F'Me, I mean F3 grrr!

[alkemyst]

I have been having issues with my machine...the last thing I thought it was was my 1 year old F3 (edit: this was my born on 6/2010 one). S.M.A.R.T. showed nothing....a chkdsk /f/r showed some file corruption which was fixed and things back to normal.

a week later it died...totally. Whistles when powered on, but the BIOS doesn't even see it.

Had to pick up a 7200.12 from TigerDirect as the best drive locally. Not a bad pick, but not a Caviar Black or F3.

Just a report...this is the second F3 that died within two years I dealt with. One on an old customer's machine when I did PC support as a side job...I sort of blamed it on the fact that they always kicked/banged into their computer case (they were old)...

It seems across the board QC or just crappy build quality is out there. Gone are the days drives lasted 3 years easy and 5-6 most of the time.

Again just my report...I'd have bought another F3 if I could.

 

[Spikesoldier]

modern hard disks have horrible reliability compared to old.

everyone knows this.

 

[C1]

I have tended to stay with older drives (eg, 300GB maxtor diamonds). I have many many drives (of all kinds) some well over 10 years old. I might have lost two at most. Even my newer ones though (hitachi's & Iomega 2.5" externals [got a bunch of those]) have been rock solid and have zillions of hours on them (never lost one). I even have some of the old 2.5" Storix externals (40 & 60GB) which have innumerable hours logged and some of these have been accidentally dropped onto hard floor (2+ feet) while running and yet they operate still fine.

I attribute my reliability results to watching what I purchase/acquire. I always buy boxed drives, check newegg customer ratings, hardware reviews, etc. before purchase. I never buy or pay bottom end prices.

 

[alkemyst]

modern hard disks have horrible reliability compared to old.

everyone knows this.

ok? thanks?

 

[stahlhart]

Thanks for the heads-up... guess I'll start replacing them annually now. They're cheap enough.

 

[exdeath]

Mechanical drives have always been garbage. Don't know why we tolerated them for 60 years. We've moved on to TB of data and 10s to 100s GB/sec speeds elsewhere in the PC, and the HDD is the only thing operating and kilobytes/sec and 10s of MB/sec speeds. It's like working on dial up any time I use a computer with a spindle drive and having to install/uninstall anything.

Though I still had a bunch of first generation Cheetah X15s I finally decommissioned and gave away after 10+ years of service, not a single sector reallocation on any of them.

Have a Raptor RAID 0 still sitting around as well, 6-7 years old and saw heavy use from my PC gaming days, again, not a single sector reallocation.

Yet everywhere else I look HDDs are dropping like flies on a daily basis. Mostly the cheap crap that OEMs ship their PCs with. People only look at CPU speeds and RAM, so HDD is the first place OEMs cut corners with the slowest cheapest drive possible. Personally, if it spins, I'm not touching it, unless you're paying me.

 

[Blain]

Old HDs = Longitudinal recording... lower platter density but more margin for error, drives don't die as easy.
New HDs = Perpendicular recording... higher platter density but less margin for error, drives die easier.

 

[exdeath]

Toilet paper roll. Coat it in iron dust. Spin it. Use a straw with a loop of wire to rear and write "data".

Congrats on 1950s HDD "technology" that we still use today. Ugh.

Can we just admit DRAM+HDD was a failure and go back to the core memory paradigm of instant access non volatile RAM?

 

[Blain]

Congrats on 1950s HDD "technology" that we still use today. Ugh.

That's what I say about the old fashioned four wheeled vehicles we drive around in.
They're simply glorified "horseless carriages".
When are we going to get a clue and move on into the future?

 

[Cerb]

0 F3 failures, here, been using them since 2-3 months after they came out. Sample size and luck of the draw, man.

modern hard disks have horrible reliability compared to old.

everyone knows this.

'Tis the truth. If your data, and/or uptime, is important to you, consider every mechanical drive you want to buy to be double the cost, and have one for backup or RAID.

Toilet paper roll. Coat it in iron dust. Spin it. Use a straw with a loop of wire to rear and write "data".

Congrats on 1950s HDD "technology" that we still use today. Ugh.

Can we just admit DRAM+HDD was a failure and go back to the core memory paradigm of instant access non volatile RAM?

When Other technologies are equally affordable, sure (and SSDs are getting there). I probably haven't spent as much on computers in my entire life as those Cheetahs cost when they were new. I would also go insane hearing Cheetahs while using my PC. Even with a dedicated separate drive for backup/recovery, HDDs are still cheap compared to other options, and cost matters.

I'd rather have cheap drives of so-so reliability, than have to spend a mint for a single quality drive, when both will be obsoleted in several years. Now, if I were running a business relying on data safety and computer uptime, that would not be my opinion. As a home user who occasionally uses his PCs for work, though, it's good enough. I realize that opinion sucks in some ways, but it is very much an economic decision.

 

[alkemyst]

updated OP, this drive was born on 6/2010...not two years old like I thought.