How bad are hard drives?
 

A month never passes that I don't get an email telling me that their HD crashed and they lost all the content they bought.

OK so we do have a lot of clients and it would seem that one of them would suffer this problem, but 1/2 a month?

As a non techie can you tell me how bad are HDs or is there another reason for this?

In ten years I have only had two hd's fail me. One was when I first got into computers and it didn't matter if I lost anyting. The other was about two years ago but I had backups of everything

I've lost a couple and I would imagine that the beating which webmasters' computers take could definitely increase the percentage in our industry.

hds are fine, its the operator that needs a slap in the face

They last a while, if you get a crashed HD more than once a year you are doing something wrong...

if you have important data, then you should have backup.
you must have proper cooling for your HDD if you want them to last.

They are most common thing to break on a computer, but I would say 1 out of 40 computers of a hard drive crash a year when the computer is very active.

Just recently with ata they have gotten allot better for home use.

The last guy to ask for us to resend all the content via FTP, which isn't a problem, failed to tell me what the content was and the email address he used is against an account that bought nothing.

the way some of us abuse our systems it doesn't surprise me that drives fail especially if people are relying on mail order computers like dell and such. heat stoves is what they are better described as

Yep, heat kills hard drives more then the use.

I've lost more power supplies than anything. The culprit every single time has been the fan blowing out and then it overheats.

I have less the a handful die on me, and I've been through atleast 100 or so over the years.

Which is exactly why fan modifications should be made right out of the box. Fan design by these companies revolves around keeping the computer quiet so it will appeal to consumers with no regard to the long term effects of the added heat.

The last computer I bought was an HP, and it struck me as odd that both exhaust fans only had a hint of air pressure.

I installed SpeedFan and found that HP was setting the fans at below 50% power. So I hooked the fan up to a PSU plug to bypass the mobo 50% limit and it's a decent temp in there now.

I get a drive bomb out rarely, but don't matter if it does - there is a backup of everything - and never lost data since the time PC's were marketed.

There are often other reasons, apart from genuine drive failures - users can be abusers of HDD's.

It's also not the first time drives have been known to fail on queue for some ulterior reason. :winkwink:

Ya need an idiot "fact sheet" Paul telling em to burn damned CD backups with license stuff and any 2257 data included.

We have 12 computers plus a main server in the office and never had a HD go down on us. We also back everything up on seperate hard drives and what's on the server. Seems strange to me to get so many rerquests, but the fan explanation rings true.

Never had a hard drive crash in the 10 years I've used computers

*knocks on wood*

Right after people order content they are told we will create the FTP file and email them. This happens as soon as we can do it, if we're asleep it take longer.

Have you any idea how many read this? I wake in the morning to emails asking how, when and where they will get there content. :1orglaugh

never had a maxtor fail on me.
twice had a WD fail on me.

I back everything up on a second hard drive, external so that i can port it to another machine if need be for easy retrieval. Recently CompUSA had a deal on a 160 gig drive for $30 after rebates. Add a 30 external HDD enclosrure with usb 2.0 and you're good to go.

hard drives are fine. maybe you just did something wrong

2 HD's in 10 years...

1 was a shitty gateway laptop that died for no reason.
2 was my main Dell HD ( 4 years old ) that was replaced with a 200GB WD recently.

All my shit is backed up to my servers + on-site office storage.

1 in 15+ yrs, old WD that basically got frozen after weeks so not even a factory error

In the past 7 years we have lost about 3 hard drives. I think that most of them were ruined due to one or more persons working here who dropped it or bangged it up somehow.

Just a few days ago I lost a MAXTOR 300 gig HD that was full of content to be shipped to a customer. I got an error that says master file corrupted. Found out that the HDs with both firewire and USB connection may get mucked up without reason.. Now I just get the externals with USB only.

i hardly hear people complain about losing seagate drives, but that's proably due to them not being as popular

My hd failed on me last week.

Had 2 WD's fail. Heard from a guy I know that used to distribute WD's they've been having higher than normal failure rates in the past few years due to lowered quality control to speed up production.

I'm only buying Seagates now.

I had a hard drive die on me last year, got a replacement that died a month later and the replacement for that one died on it's 2nd day. Haven't had any problems with the ones I've gotten since.