ministation backup drive shutting down Mac OS 10.12.6

[cabosurf]

I own a MiniStation™ Thunderbolt - HD-PA1.0TU3 connected to macbookpro via thunderbolt Mac OS 10.12.6.

It worked great for years for both backing up my apple photos library and time machine for my whole laptop.

Recently after about 1 minutes of being plugged in it freezes my macbookpro and actually shuts it down completely.

Today I tried a brand new thunderbolt cord. Didn't fix it.

I'm aware it's time to upgrade to a new drive (preferable SSD), but I need to get my photos library off of it first... does anyone have any fixes to prevent this freeze/shutdown so I can grab that 100GB library file off it first?

I can't prevent the shutdown or even run repairs on it before it freaks out my computer.

Man I pray I haven't lost 20 years of photos. It's my fault for not having a cloud back up, but by the time I went cloud, I had already been essentially "locked out" of this drive.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

-Dave

 

[oxygen8]

Try the USB3 port

first of all Clone the drive!

Now jou have time to recover from this clone

[cabosurf]

thanks for the help!
I'll give that a shot with the USB3.
As far as the clone... will 60 seconds give me enough time to clone the drive? It's got 100GB of data on it at the moment. (again, it only gives me that much time before shutting down).
I guess there's a chance that the thunderbolt isn't supplying the drive with enough power, so maybe the USB3 will?
More to come... headed to the store to get the USB3 cord!

[oxygen8]

thunderbold is near by sata
a demaged drive can stop the system
usb3 can not stop the system

[cabosurf]

that made the difference! The point at which it would normally crash my mac, it instead provided an error message stating the drive needed to be repaired/formatted, but that I could copy files locally first. That was great news! I'm backing the photos to dropbox now, then I'll wipe it and start again.

While I've got you, once repaired, is thunderbolt faster than the USB3, or should I just keep using this new USB3 "sync cable" since it solved the problem and not worry about any speed difference?

And finally, I should probably place this in a different post, but I was thinking of getting an actual SSD backup external drive since they're so screaming fast. Any model recommendations and which connection from my 2013 macbookpro should I be looking for, thunderbolt or USB3? And does it make more sense to get an internal drive with a connection doc when looking at SSD?

Again, I apologize if this is an inappropriate post for this forum... just ignore if so.

Thanks,
Dave