The hard drive is dying...

[MustangSVT]

I don't know why but so far 5 drives have been failing in the past 4 years or so where I didn't have ANY failure before that. (even the IBM deathstar ran fine!).

This includes all brands , WD, seagate, toshiba.. and so far 2 3.5" desktop drives and 3 2.5" portable drives.

Anyway current one is the WD 3.5" drive. There has been no errors or failures yet but I noticed excessive activity and lot of head noise (not knocks yet). And now its failing smart test.

Thankfully, its working fine and I backed up all of important data, but what can do with this now?

Do I try a low level format? or should I just chuck it?

are SSD's any better in terms of reliability? mmmm

update: the reason I ask is.. I wonder if I should get a new 1t~2tb hdd or if I can salvage this, i would rather get SSD and use this as storage drive. I do have a back up external drive.

 

[paperwastage]

just probability of you being unlucky

You could try a low level format, but I wouldn't trust any data on it. still under warranty?

perhaps something in your system's kill it (uneven PSU or power supply from mains)... or a rat entering your machine at night and chewing at the cable

 

[VirtualLarry]

Same PSU with all of those drives? Or different rigs/PSUs?

You can see what I might be getting at.

 

[MustangSVT]

Same PSU with all of those drives? Or different rigs/PSUs?

You can see what I might be getting at.

yep yep but its with different psu.

on desktop it was old antec and i moved to antec earth 450w. and they each ate one hdd. and for 3 portables, 1 toshiba and 2 WD. they were used on various machines.

but is there anything that can be done with this current "dying" hdd? or is any low level formatting pretty much all i can do?

 

[VirtualLarry]

You could zero-wipe it, but check the SMART data, look at the reallocated sectors and pending reallocations.

If those are non-zero, then wipe it and chuck it, IMHO. I've got a drive here, a Seagate 500GB 7200.11, and it started growing bad sectors. Practically brand-new, although it got jostled a bit for some time. Pretty useless to me now.

 

[stahlhart]

I don't know why but so far 5 drives have been failing in the past 4 years or so where I didn't have ANY failure before that. (even the IBM deathstar ran fine!).

How is your case ventilation? Have you been monitoring your drive temps? Any room in that part of the case for mounting a fan? There are HD-specific cooling solutions also.

 

[C1]

This is actually an interesting phenomena. It is surprising how often one sees a report from a particular individual that they have had a string of HDDs die while others (such as my case) effectively never experience an HDD failure (and Ive got a lot of HDDs of all kinds and some really really old ones as well as ones with zillions of hours and cycles on them).

This brings to mind a questioning of the whole idea of HDD reliability using historical statistics such as MTBF and averages for life span for any particular individual user. Mainly, it may not mean all that much as IT REALLY IS IMPORTANT TO KNOW THE DISTRIBUTION OF FAILURES ACROSS USERS. Im thinking of some kind of histogram that shows something like an order rank of failures experienced by user. In other words, it may well be that 50% of HDD failures, for some reason or another (maybe they are simply haunted! - ha), are experienced by 10% of users .

Anyways, just wondering.
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