Instead of bad caps for this post, bad HDDs instead ;)

[RJARRRPCGP]

Well, I went to a place in Windsor, Vermont that deals with used PC parts, both good and bad, thus I went to test some HDDs. Sad, but true, saw a good amount of bad Western Digital HDDs.

I noticed that when Western Digital HDDs fail, the common symptom is the failure of accessing most of the drive, only a quarter of the HDD is readable and writable! Then if and when I attempt to access beyond the quarter of the HDD space, bad sectors are reported then the OS locks up usally with a click of death.

Saw a Caviar WD300BB 30 GB UDMA 100 7,200 RPM HDD that was made in 2002. To my major disappointment, the HDD, even when no older than 2002 when powered, immediately gave me a SMART error, the HDD literally repeatedly emitted a bleeping sound accompanied by me feeling the HDD pulsing with each bleep sound.

I also saw a 1 GB version that out of the blue was inaccessable beyond 238 MB then if any program attempted to access beyond 238 MB of the HDD, the utility would lock up and give me a click of death. When I tried Spin Rite, even that failed.


Has anyone been seeing a rash of bad HDDs lately? (excluding the IBM Deskstar HDDs that some people are having major problems with)

[willawake]

I have had mixed experiences. My friend at the computer shop told me that they get more WD returned with failure than Seagate but he also advised that they sell more WD.

In the office we used to have quantum fireballs. I still have 3 running today after years. Others failed dissapointingly. I have seen a maxtor slow down to an incredibly slow speed so it was replaced. I have never seen that with other HDDs. Then we moved to WD. Same mixed experience as with the quantums. Some still running great after 3 years. But lately i have switched to Seagate because :

1. I had two WD hard disks which did not pass the dlgdiag (too many errors) as new.
2. WD hard disks failed in the mailserver after 1 year and then the next and next after 2 months.
3. I had a WD develop an abnormal sound early.
4. I had a WD which made a high pitched sound from new but works fine.
3. Seagate come in nice protective plastic cases.
4. I feel like a change.

I have a new seagate yet to be installed which gives the impression it is vibrating excessively (still have to decide what to do about that).

In conclusion, I think that many products including hard disks are becoming too cheap and that can only mean worse quality. It is a PIA when an office hdd fails, takes me a day to do the setup again. I prefer to reinstall windows with newer versions of all software and drivers than keep a ghost of each computer. i always scan every new hdd with the manufacturers utility before installing. I know that dlgdiag is an honest utility, not sure about the seatools though.

One thing i would never buy is second hand hard disks though.

[RJARRRPCGP]

I'm thinking about getting a Seagate HDD, because of the 8.5 ms seek time.

Should be faster with almost everything.


But unfortunately at the used computer part place in Windsor, Vermont, when I saw a Seagate 10 GB UDMA 100 HDD which also has the low 8.5 ms latency, it was bad, some bad sectors and was slow. When I decided to copy a couple of large files from one folder on the HDD to the Windows desktop, it was slower than it was supposed to be and sounded like a jackhammer. LOL.

Thus I was required to take that HDD back and say that it's bad.

Was getting unlucky at that place so far.

[willawake]

i forgot to say that i have worse experience with the newer black WD caviar se hard disks although i have some good ones.

forget about used hdds. used is good for anything but hdds.

do you use the manufacturers utility to write zeros on the drives? sometimes revives a previously bad hdd. but any pings and other crappy sounds, forget about it. no sense putting data on it.

maybe find some mobos at that place, recap them and sell em and then buy a new drive.

i have a ibm deathstar working fine. i was lucky.

[RJARRRPCGP]

i forgot to say that i have worse experience with the newer black WD caviar se hard disks although i have some good ones.

forget about used hdds. used is good for anything but hdds.

do you use the manufacturers utility to write zeros on the drives? sometimes revives a previously bad hdd. but any pings and other crappy sounds, forget about it. no sense putting data on it.

maybe find some mobos at that place, recap them and sell em and then buy a new drive.

i have a ibm deathstar working fine. i was lucky.

Yep, I did with the Western Digital HDDs, but no change.

Also, I do have some good used HDDs, just that at the place I have been at, hasn't been weeding out all of the bad HDDs. I actually go there to test HDDs and if no errors and abnormal sounds, I then say that they're fine.

I brought this topic up, because I saw HDDs that were new and failed in less than 3 years. Failed probably before the end of the warranty.

[RoadKill]

In Seagate I trust.

[Fatal0E]

Sell
Maxtor---very high failure rate within first 2 years
WD---recently a somewhat concerning failure rate within 2 months
Samsung----do these things actually fail? sent like 2 back in last 3 years
Hitachi----Never sent one back
Seagate---Since barracude IV only sent 1 7200.7 back


move about 60 drives per week, random makes, havent stocked maxtor in about 3 months though.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Both Maxtor HDDs that I purchased are running in my PC are fine.


Just be wary of any bad sectors. Like the bulging with capacitors, bad sectors are the common first symptom of HDD failure.

[bushytails]

Quantum drives are the only ones I've ever had fail, aside from one WD... Every quantum I've owned, save for the one I just put into a computer 3 days ago, has failed in the same way... sitction on the main bearings. At one point I had THREE quantum drives, all of different models, that took a sharp twist to get the drives to spin up on a cold morning...

--Randy

[willawake]

Samsung----do these things actually fail? sent like 2 back in last 3 years

hmmm. I have heard they are very quiet too. i will check these out. Samsung has very good quality control.

Hitachi----Never sent one back

hitachi bought IBM HDD division a few years back. maybe the quality control is better now. IBMs used to be made by http://www.excelstor.com/ in China. I think they still make at least some of the models. Excelstor also make a few models under their own brand. I have seen these in the shops here.

Maxtor---very high failure rate within first 2 years

Maxtor Atlas Ultra320 scsi drives are in many servers HP, Dell etc. I hope they dont have the same failure rate (have 4 in my HP)

[RoadKill]

I don't know about high end Maxtors, but I can tell you, if you ever come across a slimline 3.5" maxtor, they are the work of Satan, they will fail as soon as any bad cap

[RJARRRPCGP]

I don't know about high end Maxtors, but I can tell you, if you ever come across a slimline 3.5" maxtor, they are the work of Satan, they will fail as soon as any bad cap

Thanks for the heads up, but a slimline 3.5" HDD I have seems to be the best HDD performance wise I would ever own so far. Just have to download the Maxtor HDD diagnostic utility, if able to. The HDD seems OK, but it's only 1 year old, was manufactured on March 29, 2003 according to the data print.

It didn't make any abnormal sounds that I can distinguish and is the quitest HDD I have had.

It even appears to perform better than my Maxtor 80 GB UDMA 100 5,400 RPM HDD. HD Tach showed it basically comparing right with the SATA HDDs, get around 50 MB/s for the sustained transfer rate!

[RoadKill]

No disrespect to your experience, but I have personally seen slimline 3.5" Maxtor HDDs (40GB ones) fail en masse, and it happened to my primary system, as well as many Dells at work.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Well, with that HDD, Powermax passed. 8) No bad sectors at all when I formatted it once already.

To be honest with you, I had the worst luck with Western Digital HDDs. The HDDs I find bad sectors with are usually Western Digital HDDs.

So far, probably until I go back to that place in Windsor, Vermont, I had only saw one bad Maxtor HDD.

The symptoms were different:

1. When installing Windows 98 SE, the Windows 98 SE installation process failed with a cab file decoding error.

2. Suddenly, but probably not until at least a week later, the BIOS failed to even detect the HDD at all!!!
Then, when I hooked it up to another PC, the BIOS ended up hanging and then displayed the message stating that the HDD failed to respond or that a C: drive error occured.


That was with a Maxtor 1 GB HDD. All of the Maxtor HDDs I purchased, including the 13 GB 7,200 RPM HDD from November, 1999 are still usable and still haven't even saw one bad sector so far!

[Preowner]

I watched maxtor and WD go from most popular to pos. Atleast thats how it was in my area.

I always dispised maxtor because for some reason they went for years w/o labeling the drive size.

Seagate, I hear way back owning one was a fate worse than the owning several clicking deskstars.

Being disgusted with the current default cheap drive makers I looked elsewhere. I now own a Samsung 120Gb Sata drive. Only working on a few months, but I hear no motor whine, and head movement noise is only noticeable because the vibration is amplified by my desk. I got it for less than $70 new online.

[willawake]

[sulbert]

Nobody mentioned Fujitsu hard drives here? Especially the MPG series have remarkable failure rates. My last Fujitsu experience was a MPF3102AT which started making weird things and did not pass the comprehensive test of Fujitsu Diagnostic Tool.

[Lance Thornton]

I work as a subcontractor for the US Government. The PC Admin and I are good friends and have lunches together when possible. He recently told me about 3 Maxtor Diamondmax SATA drives failing within weeks of each other. All out of Dells and currently, he is waiting for an adapter to try to recover the data. One big problem is that one harddrive is his, and it has the data recovery software on it! If memory serves, Seagate has changed to a 5 year warranty, so maybe they know something about their product that we don't yet.