The hard drive failure thread

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Be careful with the new Barracudas... They have head parking which can only be temporarily disabled (Resets on cold boot) with hdparm.

I would be wary of doing that. A user on the Seagate forums reported increasing numbers of reallocated sectors on two drives shortly after disabling the head park feature with 3rd party software.

I know a single unverified case is not proof of anything, but note also Seagate released a firmware update for these drives after much complaint from users - and the update only made the heads park in a quieter fashion.

My intense speculation and tentative opinion is, the drives must park heads or somehow end up with bad sectors. Otherwise why did Seagate not just disable the 'feature' completely with the firmware update instead of slightly tweaking the noise?

Makes me suspicious. In any case, time will tell.

[mockingbird]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Be careful with the new Barracudas... They have head parking which can only be temporarily disabled (Resets on cold boot) with hdparm.

[Shocker]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

The 2TB Seagate is a Barracuda Green (3 x 667GB, 5900RPM).

In my experience heavier drives (for the same number of platters) are more reliable. The only (somewhat) recent drives I've used are Seagates, and only 1 out of 4 still works. My PC has that drive (ST31000528AS) for A/V (mostly backups of CDs and DVDs, as I'd trust any HDD except a 75GXP/60GXP or slimline Maxtor over them) and 2 x WD800JD-00LSA0 (1 system, 1 data). The backups are as as they get - random old HDDs being plugged in occasionally and the data manually copied over. But I think there's a 97% chance it'll be okay.

[mariushm]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I have these in my computer:

ST2000DL003-9VT166 (5YD0W48B) 14740 hours (2 tb drive, g*d knows what series)

WDC WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0 (WD-WCAW30053135) 18272 hours (1 tb drive wd black)

WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (WD-WMAZA3290165) 14369 hours (2 tb , wd green i think)

WDC WD4000AAKS-00YGA0 (WD-WCAS84337477) 37237 hours (400 gb, wd black)

I actually upgraded the computer yesterday with new mb and cpu and memory so took advantage of that to snap some pics and clean the dust.. here you go





Also had a WD Green 1TB that I shipped to the datacenter my servers are at, but I don't have any tool to see the smart info directly.

(knock on wood) Maybe I was lucky, none of my drives have failed in the past, and I had a 640 GB seagate I sold, a 250 GB wd probably I gave to my sister... only a Maxtor 3.2 or 4.2 GB developed bad sectors after 1-2 years of usage.

BUT my system usually runs 24/7, it's powered by a quality psu and kept at decent temperatures.

[eccerr0r]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I've had too many hard drives die or become too unreliable to use on me. Yes these are all my own disks, not a company or anything... These are the ones I can think of, off the top of my head, there are more...

A lot of these are estimated POH. My current record for power on hours is around 70K and it's still working (120G Maxtor). I really should replace it, it's part of a RAID5 though.

500G Hitachi - Ate as loss - 10000 POH - media failure
500G Hitachi - RMAed - 300 POH - Controller board failure
120G Maxtor - RMAed - 4000 POH - media failure
60G WD - Ate as loss - 20000 POH - Unreliable
30G Quantum - RMAed - 10 POH - bearing failure
20G Hitachi/IBM - Ate as loss - 10000 POH - unreliable/unknown failure
6.4G Maxtor - Ate as loss - est 8000 POH - unknown, then fried with a bad PSU during debug
2G WD - Spared - est 8000 POH - Unreliable (sometimes it works so I use it when needed)
400M Maxtor - Ate as loss - est 5000 POH - unknown failure
330M Seagate - ate as loss - est 6000 POH - killed with bad PSU
260M Seagate - ate as loss - est 6000 POH - unknown failure
40M WD - Ate as loss - est 6000 POH - bearing/media failure

As seen I have all sorts of different HDDs die on me. I'm not going to use that as a reason to never buy a particular brand. They're all going to fail at some point - just get the one with the specs needed and BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.

[BigTroll]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I just put a 1 TB SAMSUNG FAILPOINT in my 2006 MacBook, Wish me luck

[valiant007]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

ive got a lot of costumers with WD hardrives and they most of the time have a lot of bad sectors.

[valiant007]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

2 640gb toshiba laptop drives.
both less than a year old.1 in a customers laptop with a ton of bad sectors and more in current pending.was very slow.
other in a neighbors laptop.
dropped dead.
no spin.
seagate 7200.11 1tb with bsy bug.was backed up so my neighbor will just rma.
had reallocated sectors and a few current pending before it died.i told him to back it up now.at least he listened!

i got 3 640gb toshiba hardrives. all of them less than a year old and all are totally dead. they cant be detected when i plug them in directly to a laptop or with an external encosure.

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I tried to RMA a drive that came from a Seagate NAS, they refused saying taking it out voided the warranty.

WD will probably tell you to take it back to Acer.

[mockingbird]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Ok, this clears things up. A link I found on a thread about this exact topic on their forum:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1058

Once we received the defective drive, the warranty on the replacement drive is updated...

So they have a "drop-shipper" for them in my Province who signals them that I have actually sent the package and that they have received it, and then they signal WD in California to send the replacement drive, and when WD actually receives the drive, they apply the actual warranty period. I'm confident that the local drop-shipper actually opens the package and verifies you have sent the proper drive and it is indeed eligible for RMA before giving the OK signal.

Now to check if I can get a replacement for that nearly brand new Caviar Blue I got out of an Acer where the customer couldn't wait for the RMA so he just paid for a new drive (Another Caviar Blue - yea yea I know... But WD is still the most consistent in my opinion).

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

They have no legal ability to do so. You purchase something, it needs to be repaired, you send it in for a repair, and now your warranty is shortened to 90 days after the replacement was issued? Where's the logic behind that?!

From the point of view of making more profit it is logical, although you are right, it doesn't really make sense, I must have been thinking of something else.

[kc8adu]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

or the warranty database needs to refresh with updated data for your drive.
had brand new seagate drives of a just introduced model that were not in the warranty lookup.when i called the csr stated these were just shipped a few days before and it took a few days to update.
yes i had a doa.

[mockingbird]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

They have no legal ability to do so. You purchase something, it needs to be repaired, you send it in for a repair, and now your warranty is shortened to 90 days after the replacement was issued? Where's the logic behind that?!

HP has a policy that you get an additional 90 days after a repair or replacement, so that even if you RMA the item a day before the warranty is up, you have an additional 90 days after receiving the replacement. Maybe you are thinking of that...

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Nope. The replacement drive should be covered until the original warranty is up. WD

Where does it actually say that? Not saying you're wrong, but I don't recall actually reading that anywhere, mainly as I haven't returned a drive to WD before.

[c_hegge]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Nope. The replacement drive should be covered until the original warranty is up. WD

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Isn't it standard practice that all replacement drives (refurbished of course) only have 90 days warranty or such?

[mockingbird]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Western Digital tries to pull a fast one on me:

The RMA'd drive:


And the replacement:

[Pentium4]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Most common failing drive in the world = Seagate Barracuda ES2. They're SAS drives that idle in the mid forties, under load they'll burn your hand!!! I love Seagate but those drives are ticking time bombs.

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I have a box full of failed drives.

Fujitsu, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, Conner Peripherals, Toshiba, IBM ... and probably more.

Either loads of bad sectors or click of death.

What more is there to say? Some drives fail. I don't know the knowledge to diagnose exactly why.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Western Digital Caviar 1GB drive, WDAC21000-00H. Had a Mfg. date of 1996-02-29.

That gen of Caviar, pre-1998 seem to be the worst for me. Had 2 of them with bad sectors and one failed with a click-of-death with any attempt to access past 238 MB. They seem to be more inconsistent in QC then 1998s and later.

In fact, the worst one was a 1996! Failed out of the blue with a dead broad region. That was the "238 MB" 1 GB.