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i get quite a number of PMs from people needing to transfer their licenses after re-installing due to a hard drive failure. this has always struck me as odd, since the drives are supposed to last a VERY long time and be VERY dependable.
(i've only ever had one drive fail on me in over 25+ years)
maybe this informal poll will help people steer clear of the bum drives
so my question is, and i will fill out the poll possibilities as i get responses, which make/model of drive has failed on you?
None of those, but I just had a Raptor 150 go down.
In the 15 years or so I've had my own personal computers, I've only ever had 1 hard drive fail. It was a Maxtor (But ive had a ton of other maxtors that never died).
if you can remember/find the make and model of the drive(s), i will put it on the poll
don't want to bash the wrong drives... please only vote on drives that have failed for you personally
In the past 10 yrs I've had 1 Seagate die (out of over 10) and maybe 2-3 WD drives fail. EVERY Maxtor I've touched has died. I will not use Maxtor at all anymore, if someone's paying me to put a pc together for them and they ask for Maxtor I strongly recomend against it.
Only computer hardware Ive personally had fail were two buffalo link stations. First one lasted about 8 months and they replaced it with a newer and bigger one that lasted about 4 months. I just tossed it into the trash at that point. I had a fan fail on an old G-Force card but never found out till went to upgrade it. That's all my personal experiences.
However working for Dell the last 7 years of my life, it doesn't matter what vendor it is, they will fail. About once or twice a year a manufactuer will put out just a crap run of equipment from hard drives, to motherboards, to optical drives. Some can be fixed with firmware up dates, but few and far between do people do that before the problem occurs. Other times the fail rates are so high the stock has to be simply purged. Where that purged stock goes is anyones guess, but you get what you pay for on thoes discount web sites.
So eventualy your golden, can do no wrong, favorite brand will go to crap. And the brand you swore you would never buy will be the only company thats making what you want that works. Keyclone, if you think your seeing a trend then you prolly are and it will be gone by the next run of equipment. But god knows how long it will take for bad stock to get out of the enviroment.
Starbuck hit it on the nose. It's not a matter if drives fail, but when. I've had pretty much every brand go bad on me (rough guess of 20+ drives total). The only brand that I seen more failures than normal were the infamous IBM Deathstars. I've heard of issues with newer high density Seagate drives, but have not experienced any failures yet.
The only drive I've ever had fail on me was a Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM drive from like 4 years ago. I'm currently using a Maxtor 250GB and Seagate 80GB that I've had for approx 3.5 years and they are still alive and kickin. Although I need more space :O
I use hatachie for my OS drives and maxtor/seagate for big data and WD for WoW/EQ........
Ya drives fail but I have everything backup so I just take it out, try it a 2nd time, if it fails again, toss in garbage and put in anther.
Sometimes you will get head crashed that make it look like the drive is no good but if you reformate its fine again.
Im going to disagree with your last statement there Deathwalker. If a head on a HDD "crashes" it will leave scratches on the platter. No amount of formatting is going to make that drive good again and the cast off from that scratch is going to just make things worse if the drive is even functional at that point.