another dead HD, which do you use?

[martin griffith]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock. I'd accept 100G's if they lasted longer...




martin

 

[Pooh Bear]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock. I'd accept 100G's if they lasted longer...

My experience of the former Quantum drives as system disks was exemplary.
I don't recall one of their SCSI drives ever giving problems and I only
once had a problem with one IDE drive of their manufacture - long, long
after purchase btw - and it was recoverable enough to make a perfect
backup.

No other brand of drive ever came close. Note that IBM, Apple and I think
maybe HP and Compaq have all used Quantum drives.

They got bought by Maxtor. I hear mixed opinions about them now.

I thought I was buying quality with IBM deskstars for a Raid mirror.
Although they aren't from the series that have the 'click of death'
syndrome - one drive irregularly seems to fail to unlock its heads ( as
it seems ) and I get a broken mirror message. Restarting the PC always
fixes it. I don't like using a questionable drive - but I don't think I'm
going to get it replaced under these circumstances. There is of course
always the mirror itself to fall back on luckily !

Graham

 

[John Popelish]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock. I'd accept 100G's if they lasted longer...

The trouble with this information is that by the time you have
established that any brand or model has long term reliability, the
design has changed. That said, I have had very good results with 3 or
4 Western Digital Caviar EIDE drives. They have all lasted in excess
of 5 years (some used almost every day) and are still doing fine.
They are not the high spindle speed versions, however, and all the new
ones seem to run at 7200 RPM.

 

[Pooh Bear]

The trouble with this information is that by the time you have
established that any brand or model has long term reliability, the
design has changed. That said, I have had very good results with 3 or
4 Western Digital Caviar EIDE drives. They have all lasted in excess
of 5 years (some used almost every day) and are still doing fine.
They are not the high spindle speed versions, however, and all the new
ones seem to run at 7200 RPM.

Just to spoil the fun I've seen a totally seized WD Caviar ( spindle motor
won't run - admittedly after storage ) and another one I had used to make
disturbing 'zizzing' noises - and that was a 5200 rpm drive !

7200 rpm is the norm for desktop drives now. 10,000 is not unusual - once
the province of ultra high spec SCSI drives that I think now run at up to
15,000.

Oh I've had - pro-rata - more trouble with Seagate drives than I would wish
on anyone. I wouldn't touch one with a bargepole now.


Graham

 

[colin]

Just to spoil the fun I've seen a totally seized WD Caviar ( spindle motor
won't run - admittedly after storage ) and another one I had used to make
disturbing 'zizzing' noises - and that was a 5200 rpm drive !

7200 rpm is the norm for desktop drives now. 10,000 is not unusual - once
the province of ultra high spec SCSI drives that I think now run at up to
15,000.

Oh I've had - pro-rata - more trouble with Seagate drives than I would wish
on anyone. I wouldn't touch one with a bargepole now.


Graham

same here, i can honestly say that all the drives ive had trouble with have
been seagate both at work and at home,
however this was some time ago when any other than seagate was just about
unafordable, so there were a lot of them about, but ive since had a lot of
maxtor/quantum drives that have been used 24/7 that have never had a hiccup,
only replaced to upgrade size.

I initialy bought maxtor becuase they were the only company to publish
reliability records. the latest maxtor was super quiet, i just purchased a
hitachi cos it was the only one of its size but its far noisier.

Colin =^.^=

 

[Tim Shoppa]

Well, with anything it's not a matter of if it will fail but when.

But two hard drives in the same month would make me more than just
suspicious that there's a common external cause. Power supply, etc.

my latest drive must not be exposed
to more than 350G's of shock.

You'd be surprised how many G's you get from a short drop to a hard
floor.

Tim.

 

[Ban]

Well, with anything it's not a matter of if it will fail but when.

But two hard drives in the same month would make me more than just
suspicious that there's a common external cause. Power supply, etc.


You'd be surprised how many G's you get from a short drop to a hard
floor.

Tim.

Well, who drops the HD to the floor? Usually they are in the case. If you
operate HD not fixed in the bay, the continuous vibration might kill it too.
I had that with an IBM drive that was reducing its speed by the factor of 5
when loose on the desktop.
I have a couple of Maxtor drives one is 8yrs. old 24/7 working fine,
another(16G) is 5yrs. old and a new 80G. They are all reliable. IBM and
Seagate were failing in the guarantee time (luckily).
It is really a PITA with modern parts, supply and MB, the stuff from 1986
still works perfectly (286+287, 20MHz).


ciao Ban

 

[Steve Sousa]

Well, who drops the HD to the floor? Usually they are in the case. If you
operate HD not fixed in the bay, the continuous vibration might kill it
too.

What? So you never saw a "technician" assembling a pc like: the hd standing
on its side, the guy moving stuff around touches the drive si it falls from
it's side to flat.
How many G's would that be?
No need to say i never bought or recomended a pc build there...

 

[artie]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock. I'd accept 100G's if they lasted longer...

To make sure my hd's are dead, I usually use a 1/4" carbide-tipped
drill bit. Put it in the drill press and punch through. That's large
enough to pass a drywall screw, which I use to attach the offending
device to a 4x4 in the garage.

The collection seems to have a large number of 2.5" IBM Travelstar
devices, most from colleagues at work.

The prize of the collection is a prototype 10KRPM SCSI device, 3.5
inch, full height. Sounded like a jet engine when it spun up. When it
died, it sounded like a jet engine trying to digest a stepladder (or
your choice of large undigestible object). That one took an extra long
drywall screw.

Disk drives are like tires (or tyres, depending on which side of the
Atlantic you're on). They *will* fail -- it's just a matter of when,
and how prepared you are when it happens.

Backups are your friend. I have a very, very scored 3.5 inch hd
platter at work to which has been affixed a clock movement. Written on
the platter is the question "Backed up recently?"

 

[qrk]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock. I'd accept 100G's if they lasted longer...
martin

Nowadays, Samsung drives are supposed to be the good ones. They sure
are quiet. This could change tomorrow as manufacturers seem to have
their bad spells. Maxtor is having problems with their drives. I don't
know if they have solved their problems yet.

 

[Richard Henry]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock. I'd accept 100G's if they lasted longer...

My son's computer starting running slow when playing WOW and pumping out
error messages about hard drives. We took it apart and found a lot of dust
in the CPU heatsink fingers. We blew it out with the garage air compressor
hose and everything is back to normal.

 

[Ian Stirling]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

RAID, and warrantied drives.
That, or ebay the aging ones before the year is up.

 

[Paul Hovnanian]

I've found Western Digital drives to be quite flaky in one respect.
Their firmware seems to be particularly susceptible to damage from
certain combinations of OSs and applications.

I found this out when decommissioning some surplus systems that were
used to run Autocad. Any attempt to reformat the disk in preparation for
a new system install would result in a disk that even Western Digital's
diagnostic utilities could no longer detect. In order to verify the
problem, we purchased brand new WD drives, installed W98 and Autocad and
then attempted to reformat the drives just to see how they behaved. All
died. The variable appeared to be Autocad, as systems that never it
installed were still useable after a reformat. My guess is that the
Autocad license key installation somehow interferes with contents of a
master boot record or partition table that the firmware needs to set up
the disk. Once it is corrupted, the OS will run, but it can never be
re-formatted again.

Other brands (Maxtor, for example) did not suffer the same problems.

 

[Pooh Bear]

I've found Western Digital drives to be quite flaky in one respect.
Their firmware seems to be particularly susceptible to damage from
certain combinations of OSs and applications.

I found this out when decommissioning some surplus systems that were
used to run Autocad. Any attempt to reformat the disk in preparation for
a new system install would result in a disk that even Western Digital's
diagnostic utilities could no longer detect. In order to verify the
problem, we purchased brand new WD drives, installed W98 and Autocad and
then attempted to reformat the drives just to see how they behaved. All
died. The variable appeared to be Autocad, as systems that never it
installed were still useable after a reformat. My guess is that the
Autocad license key installation somehow interferes with contents of a
master boot record or partition table that the firmware needs to set up
the disk. Once it is corrupted, the OS will run, but it can never be
re-formatted again.

Other brands (Maxtor, for example) did not suffer the same problems.

Did you try a *low-level* format of said drives ?

Graham

 

[Ben Bradley]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

I question the usability of informal polls such as this, but FWIW
I've been using Western Digital with good luck. This 1999 machine
still has the original IBM 28G, I added a WD 40G for D:, and recently
replaced that with a WD 120G (pricewatch.com, under $0.50/gig). My
newer machine, Compaq Presario 977, came with a Maxtor 60 that died
after only a year or so, and I put in two WD80's, and more recently
replaced one of those with a 120G.

Here's an interesting thing that's kist happened... I've got an
older 400MHz (Dell XPS-400) thrift-store buy on the electronics bench
with the older WD 40G and WD 80G drives from the above machines, both
drives about 3 to 5 years old, with NO bad blocks (just like all the
other live drives I have, even the oldest, the IBM 28gig). I
occasionally run scandisk on my machines to see that the drives are
still okay (and 'exercise' them to find any potetial fault). Last week
BOTH of these drives in this machine started showing bad blocks, and
showed more of them every time I ran scandisk. I started wondering if
a power glitch got to them, because they hadn't been dropped. A couple
of days ago I remebered moving the CRT monitor (the old IBM VGA that
they made a bazillion of) from two feet away to right next to the
computer cabinet several days earlier. The drives are vertical in the
bottom of the case, were maybe 9 inches from the deflection yoke, and
I wondered if the yoke was making enough of a magnetic field at that
distance to mess up the drives. I moved the monitor away, and so far
scandisk shows no ADDITIONAL bad blocks, so all indications are it WAS
the CRT monitor causing it. I had heard the magnetic domains on a hard
disk have very high coercivity and can't be erased by, for example,
moving a magnet anywhere along the case.
Has anyone else had a problem with this, or noticed it? I would
have thought I would have heard "Don't put the monitor right beside
your computer case" if this were a problem. I haven't heard that, but
this appparently is a problem.

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock.

Is that powered down? ISTR there's also a max shock rating while
running, and it's much lower.

 

[Zak]

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

Take a look at http://www.storagereview.com/. Their survey is the only
of its kind I know, but you need to register to read (as they want you
to take part and give data on failed and not yet failed drives you own).


Thomas

 

[Al]

To make sure my hd's are dead, I usually use a 1/4" carbide-tipped
drill bit. Put it in the drill press and punch through. That's large
enough to pass a drywall screw, which I use to attach the offending
device to a 4x4 in the garage.

The collection seems to have a large number of 2.5" IBM Travelstar
devices, most from colleagues at work.

The prize of the collection is a prototype 10KRPM SCSI device, 3.5
inch, full height. Sounded like a jet engine when it spun up. When it
died, it sounded like a jet engine trying to digest a stepladder (or
your choice of large undigestible object). That one took an extra long
drywall screw.

Disk drives are like tires (or tyres, depending on which side of the
Atlantic you're on). They *will* fail -- it's just a matter of when,
and how prepared you are when it happens.

Backups are your friend. I have a very, very scored 3.5 inch hd
platter at work to which has been affixed a clock movement. Written on
the platter is the question "Backed up recently?"

The 20M external drive for my MacPlus failed after about 12 yrs. And
that was when I moved it to the basement. I think it couldn't handle the
shock. Believe or not, it hadn't been moved the whole time I used it. So
far that was the only failure of a hard drive for me (knock on wood).

Al

 

[martin griffith]

Did you try a *low-level* format of said drives ?

Graham

I'm doing (well the PC is) a low level format, writing zeros to the
drive, using a seagate Disk Wizard program, at the moment.

Next I'll do a high level format ,writing ones to the drive.

sorry, coudlnt resist




martin

 

[Tom MacIntyre]

I've found Western Digital drives to be quite flaky in one respect.
Their firmware seems to be particularly susceptible to damage from
certain combinations of OSs and applications.

I found this out when decommissioning some surplus systems that were
used to run Autocad. Any attempt to reformat the disk in preparation for
a new system install would result in a disk that even Western Digital's
diagnostic utilities could no longer detect. In order to verify the
problem, we purchased brand new WD drives, installed W98 and Autocad and
then attempted to reformat the drives just to see how they behaved. All
died. The variable appeared to be Autocad, as systems that never it
installed were still useable after a reformat. My guess is that the
Autocad license key installation somehow interferes with contents of a
master boot record or partition table that the firmware needs to set up
the disk. Once it is corrupted, the OS will run, but it can never be
re-formatted again.

If this is the case, I'd be blaming Autocad.

Tom

 

[Ben Bradley]

If this is the case, I'd be blaming Autocad.

comp.cad.autocad and alt.cad.autocad are moderately active groups,
perhaps someone there has an explanation/fix. This looks like a rather
bizarre problem related to Autocad's license key/copy protection
scheme.
If it were my drives and my registered copy of Autocad I'd ask both
WD and Autodesk about it. At least one of them is doing something
wrong.