[drive failure] tell us which drives have failed on you

[algol]

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.

The Raptor and some Seagate 200GB I have around both make this horrible scraping noise when you power them up...then there's a 750GB that scrambles data you put on it in short order, and a 1GB that does nothing at all.

Drives die. If you're lucky, not for a long time. I have lots, some fairly old, so I get a dead one a few times a year. Sometimes a few weeks apart, sometimes many months apart.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Dont drives mark bad sectors when they format?

[Herc130]

The seagate 1.5TB drives suck major ass. I bought 4 of those drives. Of the 4, ZERO of them would take loading the OS. I found this out after my seagate 1tb bit the dust after 9 months of use. Then read forums full of post after post of people with the same drives and problems. Normally I use WD and yes I did have 1 WD go bad, so am not locked down on what brand to get. Went with Seagate because of the deals going on and thought it would be as good as WD....but yah..5 out of 5 drives bad. 1 died totally after 9 months, 4 will work as storage but for whatever reason will not load an OS. Keeps on failing durring install. Ordered a new WD and OS install went flawless after that.

[keyclone]

Keyclone, if you think your seeing a trend then you prolly are and it will be gone by the next run of equipment.

i'm guessing you are probably right, sorry to say.

the poll will be mostly worthless then, as the same model can have good or bad runs. what it would point to is the quality control systems the companies have in place... but that can be variable as well.

hmph

[Starbuck_Jones]

No they don't Sam. A quick format just erases the index information on a drive. Think of the HDD like a text book with a table of contents/index. If you erased that info only, you wouldn't know where anything is in the book but all the pages are still full of txt and pictures. But for all useable purposes its now blank. Thats where all the rumors and like about even if you erase/delete a file the info is still there comes from. Its just removing the pointers to that info is all and eventualy will get overwritten by new data. Now a slow format like when you install windows and it gives you the option between a quick or slow. Is the same as a quick format, but it will run a chkdsk as well. This still doesnt erase any real data and yea chkdsk can fix minor problems with file structure, as well as help map out bad clusters and stuff. But it doesnt realy make sense for software to control bad blocks as it wont be relevant to anything unless that software is running.

There are a small handfull of apps out there that will do a low level format and acutaly write 0's or 1's to every block and most SCSI and Raid controlers can do this as well.

Most mapping out of bad blocks is done by the firmware of the HDD itself. Simple thresholds, like if a block fails to write, it tries again and again. Eventualy at some magic number of failed read attempts or write attempts the firmware flags that block as bad to the bad block list. If that list grows to a certian point then you will get things like SMART or predicted failures on post. Now if you have real physical damage to a drive like a head crash that leaves a nice scratch around the platter, theres no fixing that.

[Natch]

I've had a lot of WD drives die over the years, everything from 80gb drives to 500gb ones (yet I kept buying them for some strange reason, I've stopped now though )

[Ughmahedhurtz]

It may not have been obvious (unless you're in the PC tech industry) but we just went through a major shift in drive platter density at the same time as a shift to faster interfaces (data rate and "percentage-volume" seek times) here in the last 2-3 years. Any time you go through dramatic changes like this, I'm never surprised that failure rates spike. Of course, you could also accurately assert that increased outsourcing of drive manufacturing to cheap options such as Shenzhen companies (e.g.: Foxconn) could also be a contributing factor.

I've had 7 PCs here in operation since about 2000 with various drive sizes and a few from each of the brands listed in the poll above, with zero failures whatsoever. Granted, none of mine are over 150GB in size and only two of those are the new raptor 150s. I generally buy at the "75th percentile" in PC equipment so I'm always a few revs past the "bleeding edge" and companies have usually had time to debug things when I choose to buy 'em. :P

My 2 copper, at any rate.

[Nitro]

I've had a few raptors of diff sizes go down on my personal machines but at work I've seen just about every make and model go down sooner or later.

[Zzyzxx71]

It may not have been obvious (unless you're in the PC tech industry) but we just went through a major shift in drive platter density at the same time as a shift to faster interfaces (data rate and "percentage-volume" seek times) here in the last 2-3 years. Any time you go through dramatic changes like this, I'm never surprised that failure rates spike. Of course, you could also accurately assert that increased outsourcing of drive manufacturing to cheap options such as Shenzhen companies (e.g.: Foxconn) could also be a contributing factor.

I've had 7 PCs here in operation since about 2000 with various drive sizes and a few from each of the brands listed in the poll above, with zero failures whatsoever. Granted, none of mine are over 150GB in size and only two of those are the new raptor 150s. I generally buy at the "75th percentile" in PC equipment so I'm always a few revs past the "bleeding edge" and companies have usually had time to debug things when I choose to buy 'em. :P

My 2 copper, at any rate.

This is the main reason I clamped my hands around 80gb drives (from pretty much any manufacturer) for about the last 4 years... for whatever reason (in my humble opinion) 80gb drives seemed much more solid than other higher capacity drives.

I've since moved on and have gathered relative faith in 500gb drives.

My current main PC runs 2x500gb striped, and a 2x80gb mirror for critical data. *shrug* - Starbuck hit it on the head.. they come in waves.. some good, some bad.

[bbj]

ive been building systems since the mid 80's.... Here are a few tricks ive learnt and this is applicable to almost any electronic device.

If it didnt fail within the first month then its gonna last years ( if you look after it ). Any electronic device will last longer if its kept cool. Not freezing, just cool ( like 20 deg C ) or close to that. Ive proven this time and again with 2 machines - one in hot enclosed space, and anther in ventilated cool place. some of the machines have uptimes of over 3 years ( the OS has a lot to do with that as well )

my latest 2 failues were 2 360G seagate drives. They were both the same age, and both lived in the same enclosure with zero ventilation. I burnt myself when i removed them form the box they were in. They did run for 2 years like that though.