Have you ever had a hard drive die?

[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.