hard shutdown on my Mac and turned it back on . This lead to a very long boot and some scary error messages telling me to restart my computer again.
After a couple of hours of trying to revive my system I gave up and decided it was time to re-format my hard drive and call on my Time Machine backup for help. I didn’t want to take any chances with my faulty drive so I bought a new one. This time I went with an Intel 520 Series SSD.
I have a huge 6 TB Time Machine backup on a Drobo FS which uses a 1 gigabit network line to connect to my computer. When I went to restore my system from this NAS device, my Mac couldn’t find it because of how the Drobo is connected to my computer. Time Machine likes direct connections like USB, Firewire and Thunderbolt, not network drives.
In the end what fixed everything was installing a fresh new OS and using “Migration Assistant” to transfer my user account from my Drobo Time Machine backup. This surprisingly created an account that looked exactly like my pre-crashed computer. I was very happy to see everything back to normal and I just had to spend a few hours setting up some things that didn’t migrate correctly like my my Adobe Creative Cloud apps and DropBox.
Here are the lessons that I learned:
- Keep an up to date backup of your Mac via Time Machine. I thankfully had one that was only a few days old so I didn’t loose anything important.
- Keep all your data on a separate hard drive from your system drive. The only thing on your system drive should be your operating system and your applications. I keep all my work, documents, media and renders on separate drives from my system. That way if your system drive fails (like mine did) you don’t have to worry about all your data getting deleted.
- When using Time Machine, use one drive for your data and another drive for your system.
- Use drives with fast connections like USB3 and Thunderbolt for your Time Machine backups.
- Something I wished I had was an up to date clone of my hard drive. This would have been really nice because I could have cloned this backup copy straight to my new Intel SSD. The cloned hard drive I had on hand was six months old and has only helping for diagnosing the problem.
- If at all possible have a copy of your OS install software on a fast USB drive. I had one for OS X Lion (my current operating system) and it made reformatting my hard drive and installing a new OS quick and easy.
Here are some key commands that I found helpful when trying to fix my Mac computer. These keys are first held down right when you turn on your computer and kept held down until you see a spinning wheel or prompt screen.
- Press C during startup : Start up from a bootable CD, DVD, or USB thumb drive (such as OS X install media)
- Press D during startup : Start up in Apple Hardware Test
- Press Option-Command-P-R until you hear startup sound a second time : Reset NVRAM
- Press Option during startup : Start up in Startup Manager, where you can select an OS X volume or network volume to start from
- Press Eject, F12, or hold the mouse or trackpad button : Ejects any removable media, such as an optical disc
- Press Shift during startup : Start up in Safe Boot mode and temporarily disable login items.
- Press Command-R during startup : Start from OS X Recovery System