Sorry to hear of your trevails this month, hope it goes smoothly the rest of the year 😀

As for me it's just been busy at work is all, same ol, same ol...

Besides taking arrows to the knee, I'm looking forward to Torchlight 2 and Borderlands 2 coming soon 😁

I can't help but laugh when I read that post... not laughing at you, laughing at how you said it 😁

dude... is there something wrong with your power? My friend is having bad luck with his HDDs with his fancy schmancy alienware machine too... boy do I think they are POS's now, because his PSU died, various HDDs it came with died, etc... now the HDD he's been using for the past year is flaking out too... system just running SLOW... part of his problem is, he turns off his machine every night instead of just leaving it on... leaving computers on is less wear and tear on the parts... to hell with "waa, you're killing trees"

but seriously, get a UPS with power conditioning if you haven't

My experience with hard drives has been... interesting. I've learned that the more powerful a current drive is compared to what's available when you buy it, the more likely it will fail sooner, whereas the cheaper drives that don't have the same capacity or speed, but are still name-brand and made recently, are more likely to survive.

I've only ever had one drive outright die on me, nine months after it was first put into operation. Took out an RPG I was working on that I was seriously just two weeks from finishing... The problem wasn't related to the mechanical parts though, it was an IC that blew out; you can see the melted silicon from where it did. It's possible the data is still intact and I've kept the drive in case I ever get a chance to attempt a data recovery.

Beyond that, I keep an ear open on my drives. If they start to sound wrong, I get prepped to replace them. I've since replaced two drives that sounded close to failure but hadn't actually failed, plus I keep redundant backups now of anything even remotely critical.

My best luck so far has been with Western Digital brand. The drive that failed on me was a 10GB Quantum Fireball drive.

never dismiss power problems... either from the mains/line (the wall), or your power supply in your PC... if any one of those are crap, you're going to have failing hardware or weird behaviors

and don't forget about the tin fiber issue because of the RoHS bullshit... try to keep your PC clean inside, it may help I think!

SSDs are pushing the edge. Intel seems to be quite reliable, but still, you are playing with new technology / beta tester for the long run. Might be better off using SSD as a cache drive to get the best of both worlds.

For big media files a Raid 5 server / NAS is quite popular. The really important files like pictures and personal documents should have a backup schedule or at least synced to the cloud (DropBox or SkyDrive).

Definitely avoid bargain basement or off-brand SSDs. Avoid anything made with a crappy controller.

There's a bunch of things you want to avoid doing on SSDs as well, like automatic defrag - physical arrangement of bits doesn't matter on these (and is, in fact, mixed up by the wear-levelling system anyway), so doing this just wastes write cycles in a bad way.

I've had the opposite experience to Gemini000 - I probably take care of around 100 HDDs in total at work. The WD Black and RE4 drives (their more 'powerful' line of drives) have a marked tendancy to fail a lot less often than the WD Green drives.

I suspect a lot of that is due to WD's BS "Intellipark" technology causing literally hundreds of thousands of load/unload cycles.

Of course, it could always be worse... (these are all busted)

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

For big media files a Raid 5 server / NAS is quite popular.

Even at work, when I'm making desktop/workstation systems for our students, I always just stick two disks in and mirror them. The extra $100 (less than that now, actually) outweighs the hassle we'd be put through if something failed and we lost whatever research data or analysis they may have been storing.

Same for our remote units in the field. It's such a hassle to go out to do maintenance on any but the closest of them that giving them redundant disks only makes sense.

yeah, I got good luck with the Caviar Black and Scorpio Black drives... longer warranty, better parts... I have an old Caviar "Special Edition" (before they called them Black), that has worked so long that the spindle bearings started to make noise... but it still works! It has been retired for the past year as it was in my old system and too small

it also helps to run the latest drive firmwares, latest system and/or controller BIOS, and of course latest IDE/SATA drivers

My main system has a corsair 1200 power supply. It is quite literally bar-none in terms of quality and performance. My V5 rig has a NOS pcp&c 510W. Back in the day before they were bent over by OCZ.

for some reason, this bad luck seems to come in waves. Before this, I cant remember having a hard drive issue. Sure, i"ve bought a thrift store computer with a dud drive, but I've never had one work for a while then die. I bought my 1500gb drive about 6 months AFTER they got the REV2 firmware out. The first wave of 1.5's had a major firmware bug, and I waited to get one after, it was doing great! I use it for "general media". I was lucky that my 4x640g array had the space to store the data for now. My important data is on my server, in a raid 5 setup. I've been meaning to make a new array with new drives, but being unemployed kinda stops me from doing that.

I'm going to save the drive that died, and next time I goto the mountains I'm going to test them. Specifically, I'm going to test their bullet resistance. I have a cz550 /w 7mm remmington mag that needs "sighting in"

I've never had a hard drive die on me, ever... not in the ~2+ decades that I've been using them personally. Seen plenty of HDDs shit the bed at work, naturally, but on that front my experience seems to mirror Gemini's.

of course, now that I've gone and tempted fate with this post, I'm fully expecting all of my important data to die a gruesome death fairly soon. Good thing I took advantage of Amazon's recent sale on USB backup media, I suppose.

I've honestly been looking into that carbonite service. $60 a year for offsite backup? Naturally i'd encrypt my own files, but still. I'm considering it now.

The best part of my story is, I completely left out the day I tried to get basilisk II running. (think dosbox but for 68k macs)

To the people who made dosbox, there is a real opportunity to make a mac emulator. From what I can tell, there hasn't been one updated in YEARS. They talk about XP like its NEW.

Just saying.

I had a connor 1GB drive that took a shit on me, then again it was a shitty 4800rpm drive from back in 1996... I got a seagate medalist and an ibm deskstar... I don't remember which one, but they eventually developed bad sectors... they still work and is in my NT4 retrobox.... I also have a 40MB WD drive from back in the OLD days before IDE was really standardized... it's flakey at best... last time I plugged it in, it kind of worked!

Im at the complete opposite. In over 15 years only had one HDD die on me. And i had messed with it, so i deserved it. Otherwise I have a 20 GB WD that died a soft death. Was starting making bad sectors here and there, tried low level formats, did not work, retired it. I have old HDDs from the early 90s that still work 🤣.

Magneto-Mechanical HDD also sensitive to vibration.

I do experience bad-sectors developing when
earthquake strikes when the HDD were writing/reading something.
yeah, after the quake the HDD sounded somewhat 'different', so i decided to check it out.

In all my years of computing, I've personally only ever had one hard drive die. It was a Seagate 200GB and it was being used in an external caddy as a backup drive anyway so no great loss. However I managed to find an identical logic board for the drive on hdd-parts.com and after swapping the boards, the drive started working again and still does to this day.

At work is a different story though. In 2004-2005 the place I was working at bought about 1000 HP Compaq Pentium 4 type machines that had Maxtor IDE hard drives. Those things dropped like flies, there was a period where we were replacing one or two every week.

Maybe you drunk to much limonade..

I think it is just bad luck..
For the first problem, you main computer.. Its could be a really bad psu thats taken your drives dead.. Its very important to have a very high grade psu! Some people think that a psu is just a psu.. But the quality differents very much..

The problem on the older computers.. Maybe the harddisk isnt parked or the basement is to damp... If hardware is sitting in a damp basement, it could damaged electronics.. The best i think is to disconnect the data interface and just power it to get it on work temperture.. And maybe its always good to test the disk with a program before you got it in full use..

hmmm.. I've lost two mid-90s hard drives since spring [WD 2.1 and 10] as well as an ASUS P3B-F, which I promply replaced. I back up all retro rigs on an external USB drive, though it's not always 100% current. Same for the main XP rig - on a 1.5tb usb3 drive.

Can only remember having two drives fail on me in 20 years. One external 500 gig drive that overheated and took a shit on me, and an 18 gig SCSI drive in Xeon Prime that just decided to not spin up one day.

The issues with the drives in old Macs is nothing unusual. Most of the 68K-era ones used Quantum Prodrives, which weren't too bad when they were new, but they do not seem to age well. I have two pizza-box Performas and a Centris 660AV... the Centris and one of the Performas had bad drives when I got 'em, and the drive on the other one quit after a couple hours.

The last 'modern' drive I had fail on me personally, was my 120GB WD, back in 2004. I got it replaced under warranty and it's worked fine since, though. I've replaced a bunch of drives for work, though... the 20GB WD200 and the Seagate 7200.8 series are at the top of the shit list there (counting warranty replacements, over 150% failure rates on both), with the 60GXP/75GXP Deathstars coming in a rather distant third.