How many hard drives have died on you ?

[Annisman*]

I've only ever had one hard drive crap out on me, an OCZ Vertex Turbo and even that was salvaged with a firmware update. Besides that, in my ten years of using HDD's/SSD's I haven't had a single one stop working, which is good because I never back anything up.

Right now my HTPC is rocking (4) 3TB Seagate HDD's all by itself (you know the ones with the 30-50% failure rates) going strong for 2.5 years. Am I blessed by the HDD gods ? How many HDD's have flamed out on you guys ?

 

[MongGrel]

A lot.

I still avoid Seagates these days personally and usually use higher end WD's, but that is just me maybe.

I've had problems with Spinpoints in the past also, but things change over time.

Unless I've had to build a new setup, even the old little WD Raptors held up well over 10 years I guess, still have 4 X 1TB RE3's on a hardware card from way back on the main for storage.

Try to use SSD's more lately for the OS and just go from there.

My two cents.

 

[Zor Prime]

Back in the day I used to have Western Digital HDD's crap out on me.

This was back when all the companies had good RMA policies so while you may have lost your data you were pretty much guaranteed to get a new drive if it was under 5 years old.

Anyway I had a recent bout with Samsung Spinpoint drives and instead of sending it back in I wrote 0's to the entire drive and it's been good since.

 

[larryccf]

FROM 1995 thru about 2010 i was, what you'd call a moderate user, used the computer mainly for invoicing, web sales etc.

I've had 3 die on me, all between 4.5 - 5 years of use - two that died were backup drives that didn't see a lot of use - all were seagate drives. One samsung drive is still going after 10 years of actual daily use - go figure

 

[Annisman*]

Seagate seems to be crap, I am going to swap them out with some WD 6TB drives, even with my luck I don't feel safe with Seagate.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Back in the day I used to have Western Digital HDD's crap out on me.

I used to use primarily WD drives, and TBH, haven't really had any of them fail on me. Then again, I sell them off after 3-5 years, as long they still don't have any bad sectors.

I've had a Seagate fail on me, after travelling cross-country in the back of a vehicle.

I've also had a 120MB Maxtor fail on me, back in the day, when I dropped a metal-backed keyboard on it, while it was running out in the open.

Also had a 1.2GB Conner (remember them?) die on me, due to old age.

 

[Annisman*]

On a side note, what do you guys do/use to check if your hard drives are in good running shape ?

 

[rchunter]

Recently..... a 320GB wd scorpio blue laptop drive and a 150GB wd raptor that was volume encrypted with dm-crypt/LUKS.

 

[Pandasaurus]

I've been running the same two 320GB Seagates in RAID0 for close to 10 years now. Haven't had any reason to run anything else yet.

 

[PhIlLy ChEeSe]

I had an OCZ crap out too, but is back up and running. Never had any go bad on me so far(knocks on wood).
@Annisman*
I don't live far from you.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

At home? Two or three over the last 15 years or so. I usually upgrade before that happens.

At work? Well... we're a storage company. So let me put it this way:

 

[Annisman*]

I had an OCZ crap out too, but is back up and running. Never had any go bad on me so far(knocks on wood).
@Annisman*
I don't live far from you.

Then why aren't we partying ?

 

[ksheets]

It's funny, I just pulled my 800Gb WD green drive out of my system today. Manufacture date of april2010 (5+ years old!).

I have one 1.5 seagate external drive that is probably three years old that is still chugging along.

NOW, for the failures...there are 2 identical external seagate 1.5 TB, an 800GB external WD and a 120GB hyperx ssd - all sitting on my shelf

 

[Zodiark1593]

Just my one laptop drive at 4 years old. I have reason to believe one of my externals may be on it's way out too, but it works fine plugged into my laptop. Clicks like mad when on the desktop though.

On a side note, I accidentally wiped the partition data like a dummy when I connected my main external to my desktop for the first time. Got all the data off of it though over several days. Transferring nearly 2 TB over USB 2.0 is painful.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Funny thread, because I just had to help my nephew. His system was ultra slow and not even booting to windows (Primary SSD). It was a dead secondary HD that was the cause.

Dead HDs at home and work? Countless!

Dead SSDs? 0 so far since 2008 with the first Intel X25-M drives.

 

[DigDog]

one dead WD of two after 7 years relentless use 24/7.

 

[mikeymikec]

Assuming that we're only talking about personally-owned drives:

1x IBM DeathStar 40GB drive (about the year 2000-2001), was fine the night before, utterly dead the next day and resulted in a lot of data loss (some old data was backed up though - I learnt my lesson regarding backups after this).
1x Seagate 7200.12 500GB drive (2014), bad sectors, it was giving me increasingly more trouble (failing to resume from hibernate for example) until I had enough of it.

 

[Puffnstuff]

My beloved veloraptor 600gb let go the other day with one of the nicest sounding head scrapes you've ever heard. The cacophony of clatter was the best hd death I've ever had and I let it sit in the cradle and run until it gave up the ghost completely.

Speaking of the old ibm's my 75gxp clicked for quite some time before it finally gave up the ghost on me. I was quite fond of that drive and it was innovative for the time with the glass platters. I'm hoping that before too long that I'll be able to replace all of my hd's with ssd's and eliminate mechanical failure from the mix altogether.

 

[corkyg]

Got my first HDD, a "hardcard" around 1986. Since then I have had many come and go, but actually only two real failures. One was a Seagate back in about 1989, a victim of the old "stiction" problem, and the other was a WDC in about 1998. All my drives are backed up by duplicates, both HDD and SSD. Current operational inventory is 10 HDDs, 3 SSDs, with 2 more SSDs on the way from the Egg.

 

[sandorski]

Been approx 10 years since I had one die. 2 or 3 HD deaths prior to then. The last catastrophic death was a Maxtor, when they had some bad Models, at that time I switched to Seagate and have used them since.

One of my earlier Seagate HDs became flaky after a number of years, but I think it may have been cause by a Motherboard with bulging Caps. It was an IDE Drive anyway, so I shelved it with a new build and got a SATA Drive to replace it.

 

[Mantrid-Drone]

Maybe Seagates of a certain manufacturing age or type do cause problems. I don't know.

All I can give as evidence is that I've been using new and 'clean pull' 120GB and 160GB IDE Seagates for PC backup external drives and upgrade replacements in original Xbox consoles for over 10 years and have yet to have one fail. The original Xbox 8 -10GB HDDs are usually Seagates and I have some of those including one in a well used console that still works perfectly and that's over 12 years old.

The Hitachi Travelstar40GB 2.5" in my Dell laptop bought in 2003 is original too. This is currently shown with a power on count of 6347 times and 621.0 days power on time. No problems with this so far.

In its early life it was a heavily used small business and family machine. But I should mention that for the last 5 years it has been employed as a desktop replacement. So whilst it is still regularly used it rarely gets moved.

This set me to wondering if there was any correlation between HDD failures mentioned here and the particular use of the computer or housing in which they're fitted. It would seem likely that HDDs in laptops and external HDDs would be much more often suffer physical shock during their lives than those in fixed desktop PCs.

A consequence of this might be why bigger Seagates, because they're relatively cheap and therefore bought by the mass market when wanting external storage at a good price/capacity ratio, are reported failing more often than some other brands.

 

[bononos]

At home? Two or three over the last 15 years or so. I usually upgrade before that happens.

At work? Well... we're a storage company. So let me put it this way:

Is your work experience with hdd failures consistent with Backblaze's findings?

 

[DigDog]

interesting fact:
IBM replaces approximately 50 drives every day throughout the whole of australia and new zealand.
considering their list of businesses, i reckon they pretty much run every server in the country.

 

[dbcooper1]

OP, by not having anything backed up, you're playing with fire; it's not a matter of IF but WHEN. I've seen some last 10 years and others less than 24 hours, and most of the others were somewhere in between. I replace most before failure because they become too slow or too small..

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Is your work experience with hdd failures consistent with Backblaze's findings?

In the year and a half I've worked here, we've only sourced from a single OEM for spinners, so I really can't say.