How many hard drives have died on you ?

[corkyg]

... 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.

You bring up valid points to consider. I do believe that large drives, i.e., >greater than 500GB, are more prone to failure. And, I do believe a lot has to do with how they are used and maintained.

 

[BUTCH1]

None recently but back around '96-00 I had a lot of issues with WD drives, mostly the 1Gb size. I've got a 7yr old Seagate as a storage drive, never a problem and a 128Gb SSD as my main drive. With prices the way they are now I can't see why anyone would not use an SSD. Even with an older E8400 system I still boot to desktop in 13-15 seconds and as far as bang-for-the-buck goes going SSD cannot be beat IMO.

 

[Charlie98]

Meh, I have one 500GB Seagate USB portable with something like 12 bad sectors in 25K hours, but it still performs and I use it on my game machine as a redundant backup drive. I did have my Samsung 256GB 840Pro die on me in less than a year... that was probably my worst failed drive happenstance... in fact, the only real drive failure I've ever seen on my systems. Thankfully, I'm a fanatical backup'er, more so since the Samsung failure, even, so it didn't really hurt me, just gave me a moment of pause.

And, like the OP, I have an Evil Seagate 3TB Devil drive in my HTPC... and it's fine. I did replace the older 2TB Seagate with a 5TB Toshiba, and then the 2 3TB drives (the Seagate and a WD Red) became the media backup drives... thereby minimizing my exposure to a failure.

Because I have everything backed up 5 ways to Sunday I'm not really concerned about a failing drive (except my OS SSD in my business desktop, which might have new data less than 24 hours old.) New and old components fail, there is no rhyme or reason... the key is to be prepared.

 

[iluvdeal]

You just jinxed yourself OP, I'd backup your 3TB drives right now if I were you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

We had some scattered thunderstorms last night, and I got a Skype call from a friend that I had sold a PC to semi-recently. I sold it with a free 240GB SSD, and also the factory-included 1TB HDD. He said that his power glitched, and when it came back a split-second later, his PC booted back up, and wanted him to create a "profile". I was like, "weird". Then he showed me the desktop, and it said "Lenovo", and I was like... hmm... that's a factory OS install, I didn't put that on. Then I remembered that the factory OS was still on the secondary HDD. So the BIOS failed to detect / boot the primary SSD, so it went to the secondary HDD to boot.

Not a good sign.

So I had him look in Disk Management, and the SSD wasn't showing up there at all either.

So I had him do what I've read on here that Crucial techs suggest, running the SSD for 30-60 minutes, with only power connected and no data cable, and see if it comes back.

Well, it never did. (It was an OCZ, waaay out of warranty.)

So he's getting along with the HDD instead.

I advised him if he ever gets another SSD, to also get a battery-backup.

 

[Annisman*]

You just jinxed yourself OP, I'd backup your 3TB drives right now if I were you.

So how do I do that without having to buy 12+TB of more HDD space just to do it ?

 

[IGemini]

Three different drives, all being used as secondary storage.

One was an 80GB Maxtor. By then Seagate bought them and it was past warranty, too small to be worthwhile anyway.

Another was a 300GB Seagate. Sent in for a refurb replacement but had already replaced the drive. Sold it to a friend who still has it.

The most recent was a 1.5TB Samsung Ecogreen drive, being used as an external media drive in a small enclosure. The failure was only a month or two after Samsung published that the drives didn't tolerate 35C+ temperatures very well and I wasn't looking for notices after running it so long. Got a warranty replacement just before it ran out, using as a second drive in my main machine.

 

[iluvdeal]

So how do I do that without having to buy 12+TB of more HDD space just to do it ?

What's worse, buying backup drives or losing your data? Take your pick.

 

[Annisman*]

Great, I've been farting around on the computer all day at work and now I have all the parts for a 24TB NAS sitting in my newegg cart. Gahhhhhhh !

 

[mikeymikec]

So how do I do that without having to buy 12+TB of more HDD space just to do it ?

You back up the most important stuff first, and steadily invest in more backup media as time goes by. I use a combination of backup HDDs and DVD recordables for backing up my stuff.