Hard drives crashing left and right.
 

In the last year or so I've had 6 hard drives crash. Right now an external drive that's mostly off is starting to do it's clicky thing, which means it's going to be dying.

I am religious about doing daily backups so I haven't lost any data yet but I am getting very fed up with the low quality of the drives. All of these drives are over a year old so I couldn't RMA any. The most fucked up part is most of them seem to die at about 1.5 years of age and they are different drives (WD, Samsung) and reside in different hardware (my pc, NAS, external USB enclosures). There's simply no pattern and only one conclusion - hard drives have gone down in quality big time.

I am weary of buying any of the new drives, especially huge ones like 750gb to 1Tb. I just can't imagine losing so much data at once.

Dammit, as a consumer, I am pissed.

This is all.

couple things that should help your headaches.

1> Buy WD Raptor drives. They have better bearings, better heads, better everything really. They're meant for constant server use, and are rated at a lot of hours. Also 10,000RPM vs the normal 7,200 so the extra speed is nice.

I use one as my OS drive, where I keep my most important information and install programs to it.

2> If you use a lot of drives for storage, consider RAID. If you only use one drive as a repair drive, you only dedicate one out of every 4 drives.

3> Use PerfectDisk to defrag, it's nice.

4> I'm looking at one of these myself.. You can get a 4-bay hot swappable rack system, so you don't need to keep your drives online and humming at all times. Just pop them out at anytime, while the computer is running.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio....asp?CatId=285

I've had many hard drives. Mostly Western Digital. I've never had one crash. Probably just been lucky for 12+ years.

I'm running WD drives, not one has ever failed me. However, I've been keeping everything on RAID1 for over a year now. The absolutely vital data is also backed up weekly on an external USB drive.

All drives fail. The question is when will they fail.

Sansa, have you considered Seagate? They have a 5 year replacement warranty. I'm pretty sure some of the other manufacturers offer a greater than 12 month warranty also.

Next thing to consider is RAID. You'll still need to back up (RAID is not a replacement for backups!), but if a drive fails your equipment continues working, rather than being offline until you can find a replacement.

FWIW I had a really bad run with a particular model of Seagate drives (all four failed within 18 months), but apart from that the only other drive that has failed in the last 5 years was an IBM DeathStar.

My NAS is running in RAID5 and it still lost 2 drives. Luckily not at the same time but about a month apart. WD Raptors don't seem to come in sizes of 150 Gb. I will be looking in Seagate for my next batch of drives. Thank you guys for all the tips.

Thats bad man... Hope you will be able to fix that soon.. Find a good brand..

have had more than 10 PCs, only had one HD crash, power supplies or CPU fans - now that's a different story

I hear that, I filled up my 250gb in the last week alone, laptop keeps crashing now

My 3 year old Dell laptop HD died on me last week. Thankfully I knew it was going, backed up daily and bought a replacement a few weeks ago.

I have about 20 desktop hard drives that I need to connect to the laptop to read and see if there's stuff I need to keep. I'm hoping they all still work :(

better choose for the very best...........

yes, they do. I've got 6 of them.

What is the advantage of PerfectDisk over the Windows defrag utility?

my pc is 6 years old and it came with a hd of western digital. Built in an extra hd of 160 gig 2 years ago also of western digital, both are still running perfectly fine :thumbsup
(knock on wood ;)

Good Info

Has it crashed yet ???

^^

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HD crashes are the worst feeling, that is why I try to do weekly backups

You could have a power problem. Disks are touchy about power spikes and fluctuations. Get small UPS and hook your PC up to that.

Like KimJI said a small UPS couldn't hurt. If it is spikes that should solve the problem.

Excellent advice given by several but considering the number of drives that have failed on you I would also look at power issues. Spikes are not good but that is not the only side of power issues. Low voltage can kill drives also and can cause other issues as well. Check the power at the outlet. If it is below 110v then it needs addressed. Your utility company should be happy to take a look if that is the case. Check the voltage at the connection for your hard drives, the low voltage side of things. If it is low and line voltage is good then look at your power supply. Some desktop systems come with power supplies that are not large enough to handle much additional hardware. Even when checking the voltage at the HD connector you may not see an issue if the machine is running with no loads, so try to do it where you can run the machine and make it work along with any thing you sometimes connect.

Keep in mind when it comes to power inside your office or home it could also be something else that only runs some of the time. Example running your washer and dryer while the AC is working big time can lower the voltage you have available. Now in general terms they are not on the same circuit within your house but in terms of the circuit feeding your house it does matter. Same is true anywhere else, the higher the loads on the electrical system the lower the available voltage can be if it was not designed for the loads.

Hard drives do fail, fact of life, however something else I think is causing the problem in your case and at very least worth looking at, while drives fail rare that so many fail on the same person on the same machine. Personally I am still a SCSI drive person, faster and more stable.

PLEASE be very careful working on your system or anything electrical. More people die each year from relatively low voltage (120v) than higher voltages.

Good Luck

Hi again Sansa :)
 

Before you do anything... hook up those drives to another system that is working 100% ... just make sure you have the master and slave pins right, if IDE.

I cannot see you going through so many drives so quickly unless they were of very poor quality... however by checking your hard drives on a working system you will have a way to verify. It is very common for the power supply located in your case to act up ... causing system wide issues...

Hope this helps you out...

Later,


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I agree. I had that problem when i moved a few years ago.