One of my big drives finally failed

Puffnstuff · 02-23-2012, 08:15 AM

I knew it would happen eventually and yesterday a seagate 7200.12 1tb drive failed without warning. Keep in mind that I use several programs to periodically test my drives in an attempt to identify problems before they arise. My only warning was that this drive started disappearing in windows. Reboot and it was back but would go away again. Ended up getting a new wd caviar black to replace it. Put the seagate into a drive dock and was able to extract everything from it albeit slowly. At least seagate offers advance replacement with a prepaid return label for what it would cost me to ship the drive myself and wait for replacement. The most important stuff I had backed up already but it was nice to be able to get it all back. I did notice that the latest version of seatools for windows will not run on my system but the older on will plus it sees the drive in the dock.

magreen · 02-23-2012, 01:40 PM

Good job getting it back. If you're in a pinch with a nonresponsive drive, there's always the freezer trick.

thestrangebrew1 · 02-23-2012, 02:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by magreen

Good job getting it back. If you're in a pinch with a nonresponsive drive, there's always the freezer trick.

Freezer trick?

To the OP, are you planning on a replacement? I'm looking into getting a few 1-2 TB HDDs for storage and backup myself. I hate reading about these larger HDDs failing so often in such a short period.

magreen · 02-23-2012, 02:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thestrangebrew1

Freezer trick?

...

Well, there's some debate about whether the freezer trick works. But the bottom line, to my mind, is that if you've got a dead drive and you're definitely not going to pay the money to go with data recovery service, it's worth a shot.

http://lifehacker.com/5515337/save-a...-freezer-redux
http://www.datarecoverypros.com/hard...ry-freeze.html

Elixer · 02-23-2012, 03:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Puffnstuff

At least seagate offers advance replacement with a prepaid return label for what it would cost me to ship the drive myself and wait for replacement.

Enjoy it while this lasts, since they slashed warranties, so now, it is pretty much a throw-away device after a year or two.

Puffnstuff · 02-23-2012, 07:02 PM

Well I had to pay for it $9.95 which is what it would cost me to ship alone. For this they send me a new drive and a prepaid shipping label so I take the new drive out and put the broken one in and send it on its way. It's been my experience that wd drives have been the most reliable for me which is why I'm replacing drives with wd's. I have one more seagate 7200.12 drive, a 750gb in my system that hasn't given me any trouble but if it does another wd black will take its place.

Strangebrew I'm buying wd caviar blacks for storage and I use a 600gb velociraptor for programs that I don't keep on my ssd. Eventually all of my drives will be wd's. Hitachi deskstars have also been good to me, knock on wood, but they aren't quite as fast as the caviar blacks.