Another Drive Bites the Dust

[Soopafresh]

80 GB Western Digital. I noticed something was up last night. Fortunately, I copied the data off of it in time. Now, it doesn't even show up during boot.

I've got a bin of dead WD drives at work. Dunno why I keep them around. I'd say average life expectancy is around two years.

Anyway, dodged a bullet

[reboot]

I have 2 80 gig Seagate's that are still going strong. One of them is pushing 5 years.
I never had a WD or Maxtor last that long.

[Shadow57]

I have 2 80 gig Seagate's that are still going strong. One of them is pushing 5 years.
I never had a WD or Maxtor last that long.

Oh, don't say that.

We have a lot of Maxtors and some of them are coming up
on 10 years.....and they're loaded with files!

We just bought 2 Seagates to try them, but we still like Maxtor!

[mastersmurfie]

I have a Maxtor 80GB and a Western Digital 40GB in my system...both been running strong for about 3 years now...no problems at all

I defrag about once a month, reformat the Maxtor (my main drive) about twice a year.

guess I'll just have to wait for five years to be sure...

[reboot]

Defrag? Format? What are those?
I haven't done either in so very long...
Actually overdue for a fresh install...trouble is, it takes all day to get the software back on and working.

[makntraks]

Defrag? Format? What are those?
I haven't done either in so very long...
Actually overdue for a fresh install...trouble is, it takes all day to get the software back on and working.

So true... the PC my kids use needs an upgrade and it will take at least a day to make completely functional.....

makntraks

[jason69uk]

Western Digitals only last 2 years??

i bloody hope not i juss bought one for 120.

[bazooka]

Western Digitals only last 2 years??

i bloody hope not i juss bought one for 120.

They last longer than two years.

I installed two Western Digital Drives five years ago and they are still going strong.

[guns1inger]

IBM drives are much worse. I bought two within a month. The first died after about 3 months. Had it replaced (unfortunately with another IBM). The second died just after the 1 year warranty ran out. Replaced it with a seagate. The replaceemnt IBM started making noises after about 8 months. It's still in there, and still makes strange noises. I use it for scratch space only now. When it dies, a (big) Seagate will replace it.

[fmctm1sw]

80 GB Western Digital.

Not good. I have one of those...

[rallynavvie]

I have 3 80GB Maxtors going on 4 years, 1 200GB WD going on 4 years (I bought it when they were $300 for the OEM drive ), and several other 200-250GB models for 1-2 years. The old 200GB WD has freaked out and dropped from the system on a couple occasions, but a reboot brought it back and the all the diagnostics showed no problems with it so I figured it was cabling or seating on the IDE connectors. It has been running 24/7 for the last 8 months with no problems.

What is it you all do to kill hard drives? Damn and I thought I was hard on my computers

[lumis]

i've had pretty good luck with western digital hard drives..

many years ago i had a 1gb caviar drive for about 5 years before giving it away.. and i've had a 30gb drive for about 4 or 5 years, its been working great.. i've put it through a lot.. for about a year i took it back and forth from a friends house to burn dvd's, probably about 50 times.

[Shadow57]

What is it you all do to kill hard drives? Damn and I thought I was hard on my computers

At the risk of getting flamed, or even broiled, I'll mention defragging.

I like to keep my drives defragged. I've read that constant defragging
is tough on a drive. Seems like constant searching, moving etc would
be tougher.

Defragging works the heads etc, but doesn't constanty searching through
un-organized files work the heads a lot harder?

Heat is another killer of drives. My problem is a LOT of dust, which leads
to faulty fans, which leads to heat if I didn't keep after it. A tiny fan went
bad which brought the PC to a crawl.

Those are the 2 main things that I can think of that would kill a drive.
Maybe improper break-in of a new drive might be a factor. I don't know
if a new drive has to be broken in. Whenever I build a new PC I break
it in for a week or so.

If I'm wrong about all of this........flame away!

edit... I must be blind. Defragging was already mentioned by
others in this thread. Someday I'll learn how to read.

Well, the heat issue still stands!

[reboot]

I knew I would stir the pot
The WD's I was talking about come from back in the 3 gig days. Seagate had similar problems as well, and Maxtor was the drive of choice.
In the 10 gig days, Maxtor seemed to crap out, and Seagate gained ground.
In the 50 gig days, WD became king.
In the 90 gig era, Seagate came back with a vengence.
Since then, it's been a battle between the 3, and for a while WD had the upper hand with the 8 meg buffer drives.
Since then, it's anyone's guess, as they all perform, and last, well.
Everything but IBM "deathstar"

[otpw1]

80 GB Western Digital. ---EDITED-----

I've got a bin of dead WD drives at work. Dunno why I keep them around. I'd say average life expectancy is around two years.

Anyway, dodged a bullet

A lot of WD drives have 3 year warranties, get RMAs!

[ViRaL1]

IBM drives are much worse. I bought two within a month. The first died after about 3 months. Had it replaced (unfortunately with another IBM). The second died just after the 1 year warranty ran out. Replaced it with a seagate. The replaceemnt IBM started making noises after about 8 months. It's still in there, and still makes strange noises. I use it for scratch space only now. When it dies, a (big) Seagate will replace it.

That's why they call them IBM 'Deathstar' drives.

[Soopafresh]

It could be I had a lot of WD drive deaths because there were a lot of WD drives at work to begin with. ALL drives die, eventually. Keeping them cool with a fan will help their longevity, but the most important thing is maintaining backups. With DVD media as inexpensive as it is these days, it makes sense.

Also, enable S.M.A.R.T monitoring on your motherboard and you can see if your drive might be near kaput with an free app called DTEMP.

http://private.peterlink.ru/tochinov/

[Nelson37]

All HD's fail, and all HD manufacturers have problematic models every now and then. Proper cooling and regular defragging will definitely extend HD life.

Do you remember the make and model of the car that died while you were going to get a hot dog? Or do you remember the one that died while you were taking the head chearleader to the prom?

I once replaced a secondary Seagate drive in a Novell server mirrored array. For performance reasons, and on the advice of a Master CNE, I aborted the mirror process till the end of the day. (NEVER do this!) What happened next was only determined after some extensive research and testing.

The primary drive went off-line and the (empty) secondary drive was promoted to Primary. Seconds later, the formerly Primary, and full of data, drive came back on-line and was inserted into the Array as a secondary drive. The OS, seeing it now had both components of a mirrored array, automatically commenced copying the (empty) primary drive to the (no longer full of data) secondary drive. All data wiped out.

The moral of the story is that the drives were fine, it was a faulty PSU which was causing the problem. But I still avoid Seagate drives.

[rallynavvie]

Or do you remember the one that died while you were taking the head cheerleader to the prom?

IIRC we went in her car

[Musty_Hustla]

i have a 3.2gb seagate that's 8yo and still fine.

[RabidDog]

that CNE was probably a certified Unix network Technician.
2 ibm 40gb one dead and replaced by Hitachi (different?) one still running, not as silently as before tho

[ViRaL1]

that CNE was probably a certified Unix network Technician.
2 ibm 40gb one dead and replaced by Hitachi (different?) one still running, not as silently as before tho

Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technologies) bought IBM's hard drive operation a while back. They're making 500GB drives now.