you might say to yourself, “yes, that’s definitely busted up. I can tell by all the fsck failures, and how sometimes it’ll spin up and down a bunch of times all anxious-like, right before a nasty kernel panic.”
perhaps you look into it, carefully examining logs, and suspect that this is probably related to time machine backups (which is the exclusive use of this disk, and which surely does involve a lot of disk activity), and think you can be clever by simply turning off Time Machine and unmounting this volume to work around those unsightly panics. but no. no, I say.
Any time I had to reboot, I would always make sure to unmount this volume immediately. With it unmounted, I reasoned, the disk should just sit there unused… defective, but dormant.
This is wrong. I would still hear this disk spin up and down followed by kernel panics. The volume was not actually being mounted, according to the kernel… so who knows what was making it spin up and down. Something.
So, when your seagate 1.5 TB hard drive begins to fail: take the 3 minutes to shut down and disconnect it from your computer.
