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Moving my music library to a larger drive - a mini drama

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on November 1, 2018 at 00:13:32

My previous hard drive was a 4TB RAID1. It got to be about 75% full, so I thought I'd avoid future problems with running out of space by going to a 6TB RAID drive, and moving my music files to the new drive.

I have a long history of dealing with MacSales at OWC (Other World Computing) and I've been happy with the products and services they offer. The last time I bought storage for my computer, I got one of those "build it yourself" RAID enclosures, where you buy the internal drives separately and then install them into the RAID enclosure. This time, I went with a Thunderbolt-capable enclosure which was quite a bit more pricey than the USB/Firewire enclosures I'd previously used. I also ordered a couple of Toshiba "enterprise class" hard drives, since I'd been so pleased with their lower capacity cousins when I used them in a previous RAID drive. So the bill worked out as follows:

Thunderbolt-capable 2-drive RAID enclosure - $250
Toshiba 6TB "Enterprise Class" SATA drives (2 x $300) - $600
Tax and Overnight Air Shipping - $100

Total - $950

Everything showed up at my door the next day. It turned out that the innards of the Thunderbolt enclosure weren't quite the same as they were in the USB enclosure I'd worked with a couple of years ago, and I was kind of fumbling around a bit more than I'd expected - at a couple of points I even clumsily touched the exposed circuit boards on the drives. Well, at least OWC had a 30-day return privilege if I needed it!

So I finally got the enclosure and drives assembled. The next problem was to set the drive enclosure for RAID1 (mirroring) - it comes with a default setting of "Spanning", and to change it, you have to use a mini screwdriver to click a set screw into the RAID1 detent. Not only that, but you also have to hold a reset button down for 3-seconds as the device starts up. So I got everything connected, and tried to hold down the reset button - it felt as if there was nothing there, so I quickly grabbed the mini screwdriver and jammed it onto the reset button. I had no idea if this was doing anything or not, but the drive did start up.

The next step was to format the drive, so I opened Disc Utility, and to my relief, the new drive did appear along with the other drives AND it showed up as RAID1 - yeay! Once the formatting was finished, it was time to actually move the files over to the new drive, so I took everything from the 4TB drive and started to copy it over. It started well, although the estimate for 45,000+ files (3.5 TB) was that it would take 13 hours. However, when it had copied 45GB, the copying suddenly seemed to stop. I left to watch TV for a couple of hours, and when I came back, it was still stuck at 45GB. I then clicked the STOP button on the utility and got a message "Stopping". I then went to bed. When I got up the next morning, the "Stopping" message was still there - nothing seemed to have happened overnight. I then decided to shut down the computer - but after clicking "Shut Down" on the menu, I saw the screen go dark, but the computer did not really shut down - it was in the twilight zone!

"Scotty - switch to manual override!" You can force your Mac to shut down by pressing and holding the on/off button for a few seconds until the machine actually shuts down - which I did, and the machine finally did shut down! After a couple of minutes, I re-started it, and the start-up process appeared to go normally (albeit a little slower than usual). Once the start-up process was complete, I saw that all the drives were still showing up, including the new drive. I opened it, and, sure enough, the 45GB of files were there! So I thought that perhaps the size of what I was copying had overwhelmed the operating system, and at that point, I started copying the 12 or so main folders of the drive, each one separately. This worked fine, even when I got to the last folder, containing all the iTunes files, which was 2TB by itself. But it also copied over just fine.

And from that point on, the new drive appeared to behave normally. So everything has been copied over, and the new drive has been working as expected for the last few days. I've actually played some of the files off of the new drive, and they play just fine, as expected. It's just that the experience of getting the files to the new drive caused much more anxiety and annoyance than I expected. But I suppose all's well that ends well?

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