Post you hard drive horror stories!

[MDE]

I'll start off with mine.

About a year and a half ago I got a 7200RPM 60GB Maxtor drive from Best Buy. Opened the box up and it was a Quantum drive. Great. It worked for about 6 months, then crapped out. RMAed it, got another Quantum that happened to be DOA. Sent that back and got a Maxtor 80GB which died a few months later. Sent that one back and got a newer model 80GB drive, which developed a nasty clicking noise (mp3 available upon request). Drive #5 is on its way to me right now.

Someone please top this story to make me feel better .

 

I had some IBM deathstars.
I went away for a long weekend, came back and my main drive was clicking.
I was later told it was doing that since 10 minutes after I left the house.

 

[Electric Amish]

I don't have any...


..Oh wait! I bought these Seagate, IBM, Maxtor, WD drives and....they've all worked flawlessly.

 

[Ameesh]

this dirve , so hot was very good so i broke it, man it sucked

 

[Walleye]

i've never had a hard drive fail.

well.. i may have had a 4.3 gig hard drive fail. i'm not sure what to think of it... it's kinda...i dont know.

i'll get back to you.

 

[Kipper]

Make that 2x for Deathstar. I bought a 40GB 60GXP two years ago, and it crapped out on me after six months - got an RMA and that has been humming along fine in a friend's computer for a year or so now.

Have a Seagate 40GB as my main which has been running in there for two years now...

Maxtor 120 and WD 200GB have not crapped out of yet, humming along fine...

Edit: Post #2001 woohoo.

 

[Coolone]

I've have two deathstars die on me, and a maxtor 30gig

Seagate and WD have been treating me very well as far as HDs go

 

[waggy]

yeah i have one or two.

I have purchased 4 IBM deathstars err i mean deskstars over the last few years. I have had to RMA 2 of them.
just yesterday the 3rd one has died and IBM/hitachi wont let me RMA it. one of the pins became unsodderd from the board on the back. i wont ever buy IBM again.

I have a 500+ meg WD that still works. have it in a small server.

ticks me off that the this IBM died. it was a backup drive. i have a bunch of crap on it i dont really want to lose. ohwell gives me an excuse to buy a new drive. but still ticks me off.

 

[jmgonzalez]

Exchange Server - original 18GB SCSI HD dies on me one morning.

This has my logs that were not written to the database yet.

That was not a good way to start the week off...

 

[Iron Woode]

Back in the day, I bought a Western Digital 1.5 gig hdd. It died in 2 months. I RMA'd it and they sent me a 1.5 gig drive that died 2 weeks later. I RMA'd that drive and they sent me a 2.0 gig drive that died 6 months later.

After that I stopped buying WD, and bought a Quantum (when it was its own company) and never had a problem with it. Then they got bought out by Maxtor, and now I buy Maxtor and had only one drive die and it died 2 weeks after the 3 year warrantee was up.

 

[Provider]

IBM..... and thats all i have to say about that.

 

[privatebreyer]

Reformated a Western Digital 13.6GB drive after a year of use...Got 12.1 GB back.
Reformated the same drive a couple years later... It now has 7.1 Gb.

 

[ReiAyanami]

WDC died 8 months from the infamous recall a few years back

most recently a dead 40gb maxtor (rebadged quantum) died after 1.5 years.

seems like quantum qrapped out after maxtor bought them. although i do have a dying 780mb quantum but that's like 7 yrs old and its scsi

 

[EyeMWing]

Maxtor 120 gigger in a proprietary video editing station. It's sitting on a SCSI=>IDE converter (The station uses a SCSI interface, IDE drives are so much snazzier, and much larger)

Anyway, this drive 'died' twice - both immediately after the station was moved. It turns out that the cable to the SCSI converter was a little bit loose. Some hot glue fixed that.

I had a Seagate 1 gig low profile IDE go. Still have a Seagate 1 gig low profile SCSI.
I had a 6gb Quantum IDE give me the click of death. Cost me nothing and I got some cool magnets out of it.
I have a Toshiba laptop HDD (In a Compaq laptop) that literally rattles when you pick it up and shake it. Drives aren't supposed to do that. I'm holding onto the laptop pending payment for the replacement drive and service.
I had a pair of Seagate sub-500mb drives arrive DOA in a spare parts shipment - for free. They're awaiting disassembly for magnets.

I've either been lucky or know how to take care of my shtuff

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: EyeMWing
Maxtor 120 gigger in a proprietary video editing station. It's sitting on a SCSI=>IDE converter (The station uses a SCSI interface, IDE drives are so much snazzier, and much larger)

Anyway, this drive 'died' twice - both immediately after the station was moved. It turns out that the cable to the SCSI converter was a little bit loose. Some hot glue fixed that.

I had a Seagate 1 gig low profile IDE go. Still have a Seagate 1 gig low profile SCSI.
I had a 6gb Quantum IDE give me the click of death. Cost me nothing and I got some cool magnets out of it.
I have a Toshiba laptop HDD (In a Compaq laptop) that literally rattles when you pick it up and shake it. Drives aren't supposed to do that. I'm holding onto the laptop pending payment for the replacement drive and service.
I had a pair of Seagate sub-500mb drives arrive DOA in a spare parts shipment - for free. They're awaiting disassembly for magnets.

I've either been lucky or know how to take care of my shtuff

Yeah, those magnets are awesome. Strongest magnet I've ever seen came out of a 3.5GB Maxtor CrystalMax drive (coincidentally pulled the drive out of a Packard Bell before it died).

 

[SKORPI0]

Maxtor 100GB ATA/100 drive dead less than year after I bought it. Tried swapping the circuit board from a Maxtor 120GB and the freezer trick. No success, still not detected in BIOS. Lost about 80GB of downloads. Had backups of some of the downloads, but not all. :|

RMA and got a 160GB ATA/133.

 

[tranceport]

4 years ago.
I was asleep.
Awoken by click click. click click. click click.
troubleshot for a bit.. turns out it was 20gig drive full of mp3s.
WD replaced with no problem.

Lost all my mp3s though.

 

[StormRider]

My hard drive is really, really small. Most girls have never seen a smaller hard drive. That's my horror story.

 

[MDE]

Come on, I need horror stories, not "My drive died and they gave me one almost double the size" . I'm beginning to think Maxtor is sending me bad drives on purpose...

 

[FuZoR]

my 160GB just stop working wont boot up
there goes all my mp3s... anime... :-(

RMA ibm harddrive TWICE! luckily nothing to important on those

 

[Vic]

Hmm... in 15+ years, the only drive that's ever died on me was a 60GXP a while back. But I got most of my data off it (and I had backups ), and it was only 9 months old so the mom-and-pop I bought it from gave me a new one on the spot. Then I sold it.
I'm running 4 Maxtors in my house right now (combination of D740X's and DM9+'s) with absolutely no problems. The youngest of those drives is about a year old, the oldest is more than 2 years. I also have a 5 year old 8.4GB WDC that I use for temporary backups, and it's never had so much as the smallest error.

Have problems with your hard drives? Check your power supply. Is it a cheap brand? Most likely, there's your answer. Also double-check your cooling, ambient temperature, and make sure that you always run your PCI bus in spec at 33MHz when OC'ing.

 

[phpdog]

Hi ,

I bought a 10,000 rpm Seagate SCSI drive from ebay ... I had been looking forward to it arriving for like a week , I went out and bought an SCSI Card and Terminator and cables.
It finally arrived , Looked good nice condition couldnt wait to plug it in ... fired it up and it worked ok ... very smooth instalation ... Installed XP on it and started transferring all my DVD,s and mp3's to it .

Then it started ... I had a little clicking noise everytime i done a defrag ,,, then it started when i was booting up to windows ... and eventually it just done it whenever it felt like it . So me being a member of anandtech you can guess what i done I OPENED IT UP AND TOOK IT APART.... trying to see what the problem was of course.

When i opened it a found a line "like a scratch" circulating right round the disc , I started messing and messing and messing lossening all the screws and stuff ... i found that the only way to stop this infernal racket was to leave the top of the HDD. I had to put a little piece of plastic in the mechinism because it had an anti dont leave the top off thing.

TRUE STORY ... i started my PC one day and left it Copy & pasting about 1,200 mp3's from my other HDD Maxtor 30 Gig ... when i came back i see a blue screen ... MY SIDE WINDOW on my PC was like MAJOR cracked and my motherboard had been attacked by a [ IFH ] Identified Flying HD.

One of the Disks [ it had 4 ] had came flying off the spindle [ @ 10,000 rpm mind you ] bounced off the side window and went right through my EPoX 8KHA Motherboard.

Needless to say the board was a write off

 

[Ameesh]

Originally posted by: phpdog
Hi ,

I bought a 10,000 rpm Seagate SCSI drive from ebay ... I had been looking forward to it arriving for like a week , I went out and bought an SCSI Card and Terminator and cables.
It finally arrived , Looked good nice condition couldnt wait to plug it in ... fired it up and it worked ok ... very smooth instalation ... Installed XP on it and started transferring all my DVD,s and mp3's to it .

Then it started ... I had a little clicking noise everytime i done a defrag ,,, then it started when i was booting up to windows ... and eventually it just done it whenever it felt like it . So me being a member of anandtech you can guess what i done I OPENED IT UP AND TOOK IT APART.... trying to see what the problem was of course.

When i opened it a found a line "like a scratch" circulating right round the disc , I started messing and messing and messing lossening all the screws and stuff ... i found that the only way to stop this infernal racket was to leave the top of the HDD. I had to put a little piece of plastic in the mechinism because it had an anti dont leave the top off thing.

TRUE STORY ... i started my PC one day and left it Copy & pasting about 1,200 mp3's from my other HDD Maxtor 30 Gig ... when i came back i see a blue screen ... MY SIDE WINDOW on my PC was like MAJOR cracked and my motherboard had been attacked by a [ IFH ] Identified Flying HD.

One of the Disks [ it had 4 ] had came flying off the spindle [ @ 10,000 rpm mind you ] bounced off the side window and went right through my EPoX 8KHA Motherboard.

Needless to say the board was a write off

lol, serves you right for running a harddrive with out the cover.

 

[sciencewhiz]

Originally posted by: FuZioN
my 160GB just stop working wont boot up
there goes all my mp3s... anime... :-(

RMA ibm harddrive TWICE! luckily nothing to important on those

I'd argue that you didn't have anything important on the 160 either.

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: phpdog
Hi ,

I bought a 10,000 rpm Seagate SCSI drive from ebay ... I had been looking forward to it arriving for like a week , I went out and bought an SCSI Card and Terminator and cables.
It finally arrived , Looked good nice condition couldnt wait to plug it in ... fired it up and it worked ok ... very smooth instalation ... Installed XP on it and started transferring all my DVD,s and mp3's to it .

Then it started ... I had a little clicking noise everytime i done a defrag ,,, then it started when i was booting up to windows ... and eventually it just done it whenever it felt like it . So me being a member of anandtech you can guess what i done I OPENED IT UP AND TOOK IT APART.... trying to see what the problem was of course.

When i opened it a found a line "like a scratch" circulating right round the disc , I started messing and messing and messing lossening all the screws and stuff ... i found that the only way to stop this infernal racket was to leave the top of the HDD. I had to put a little piece of plastic in the mechinism because it had an anti dont leave the top off thing.

TRUE STORY ... i started my PC one day and left it Copy & pasting about 1,200 mp3's from my other HDD Maxtor 30 Gig ... when i came back i see a blue screen ... MY SIDE WINDOW on my PC was like MAJOR cracked and my motherboard had been attacked by a [ IFH ] Identified Flying HD.

One of the Disks [ it had 4 ] had came flying off the spindle [ @ 10,000 rpm mind you ] bounced off the side window and went right through my EPoX 8KHA Motherboard.

Needless to say the board was a write off

THAT'S what I was talking about! I feel much better now, thanks .