So that hard drive swap? The story got worse.

After the long weekend of swapping and getting back up to speed, I finally go back to work. Close the lid on the MacBookPro, lift it to put it into my bag… and there’s this buzzing noise coming from the hard drive. It sounded like a lightsaber (best way to describe it).

That can’t be good.

I contacted Other World Computing about it. It only makes the sound when on… doesn’t have to be going to sleep, could be lid open and in the middle of doing whatever, pick up the machine and tilt it (not even a quick tilt, just gently) and noise. So it’s not say a loose bracket or something. They opt to send me a replacement. I got the replacement just before this past weekend, and just time.

See, all the week while I had the new drive in, I had strange crashes. Some background daemon would crash, or Xcode would crash in a non-normal way (yeah, Xcode 5.0.2 crashes on me, but the crashes seem to be fairly deterministic and reliable — these new crashes were out of character).

Made worse? All day Friday while at home (the great Austin Ice Storm of 2014!) I kernel panicked 3 times. Well, more than that, but after the 3rd one I figured it was time to stop work for the day and investigate. All my crashing and panicking was coming out of processes like mds and backupd, which starts to point to disk i/o. Hrm.

So I swap in the new drive (so we have “original drive”, “replacement drive 1” and now “replacement drive 2”. I put replacement 2 in, and start the process again of restoring things. Hrm. Long story short, first restore attempts fails for some unknown reason. Try again, and it appears to have succeeded but didn’t, because reboot and while booting it panics again (couldn’t find ‘init’. That’s bad). So again I go around and around. Yeah, it starts to panic again.

And I tried tilting the machine. Sure enough, replacement 2 makes the same vibration lightsaber noise.

Well crap.

It’s unlikely to have 2 faulty drives in a row, possible, but unlikely. What gives?

I did a bunch more experimentation. After talking it over with my buddy W, it came down to a simple thing: time vs. money. To try to further diagnose this problem would require a lot of time, perhaps a week or two without the machine. I cannot afford that. If it was just for email and Facebook, whatever. But as a developer, the machine is vital to my daily existence. Time is more critical here.

So….

I am now the proud owner of a MacBookPro11,3 — the 15″ retina model. 🙂 And the big model too, because these machines can’t really be modified or upgraded after the fact, and 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB drive space matters given what I do in a day.

No, I’m not happy to have suddenly dropped 3-grand (and yes, I got AppleCare — always do), but I’m thankful that I could.

So I’ve used Migration Assistant and things seem to be getting back to normal.

As for the other machine….

While doing some of this restore work, I had put their “replacement 1” into an external case (see their DIY upgrade kit). On a whim I tried it… I just tilted the naked drive. Sure enough, it vibrated. I’ve been in communication with OWC’s tech support, and just sent them a follow-up with a little video of the vibration noise. We’ll see what they say.

I was convinced the old MacBookPro was dying a hardware death somewhere, but now I’m not so convinced. Nothing I can do about it now… I guess it just means the kids get a nice MacBookPro for school. But we’ll see how everything shakes out in the end.

The story continues…. but I just hope that I’m nearing the end of it, at least the major headache portions.