Re-solidified (?)
Posted by enrico | Under Computers Wednesday Nov 7, 2007Since my last post was “Meltdown,” I guess that’s an apropos title, since everything is back up and running. The final diagnosis for the desktop: simple drive corruption. Thankfully, I don’t have to buy a new drive! I have no idea how it got corrupted, since as it was going south, I was in front of it doing nothing special, but I ran several utilities that stressed the hell out of the drive (writing 1s and 0s randomly in all sorts of patterns covering the disk multiple times) and nary an error was reported.
Unfortunately, I was not able to recover all the data. Between data recovery efforts and backups, I got more than 80-90% of everything, and I’d say that almost everything that was important (since I backup that stuff more often) is still with me. It was a classic case of diminishing returns: the first day of full-on effort yielded by far the most data, the second day a bit more stuff but at far greater time and effort, and by Day 3, I had to just chalk the remainder up as a loss. I had a HUGE project at work that required me to work almost all day this last Sunday (another reason I hadn’t updated), so I didn’t have oodles of time to burn with my system in lala land.
The laptop was obviously fine from the start after I wiped it clean since its problems were always more superficial and was a result of my being overcautious than anything. It was “home base” for everything and turned out to be a trooper. What was massively cool is that my MPB has an 80G drive–adequate but small by laptop standards nowadays. It has one Firewire port which was connected to my desktop, which has two physical internal drives. The freaking awesome cool thing I had never tried in target mode is hot-connecting more physical drives to the slave machine. In this case, I added two more external FW drives to the G5, so my wittle bitty Macbook now had 5 physical drives mounted for a total of 880G of total raw space at its disposal!! Mwahahaha!
Ok, enough geekery, I promise. I just wanted to post a quick update before the posts that are about to go up because I got some comments (thank you) and wanted to bring the minimelodrama full circle. 
What utilities did you use? and do you perfer Firewire or USB 2.0
Honestly, a lot of `fsck’ in single-user mode, having to specify alternate superblock information. I had both DiskWarrior and Data Rescue II (thanks BK) take a stab at the drive as well (booting from the CDs). DRII didn’t get to do it’s full job because it was taking too long. Even the documentation tells you that having it run for days is not uncommon. Sorry, can’t wait…
Firewire, even FW400 is vastly superior to USB2. USB2 approaches FW400 in raw total data, but it is nowhere near as robust or flexible. I can pull the FW cable from the drive in the middle of a copy, wait 5 seconds, and put it back, and the copy continues. That’s impressive. There’s a reason video cameras, for example, don’t xfer video over USB2. Start talking FW800, and you’re not even in the same league anymore, performance-wise. USB2 is cheaper, but it’s cheaper mainly because of sheer supply, not because FW is inherently more expensive. For general home and consumer needs, USB2 is more than adequate, but if you have the option for FW, you’ll notice the difference.
It all goes back to the very foundations of the technology. FW was designed to be an easier, more flexible replacement for early SCSI devices (high-throughput data transfer w/o having to assign device IDs, hotswappable, etc.); USB was a replacement for serial communications (input devices). Not even the same class.
I’ve always been more fond of firewire myself. Sometimes I wish USB 2.0 wasn’t so successful lol