Have you ever had a hard drive die?

[fccHandler]

I'm posting this poll because of what I heard today in this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=85636). Obviously hard drives do die, though it's never happened to me personally (and I've been a computer geek for 20+ years.) Have I just been lucky so far? Is this really something that I should be concerned about?

I'm curious about what percentage of Doom9 members have experienced an unrecoverable hard drive failure. It would also be interesting if you can provide additional details, such as the manufacturer's name, the age of the drive, the OS used, or anything else that might be relevant.

Thanks for participating!

[Krismen]

R.I.P. :

1. WD Caviar WDAC2340 (340 MB). Year of prod.: 1993. My first hdd. Still working but stops randomly.

2. WD Caviar WDAC36400 (6.4 GB). Year of prod.: 1997. Probably some part of a plate was damaged. Now it hangs on my wall as part of decoration.

3. Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 6E040L0 (40 GB). Year of prod.: 2001. Died after a power failure.

4. Seagate Barracuda IV ST320011A (20 GB). Year of prod.: 2001. Few bad sectors. Currently I've got a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 6Y080L0 (80 GB) as replacement for this drive.

5. Seagate Barracuda IV ST340016A (40 GB). Year of prod.: 2003. Got it as replacement for Maxtor 40 GB. Same thing happend as for my first hdd (stops randomly). Currently I've got a Caviar WD400BB (40 GB) as replacement for this drive.

[dani82]

never had a hd crash on me, but one hd froze eveytime i started to encode, but to be fair, it came like that (oem)

i'm 3/3, with a 4th hd coming this Black Friday

[kilivipin]

During an AutoGK encoding of dogville, on my shitty pc, around 30 hours into a 34 hour backup. Arg.

[jeremymacmull]

my IBM travelstar on my laptop (and replacing laptop hdds is nowhere near as cheap as desktop ones a 30gb fujitsu was 120 quid at the time) 2 years ago


JEREMY

[jel]

work: 80 GB - not sure of brand, whatever came standard with a DELL Precision 530, Xeon, back in 2001 -kicked the bucket about 3 months ago - a message popped up when booting one morning that said something along the lines of "DELL wishes to inform you that your hard drive will soon die a unceremonious death sometime in the not-to-distant future. Please back up your work, contact support, and pray")

home: 80 GB WD (something-or-other) 2003/4 lasted about 4 months :eek: and we never did find the cause?!?!?

[neo75903]

Maxtor were the only ones that gave me problems. I am currently solely using Western Digital drives and have not encountered any problems so far. But then i guess it also has todo with luck, some ppl never had problems with MAxtor and some do.

[The Geek]

Oh yeah, I am very familiar with dying hard drives.
Not only my own hard drives, but I also see how friend's hard drives die.

The oldest hard drives, my Quantum 1 GB and a friend's Seagate 1 GB, they still work fine.
Then, the disaster started with my first Seagate. It quit working after about 3 years, and both of a friend's Seagates also died. One within 1 year, one after about 3.
I bought an IBM 60 GXP, and later an IBM 120 GXP, another friend also bought an IBM 60 GXP, and all 3 are dead, all died within the warranty period of 3 years.
We're all running Maxtor and WD drives now, they never gave any of us any problems. An old friend's WD also funs fine, and so does another friend's Seagate.
But I'll stick to Maxtor and WD.

The Geek

[neo75903]

@The Geek:
wow you really do feels Murphy's law the hard way :)

[alexnoe]

5 IBM HDDs died on me

[Happygolucky]

I once had an IBM Deskstar drive die. It was about 2 years old, I called IBM Tech Support and they hot swapped it (sent me a new drive before I sent them the broken one) without any hassles.

My 80GB Western Digital "Special" drive (has an 8MB high-speed buffer, 7200rpm) recently began acting wierd. Under heavy load (like authoring a DVD, moving large files, etc.) I was getting Event ID 9 and Event ID 51 errors, but the drive tests (using WD utils) as OK. Western Digital is replacing it under warrenty.

[neo75903]

Originally posted by Happygolucky
I once had an IBM Deskstar drive die. It was about 2 years old, I called IBM Tech Support and they hot swapped it (sent me a new drive before I sent them the broken one) without any hassles.


Good Service! i did it twice with my Maxtors and it took 2 months before i got an reply and few weeks later an replacement.
They had to investigate the fault before they can swap me new one was the answer.

[echooff]

You guys make me feel lucky. I've been messing with hard drives since the 80's. My first one (it was the largest on the market) had a whopping 5 mb worth of storage. I have never had one crash. Lost a lot of floppies, but never a hard drive.

[DAvenger]

Numerous times. All Maxtors :mad:

[dragongodz]

an IBM many years ago. just developped constant errors after much use and abuse. :)

i have a seagate 20gb dieing at the moment. again well used and abused for a long time. no errors but reading from it is at painfull speeds (4+ hours to copy 4gb from it) and the s.m.a.r.t. settings do show recoveries etc.

about maxtors. the thing you have to watch with them is the heat. they get DAMN hot which is not exactly good for them. a mate has one and he has a fan running right on to the maxtor to try and keep it cool. :)

[zilog jones]

Arrg, I just put "no" for the poll, then I remembered that one did fail! Here's what I've had so far:

- 1992: Western Digital Caviar 280 80MB; was used regularly until 1999; I got out my 386 again earlier this year and it still works perfectly! Not one bad sector, though there aren't really a lot of sectors to go bad :D Sounded like a jet engine too!

- 1998: Some 1GB HDD that was in a Dell OptiPlex 575 (P75). Only had it a couple of years.

- 2000: Seagate Medalist 4.8GB. Died after a few months - only some parts of the hdd were readable, and it didn't make the same noise as before. Tried talking to Seagate's tech. support and GOT NOWHERE. Asses.

- 2000: Seagate Medalist 8.4GB. Was totally ripped off for it - it cost IR£300! :angry: Never had any trouble, and I still use it as a back-up today.

- 2003: Crappy old Fujitsu 4.3GB, made in 1998. One of the IDE pins was broken off, but I just bent it in place (didn't even solder!) and had no trouble since.

- 2004: Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB. Quite an improvement noise-wise compared to our first WD, but I think it's too damn quiet! I have to look down at the LEDs to see if it's actually doing anything sometimes. I know they're not the not the best performers out there (mine's the 2MB cache one and all :( ), but it was the only 80GB I could get at a reasonable price at the time - plus it's over twice as fast as what I had before!

[Wilbert]

Throughout the years I used (and am using): WD 340 MB (5400), WD 3GB (5400), WD 20GB (5400), WD 60GB (7200), 2 x WD 120GB (7200, 8MB cache). They are all still working (dunno about the first one).

[fccHandler]

Egad, so far about 2 out of 3 voters have had their hard drive(s) kick the bucket. Scary stuff...

I have to wonder if advances in technology are part of the problem. Modern PCs run so much faster and hotter than they used to, and operating systems are so much more bloated, and constantly active behind the scenes. Every so often I'll go away from my PC for a few minutes, then come back to find the hard drive going crazy. I figure WinXP is dumping its virtual memory, or backing up its system files, or downloading viruses, or something... :confused:

Are modern PCs simply overworking our drives?

[dani82]

i believe back then, technology was built to last (cause they were expensive) or until something better came along; now technology is built to pass (why else would they sell extended warranty)

[neo75903]

@fcchandler:
idd, and there is still no media that is built to last. I presume they will find more stone tablets then it is left from our modern ages if something horrible happens in the future.
Unfortunaly one of those things might be bush in his concrete shelter.
Someone better start writing in a stone tablet that bush does not represent humanity :devil:

[neo75903]

just noticed one of my drives is producing a higher spin sound, does that mean that drive is wearing off? I can expect it to fail?

[fccHandler]

Well, a few weeks ago I wouldn't have worried about such things, but based on the current results of this poll, your hard drive's chances of survival are less than 30%. :scared:

[zilog jones]

Ah, don't get so worried. Most the people here probably use their PCs *A LOT*, and have had *A LOT* of PCs! And along the lines, this probably included some bad decisions, including buying certain seriously dodgy IBM and Maxtor models.

I hear the new Hitachi (who took over IBM's HDD department) drives seem to be actually good these days. But are they reliable?

[LordRPI]

I've only had one hard drive ever fail, and then it wasn't even in my ownership at the time. It was an IBM DeathStar (120GXP) - In all honestly, that drive really held up well - It was used to serve pr0n via Samba to the greater RPI campus at a rate of 80GB/day considering there was only 6 gigs of porn on the drive :)

Other than that, I've never had a failure, over 5 laptop hard drives (all IBM/Hitachi TravelStars) and an uncountable number of desktop hard drives. Although, to be fair, I generally replace them when the sound they produce changes or gets louder, just to be on the safe side. I don't know if this pertains to hard drives, but the resonance frequency generally increases significantly before a failure of a part (I'm guessing due to some form of strain hardening). Perhaps one day somebody will invent a device to detect this, and then as if by miracle it would print out a coupon for a significant discount on a new drive.

[neo75903]

Originally posted by LordRPI
I've only had one hard drive ever fail, and then it wasn't even in my ownership at the time. It was an IBM DeathStar (120GXP) - In all honestly, that drive really held up well - It was used to serve pr0n via Samba to the greater RPI campus at a rate of 80GB/day considering there was only 6 gigs of porn on the drive :)

I knew i went to the wrong university! :)

[LordRPI]

Originally posted by neo75903
I knew i went to the wrong university! :)

Before saying that, you must ask yourself:

Did you have a g/f in university? At RPI, there were between 4 and 5 males to every female depending on year. Most of the femailes would break your pelvis if you got too close.

Did not having a g/f save enough money to counter balance the money you needed to spend on computer hardware to actually see the opposite sex in some form or another?

Did you know anybody mentally ill enough to have a double redundant RAID array for 500GB of pr0n and call it "HAL-9000"? And then, a backup RAID array of that named "SAL-9000"...

Did you have to resort to pr0n for seratonin production when you should have been doing work?

Did a dual OC-3 just not seem fast enough to deliver pr0n?

Did the RIAA sue two of your classmates (Flatlan/ChewPlastic) for several billion dollars?

On your way to class, did you see printed out PowerPoint presentations of MC'd Overlapping Block Based Intra-frame Wavelet video compression techniques? (RPI Center for Next Generation Video, which if I'm not mistaken is funded by On2)

[nicco]

I had HD failure :( :( :(

[wmansir]

I've never had a HD fail while in use, but I have had several that I pulled and where dead when I went to use them some months/years latter (4GB Quantum, 6GB WD, a couple of others).

I've actually been using the infamous IBM 75GXP Deskstar AKA Deathstar as my main system drive for about 4+ years. I've only had 1 problem with the drive when it developd a bad sector about 3 years ago. It probably helps that it's about a 1 cm from two case fans, which keep it nice and cool.

[masken]

HDD's of today CANNOT be trusted. If you have stuff on your disks that you absolutely don't want to lose, you must use redundancy (RAID 1, 5, 10 etc). Almost all manufacturers have also lowered their world-wide warranty on IDE/SATA disks from 2 years down to 1 year. Laws in certain countries still hold up the 2 year warranty though, but the interesting part is why they've lowered warranty. Even most SCSI-disks of toady has pretty low quality.

It's simply a market under high pressure and low margins, resulting in lower quality. Speeds also increase, which means that the moving parts move faster and faster, and at the same time, the parts themselves are of lower and lower quality.

The good part is that they're cheap nowadays. The irony is that you often need twice the amount (plus a controller card) in order to prevent dataloss.

[neo75903]

idd, first i though it was technological progress, but then i see more modern drives to fail more often then i have seen before.
They are less shoch resistance and highly sensitive for high temps.
We really desperate need some kind of affordable backup solution for drives ranging 500 to 1 tera.
I know , we need bigger tape drives so can stuff 1 kilometer of tape in a cartridge :)

[dani82]

my new HD is making a noticable high pitch noise (like a ringing in your ear), should i be worry?

will my extended warranty replace it?, if it just noise

[neo75903]

My didnt when it was new, it is now making a higher noise. higher pit and annoying as well. Drive is about 3 years old think it is wearing off. It runs on a pc which was almost on for 24/24 for batch encoding.

[jcsston]

120MB IBM. Developed bad sectors. It was an old drive and had work well for many years, came with a IBM 486 25mhz system.

340MB WD. Burned up. Not really the fault of the drive. I had put 2 hds together in the system and the circuits on the bottom of the WD drive made contact with the metal top of the bottom drive. It started smoking and promptly caused the system to stop working. The bottom drive (a Maxtor 1GB) had some scorch marks on top but was still in working order.

20GB Maxtor. Failed in a year. I believe it overheated as I was running the system without many fans in 100F+ room temp. Received a 30GB Quantum as replacement, still running.

80GB Seagate. Failed in about 6 months. Just up and died. Received a replacement, still running.


We have other drives around without any problems 4GB Quantum, 12GB Maxtor, 6GB Seagate, 40GB Maxtor, 80GB Maxtor, and 120GB Maxtor.

[davepyne]

My 2GB drive never failed
My 30GB drive lives on in a modded xbox!
my 80GB (maxtor) died slowly, so I was able to salvage almost all my files
since then its been all Western Digital, and they're all good so far:
80 GB
160 GB
250 GB
250 GB (for my other xbox!)

[davepyne]

I did kinda bang that maxtor clumsily as I was installing it into a new case. i think thats what broke it. . .

[wmansir]

I just added a new drive to my system and had to reformat all my old drives in the shuffle. My deathstar was making a horrible deathly noise when it hit the 60% mark, but it sounded fine after a minute or so.

[neo75903]

@wmansir:
You better run a diagnostic tool on that drive. It might be caused by a bad or faulty sector.I had a similar experience with one of my drives, which made a ticking noise like it was looking very hard on one spot.
There is a change you can solve this by formatting your drive by a format utility provided by your manufacter. Try look at their website.
Good luck.

[dani82]

this is just weird, my new HD isn't making the noise, but causing it.

my psu, which is somewhat faulty, it produces a medium siren sound upon startup (it's warming up), but dies down in about 20sec

somehow my geforce 2ti is involve in causing the noise, so i'd had to swith back to my 8mb video card, now the noise is cut down to half

for reason, the noise is temporary reduce as long as i play with the mouse wheel or whatever it's called

[mudda_t]

Clack, clickity-clack, clickity-clack-clack-clack.....................................silence!
.
R.I.P. Maxtor80gb 2meg buffer 4+years old

[detroit0]

i've had several Maxtors go on me. I will never get
Maxtor now, no matter how cheap they are.
The last one that failed was a 120 gb drive that had
a lot of my stuff on it. I was really foolish in retrospect
because it kept making a loud buzzing noise for several
months, and I would just tap it to make it shut up.
Finally it just stopped working altogether and just clicked
when i turned it on.

[neo75903]

Originally posted by detroit0
and I would just tap it to make it shut up.
Finally it just stopped working altogether and just clicked
when i turned it on.

Lolz, i just wonder when ppl will start tapping their plasma TV for a better reception :)

Western Digital has announced new drives who produces less heat and which have a lower power consumption. Heat is for most hds a killer reason.

[Soulhunter]

Hmm, whats a "save" temperature for hdd's ???


Bye

[Fantasma]

Hi,

I have seen many hard drives die in front of me, there was nothing we could do, except replace them.

I was member of an organization that replaced aproximately 30 computers, all of them exact machines from compaq, these computers came (all of them) with Fujitsi hard disks that just started to die one or two months after being in use. Several months after that I learned that we had been the lucky ones to be in the mess described
in the links below:

Gateway named in Fujitsu HDD class action suit
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/30976.html
Fujitsu admits 4.9 million (potentially) defective HDDs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27926.html
Fujitsu faces lawsuits over HDD failures
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27871.html
Wallop! Fujitsu Europe fudges HDD recall
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27143.html
Crash! Dud Fujitsu HDDs all over UK
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27112.html
PCA publishes Fujitsu HDD advisory
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/28384.html
Ouch! Fujitsu to replace 300,000 faulty HDDs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27109.html

[neo75903]

@soulhunter:
Dont really know, but i presume about the operating temp. in open air.
I have put the most important hds with a cooler and the reading mostly give me a temp around 30-35 C degrees. Which also depends what you room temp is.

[Slogra]

I had a new Maxtor 200GB dying on me. It worked for a few days untill I transferred all data from another drive to it with Norton Ghost. It was dead immidiately after that.
I think it got too hot or maybe it was already broken when i bought it.

I got a Seagate as replacement at the shop :)

[ppera2]

From drives used with PC-s only my first died, some 10 years ago, but I bought it used. All my 2.5 inch drives are now dead - I used them with my Atari ST, but they were also used when I bought them for small money.

Usually I sale drives after 2-3 years, together with MBO and CPU.

Currently I have Quantum LM, 4.5 years old and Maxtor 40GB 7200, almost 4 years old, and both still work well, however I expect that will work not too long... Actually, I think that reason for relative long life is that I use 2 drives in PC, what decreases signifficantly mechanical load of them - much less head movement. Swap file is on second drive, and I make encodings, multiplexing usually with one drive as source and second as target.

Because I work some computer fixing, can say about brands with most failures - earlier clear 'winner' was Conner, today it's Maxtor.

And must say that many failures are caused by bad power supplies, not because of drive's low quality.

[theReal]

The first drive that died was my first HD from my first computer (840MB, don't know the model anymore). It was lying on my desk for about a month, then it suddenly wouldn't work anymore (nobody ever knew why).

Second one was a 40GB Maxtor, I think - I'm not sure about the size anymore. Started with read and write failures, so I threw it away. This drive had probably died from to much vibrations or heat (I had not always been the thorough computer mechanic that I am now ;) )

Third one was a 60GB WD. It wasn't the drive's fault, the power-plug was bad and so it powered on and off a few times during operation. A few times too often until I found the problem and changed the plug...
Had read and write errors and the diagnostics tool said they were irreparable, so I threw it away.

The next drive that's going to die under my hands I think is a very old 6GB WD drive in my dad's computer. It had a write error recently but the diagnostics tool found nothing. Still I don't trust it anymore...

I've actually been using the infamous IBM 75GXP Deskstar AKA Deathstar as my main system drive for about 4+ years.
I have two Deathstars (I think 60GXP or 75GXP, it's the 120GB model, 7200 rpm). They are both still working fine - however they have always been making weird noises from time to time. Every once a month or so, under much read/write stress, the drive seems to "reset" for a second with a weird sound, then it's working on. I've been waiting for errors since I first heard that noise, but errors never came. Only that noise about once a month :p

[neo75903]

... under much read/write stress, the drive seems to "reset" for a second with a weird sound, then it's working on. ...


Yeah my Maxtors also does that under stress. It makes a diguintisch 'click' very short silence, then it starts doing things again.
I though my drive was gonerz when i heard it for the first time. Very scary sound, and it did scared the Jesus out of me, all my documents were on that drive.

[clickit]

yes, the third in a row :

Western Digital BB 40 GB, two of this type
Western Digital JB 40 GB, the very latest crash, yesterday !!!

I'll choose another brand maybe Seagate or Maxtor

[wmansir]

I have a dead Maxtor 40GB Fireball 3 sitting in my computer right now.

It's actually a system pull from my aunt's computer. She originally bought it in a system from my uncle who was selling cheap computers. He probably picked it up at a computer show for cheap because it has a 'warrenty void if removed" sticker that I've seen at those places. Who knows where they got it.

Anyway, it started getting bad sectors a few months ago. Her computer was acting up (win98 doesn't like bad HDs) after she called me for the third time to come fix it I figured out it was a HD error. I put in a new drive and upgraded her to XP. The new HD was identical to the old one, but I didn't know that when I ordered it. At least the one I bought came shrinkwrapped from the factory, unlike the previous one.

So I decided to play around with the old drive. After trying out different utilites and goofing around it finaly died completely. The NTFS became corrupt and windows wouldn't recognize it. XP even fails to format it now. I'm about to take it out since I have my system opened up.

[Sirber]

Fuji 6GB

[theReal]

Just thought one of my IBM Deskstars was going to die. The computer suddenly powered down, then the controller couldn't find one of the drives. Then, it was found again, but it powered on and off all the time.

I checked the power plugs on the drive and found they were a little green from corrosion (I can't explain why because there's not much humidity in my room and the last time I checked the power plugs was only half a year ago. I cleaned the plugs with a special anti-corrosion contact spray and the drive seems to be fine again.

I don't know - I think the world's HDD power plugs have united against me :sly: :D :D

[LordRPI]

Recently I've been hearing an intermittent groaning noise from around the hard drive on this beast:

http://lordrpi.intercarve.net/IMG_1777.jpg

As you'll notice, there is one hard drive installed in that picture. When I heard it, I went out and bought another SATA drive, installed it, used carbonc copy cloner to transfer the data and then removed the other one. No dice, still a groaning sound. Turns out that it's actually my hard drive fan. Funny thing is, it only makes a groaning sound at low speeds, so my solution has been to let broth processors blast with distributed.net 24/7. I should get the fan replaced soon before it b0rks forver.

[The Edge]

Had a WD400BB 40Gb die on me a few weeks back. The poor thing fought for a few weeks though...managed to get a backup done in time. Still in the machine disconnected.:rolleyes:

[fccHandler]

The results are in:
3 out of 4 Doom9 members have had their hard drives die.

Someone in this thread suggested that doom9.org isn't necessarily representative of the general population, but who cares. I stress the heck out of my PC with my capturing and video work, so the experiences of the other members here is more relevant to me.

This poll actually inspired me to take action, too. I recently opened up my PC and discovered that both my hard drives were very hot to the touch. I even had difficulty keeping my finger touching the lower drive for more than a few seconds! It was that hot.

I've since installed a fan to blow across the drives, and it helped tremendously. The drives run nice and cool. :)

Once again, thanks to everyone who participated in my poll. You may have saved me from catastrophic loss.

[theReal]

Just thought one of my IBM Deskstars was going to die. The computer suddenly powered down, then the controller couldn't find one of the drives. Then, it was found again, but it powered on and off all the time.

I checked the power plugs on the drive and found they were a little green from corrosion (I can't explain why because there's not much humidity in my room and the last time I checked the power plugs was only half a year ago. I cleaned the plugs with a special anti-corrosion contact spray and the drive seems to be fine again.

I don't know - I think the world's HDD power plugs have united against me

Well, I was wrong... the power plugs are definitely ok now, but the drive started powering down again. This time for real. It's dead. R.I.P. :angry:

At least I didn't have any important data on it anymore.

I ordered a 200GB Seagate as a replacement immediately (can't work with just 180GB!) :D

[jcsston]

I found a rather interesting program recently.

SpeedFan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php)
It's to monitor and control your fan speed and temps. But it can also read SMART info from your IDE hds, (even tells the temp on some). It gives a lot of various SMART details, a little fitness and performance bar meter.

I'm not sure how accurate it is as far as telling you if your hd is about to die. On all the Seagate hd I've tested here it gave them about half or less bars, even a very new 120GB one. It gives my WD 120GB full bars.

[Soulhunter]

Originally posted by jcsston

I'm not sure how accurate it is as far as telling you if your hd is about to die. On all the Seagate hd I've tested here it gave them about half or less bars, even a very new 120GB one. It gives my WD 120GB full bars.

Same here, maybe its a bug or so... :rolleyes:

All Seagate's (even brand-new ones) show only a half filled bar !!!


Bye

[_cashel]

I've had several of those IBM "deathstars" die on me. I just recently had a Maxtor from a 3 year old Dell die on me as well.

[neo75903]

erm few boots before i encountered something saying: "c: not found"
kinda scary message, ran chkdsk immidiatly, nothing found, and after that everything runs normal again.

[rca29]

I must start by saying that i never had a HDD failure, but there might be a couple of reasons that justify that.
I've been using my pc (much) more frequently since i first registered on this forum :cool: . All the techniques available at that moment were very time, cpu and HD consuming and i had to let the pc working almost 24/7 (mostly encoding). As i spent more time on the internet, i found out other points of interest which led me to... ...using my computer more and more.
I think that never experienced an HDD failure because when i started using my pc for video backup (among other things, of course) i had
1 brand new 40GB Seagate and one 30GB Samsung, but i replaced every few months by a new and bigger HDD (80GB > 120 >160...), keeping the 'old' ones only for backup purposes.


There are 3 important factors to be considered (IMHO):
1# Most HD manufacturers state that the ideal temperature operating range of an HD should be around 20-25 Degrees C, with graphs that show a direct relationship between heat and HD failure. In this case, an increase of 10 Degrees C should reduce the drive lifespan to half. So, heat is the worst enemy of HDD.
2# The Manufacturers usually have more than one series of HDD, designed for home desktop use or for businness (or "professional") use.
If we go back 6 or 7 years, a home desktop wouldn't do nothing compared to what my humble desktop has been doing for the last 2 years. Consider for a moment that i made at least 50 backup's with the same HDD - I know that it is a reduced amount of backup's but, if you take an average of 6GB rip per movie + stripping / reencoding, and i can easily say that that HDD has written well over 500GB, and i'm not even going to try to calculate the number of readings...and we're talking about one single task, that can be made in one month. I guess that most of us do a lot of things beside this. One good example are the p2p usage. For those who use it (we talking about some millions, right ?), how many times does the HDD has to read and write by hour ? Now, how much time would a PC from 1999 need to write and read this amount of data under it's processor capabilities ? How can this be compared to the '99 "normal" usage of making a couple of Word documents or Excel spreadsheets ? Or even the 'stunning' 2x speed of a '99 CD burner ? We are buying our storage cheaper than ever (in a GB/Hd cost ratio), but are we buying the correct HDD for the real tasks we present to them ?
3# Hard Drives are - above all - mechanical devices. All mechanical devices will worn out at some point.
Remember that 30 year old audio-amplifier that never had a problem and it's still working almost every single day ? - It has only a couple of mechanical parts, and that is why it will last "ages" under normal conditions. Now, can you remember how many CD/DVD-ROM drives failed on you in the past 8 years ? ;)

I think that this poll is very useful as it is a good reminder to always backup your important data . As i write this, i never had a single problem with an HDD, but i know that if i let them stay long enough it will fail. Even a new one can fail on me (as with many others). The only important question at that point should be to find the backup drive (or media).

[ppera2]

@rca29

Good points here...
Must add some things to your post: most of errors by hard drives are mechanical nature, but there is a lot of electronic part failure too. I saw lot of burned chips on drives. Can say that about 60% damage is mechanical, other is electronical. Of course many electronical failue is caused by bad quality power supply or by voltage peaks from electric power line (net). Some series of WD drives were known as very sensitive by this mean.
Most of CD readers and writers die because of laser weakening, that's well known. Percent of mechanical failures is little, under 10%, at least by brand ones.

It's also known that often stopping and starting of drive will shortening it's life more than longtime normal work. One week of nonstop work is often less harmful than 7 power off-on.

[fewtch]

Never had a hard drive die (have been using computers with hard drives since about 1990?). I still back up important data regularly tho, that's something I never miss...

[theReal]

think that this poll is very useful as it is a good reminder to always backup your important data . As i write this, i never had a single problem with an HDD, but i know that if i let them stay long enough it will fail. And even if your HD doesn't fail, sometimes the user fails and formats the wrong one of his four drives (happened to me some time ago - you can imagine my face when I went back to Windows to discover that I had just formatted my data drive with all my documents and tv captures...)
Since that day I keep important stuff "mirrored" (I copy it to another drive manually)

[Arachnotron]

I keep my drives in a Coolermaster CMstacker 4in3 (http://www.coolermaster-europe.com/eng/products/chassis/stacker/spb-3t4-e1.asp) drivecage. It will fit in 3x5.25 inch bays and hold 4 harddisks. The big slow running fan keeps the drives at room temp and makes no noise, also the cage is suspended in rubber.

The cage is intended for the CMstacker line of PC cases, but will fit in regular cases too. They are about EUR 19,- over here.

For harddisks you normally only need some movement of the air above it. Almost any fan will do.

[Trigger911]

i was at a lan party i was drunk dude opened my case pulled the ide cable fried my seagate u seirses 120 giger. Next day his gf told me what he did and where he was ^^. Then i got the RMA on it and that one whent out 4 weeks later so i upgraded to a 2 x 120 gig maxtor sata.

[fewtch]

I just got a Seagate 7200.7 40gig HD (at a high price per gig for buying such a small drive). One of these days I'm dumping Win98SE so I can switch to NTFS exclusively and use those huge HD's. But there are still a few proggies that I want to run which won't run on 2K... probably next summer/fall when I upgrade my MB/CPU I'll let Win9x go for good.

P.S. the Seagate 7200.7's are supposed to fit 100GB per platter, yet this is a 40 gig HD. Anyone know how to unlock the other 60gigs on the platter? I should have bought an 80GB (at a mere $9.00 more) and just left some of it unformatted until later, why didn't I think of that? :(

[Trigger911]

myself i would have bought the better one and partioned it into 2-3 drives

[fewtch]

Problem is I've got three partitions already, and I'm not replacing my old drive but switching to a 2-drive setup (among others, for speed reasons -- swapfile on different drive and all that). Max number of partitions I want to deal with is four.

I want to avoid partition size bigger than 32GB with FAT32 (16k clusters), so I'm planning to use Ghost to move my OS partitions over to the new drive (which is faster) and use the old one (bigger but slower) for media storage & scratch space.

Current plan:

Old HD:
C: 10GB Win98SE + some apps (primary)
D: 20GB Win2k + apps (secondary)
E: 30GB Media Storage (secondary)

New plan:

New HD:
C: 10GB Win98SE + some apps (primary)
D: 30GB Win2k + apps (secondary)

Old HD:
E: 30GB Media Storage (secondary)
F: 30GB Scratch Space (secondary)

[theReal]

Max number of partitions I want to deal with is four.What's the reason for that? I have 8 partitions on 3 drives right now (only seven if you don't count the 8MB boot partition for XP) and I don't see any problems with it.

[neo75903]

Originally posted by Arachnotron
I keep my drives in a Coolermaster CMstacker 4in3 (http://www.coolermaster-europe.com/eng/products/chassis/stacker/spb-3t4-e1.asp) drivecage. It will fit in 3x5.25 inch bays and hold 4 harddisks. The big slow running fan keeps the drives at room temp and makes no noise, also the cage is suspended in rubber.

The cage is intended for the CMstacker line of PC cases, but will fit in regular cases too. They are about EUR 19,- over here.

For harddisks you normally only need some movement of the air above it. Almost any fan will do.

thx i have been looking for something like this.

[fewtch]

Originally posted by theReal
What's the reason for that? I have 8 partitions on 3 drives right now (only seven if you don't count the 8MB boot partition for XP) and I don't see any problems with it.
I just don't like dealing with that many partitions. I've also got two optical drives, a removable USB drive, and a program that creates virtual encrypted drives (often several of them mounted at a time). Just too many damn drive letters to keep track of without headaches...

P.S. I assume you meant "8GB" above, not "8MB" ... :p

[nephilim]

Most interesting hard drive problem I had was back in 1990. I had a 340MB Seagate drive that worked fine, probably still does for all I know, but if it tried to coexist with any other hard drive within two weeks the new drive would fail. I went through two brand new drives that way, and validated my theory by throwing some junk drives in to test my theory. Thus began the legend of the Antisocial Hard drive.
Speaking generally, if you have recurring problems with hardware failure in the same PC, then the culprit is almost always the power supply. Spikes too small to trip your surge protector can wreak havoc over time, especially in anything motorized. Even solid-state devices will wear quicker if you're using a cheap power supply.
If you really want to extend the life of your parts, invest in both a good power supply and a UPS. Better power supplies use a better brand of capacitors and coils to try and regulate voltage, and any UPS goes a long way to ensuring that your current is consistently 115V, 60Hz.

[Nematocyst]

Originally posted by fewtch
Max number of partitions I want to deal with is four.
...
I want to avoid partition size bigger than 32GB with FAT32
...
New plan:
...
Old HD:
E: 30GB Media Storage (secondary)
F: 30GB Scratch Space (secondary)

If you want fewer partitions and these are both to be FAT32, combine E&F. There is little point in worrying about cluster sizes when the files you permanently store will be much larger than the cluster size. This has the added benefit of providing you with flexibility if you didn't guess the sizes perfectly.

[fewtch]

Originally posted by Nematocyst
If you want fewer partitions and these are both to be FAT32, combine E&F. There is little point in worrying about cluster sizes when the files you permanently store will be much larger than the cluster size. This has the added benefit of providing you with flexibility if you didn't guess the sizes perfectly.
Not a bad idea... after doing some research, it appears 64GB is a better practical upper limit for FAT32 than 32GB (and it might even increase performance a bit due to the larger cluster size, although wasting more space). Will give it some thought, thanks.

P.S. if anyone can give me a reason to stick with two 30-gig partitions instead (based on what you know of FAT32), would like to hear it. I'll be partitioning with Win98's FDISK, so Win2k's refusal won't be a factor.

And apologies for going off topic again, although this thread looks like it's almost worn out anyway...

Edit -- Hard drive arrived and the deed is done. Win2k threw more of a fit than I expected... I had to FDISK /MBR and finally restore a copy of an old registry (using Win98SE to do it) to convince it to boot with the new HD arrangements. This is one reason why I like having 98SE around, because if 2K becomes unbootable or otherwise problematic I still have a working setup.