Wide World of Women

A week ago I finally got around to buying an external hard drive, a SimpleTech 320GB SimpleDrive, with a cool dark royal blue color and a USB 2.0 connection. I'll connect it and power it up, and the ring sections on top will light up for a second then go out, and there's no noise of moving drives inside the unit. I've been using it just fine for several days until a little while ago where it won't mount on my MacBook's desktop. I haven't abused the drive in any way, but the only thing that might've done something was that I was curious to see if the drive would mount automatically if I powered and connected it to the MacBook before booting up the laptop. The drive didn't mount and it hasn't mounted in following attempts on both my MacBook and iMac.

I hope I didn't kill it already.
Most of the stuff I dumped on there was already on CD-R's, but if the drive is truly dead, then I just lost all the shopping babe caps that I downloaded in 2007.

I seriously doubt it's dead in such short time. It's got a be some issue, and I wish I knew more about Macs to help you. Check to see if the drive came with any utilities that it installed. You might be able to find them online if you can't get into the drive at all. It might just be a simple drive setting.

Also you might want to google search the model number because you're probably not the only one to have the problem.

I'm kinda suspecting it could be a bad power supply. Like I said, the indicator lights flash for a second, then nothing. The power LED in the back remains on, but there's no noticeable activity in the drive (in that I can't hear anything buzzing in there like before). I did find a review on Best Buy's website from a person who looks like he had a similar problem, and their tech support offered him a replacement power supply for free. I am currently in e-mail exchange with SimpleTech's support team, maybe I can hint at that.

If that doesn't work, I believe my receipt is good for 30 days after purchase for an exchange, and I'm kinda mentally preparing myself to go through the shopping forums to find all the 2007 caps that I want. That could take a long time.

Use disk utility to check the drive - try mounting it with that - try verifying it too. Then take it back to best buy - I only buy LaCie external drives

I have tried Disk Utility to find the drive, but it doesn't appear in the side pane, only the internal HD. It did appear there previously, as I had to use it to reformat the drive for full Mac privileges (the default Windoze format is read-only for Macs).

This is the same advice I got from SimpleTech's tech support, incidentally. I'm still kinda thinking the power supply might be bad. I've now been seeing mixed reviews for these drives now, I only got this because it was marked down and I had a 12% off coupon. Shoot, it's gonna take a while to go through all those shopping posts.

Problem solved!

I did indeed have a bad power supply. There's a SimpleTech external HD at work and I borrowed it's supply to test it out. Plugged it in, turned it on, and sure enough my drive mounted like normal on my MacBook. And the latest e-mail from their tech support offered to send me a new power supply, which I gladly accepted.

I then used my break time to copy all the files that I hadn't previously archived on CD or DVD back to my laptop's hard drive for that purpose. Luckily, I was in a secluded part of the office, because not everything that wasn't burned yet was home shopping caps.

If there's a moral here, it's back up your backups! I usually burn my downloads to disc, but the drive purchase put that on hold. I'm still gonna be cookin' discs before copying just to be extra careful. As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth $200 on the street.

...um. Yeah.

I highly suggest backing up your external drive.

So many times I've heard from people whose external drive was fine one day and then corrupt the next.

Even knew some people who lost 500 GB - 1 TB from a drive.

Almost everything that I put on there was already on CD-R, except for for newer shopping caps and other "stuff." That's why I took the time to copy back all the unburned stuff... discs are actually buring as I type. I do still have CD-Rs of all the shopping caps I've downloaded through 2006, so it wouldn't have been a total loss. But if it was...

Even though it wasn't a drive failure this time (but next time you never know), I'm burning stuff to CD or DVD before I drag stuff on there from now on. That's one reason I've been largely hesitant to buy an external drive, I always hear those horror stories of how a drive suddenly goes kaput and irreplacable files are lost forever. That's why I say back up your backups before it's too late. There's a reason people keep hammering this lesson to you, so you'd better listen, people!

Back up dvd's. There's just much more You can find a spindle of 100 for $25 if you search around. That's over 400GB of data you can back up for $25.

I agree. Check the Sunday paper, there's always at least one office or electronics store that has their blank disc media on sale!