I've had a few desktop drives fail for certain - a secondhand quantum bigfoot where i saw the flash and wisp of smoke from a failed component, a fireball that started rattling (though that machine had a crap psu, but then again rattle is surely a physical issue) and a seagate that developed more bad sectors as the years passed.

I've also binned a few old ones that in retrospect may not have failed , could have been a faulty or somehow incompatible mobo. Though i also had a powermate psu explode yet it's maxtor drive is still working 8 years later.

Most depressing failures were a few laptop drives - hard to replace, hate the flimsiness of laptops, and i had physical and other compatibility issues getting something to fit in the first place.

At the moment i have a 160gb drive that only seems to run with linux, just cannot get windows running on it, and an 80gb hitachi from a g3 imac that i am chucking. Tbh what made me finally scrap this imac was the hard drive not playing ball with linux, Mac os will install on it, but linux install seems to get stuck on scanning the drive, or installs then crashes on boot. May just be linux compatibility but i decided life wasn't long enough, after spending a few days trying different options.

luckybob, errr....sorry if this feels like pouring petrol into your now cooling (hopefully) flames of rage and disappointments : for me, hard disks are some of the most trusted components. So far, there have been only 1 hard drive problem for the past 6 years that I can remember. I'm still using a 5.4GB Fujitsu and 4GB Western Digital Drives in my Pentium 133 system. Perhaps this is another story - "They don't make drives like these anymore".

I've had more than few instances of accidentally dropping my hard drives from the height of about 30cms (1 foot) now and then, and they still work. All my newer drives fall into one of these : Western Digital, Maxtor or Seagate. All have proven to be reliable for me so far.

Anyway, the culprit I mentioned is a Western Digital 1TB Scorpio Green that I bought about the end of last year for my sister's system. 2 months ago, Windows 7 was booting into recovery mode, and went into infinite loops of reboots and recoveries, and checking. When I try to low format or repartition the drive, the system hangs while trying to access the drive - it keeps seeking the drive. I have replaced the drive with another 1TB Seagate drive. Didn't try to repair the WD yet.

For my job I use a 32GB USB 3 Flash drive (they dropped quite in price just cost me 35 bucks). I use SyncToy at home and at work to sync everything. So worst case I have two other machines with the same data 😀

Funny not that long ago I only got a 16GB for the same price...

Hard drives are a good example of the "bathtub curve" of product reliability. The majority of faults occur at the beginning of the product's life due to manufacturing or material defects, and at the end of the product's life due to wearing out. Between these two times is a flatline where causes of failure are statistically most likely to be external or environmental factors, so can occur at any time.

Malik wrote:

luckybob, errr....sorry if this feels like pouring petrol into your now cooling (hopefully) flames of rage and disappointments : for me, hard disks are some of the most trusted components. So far, there have been only 1 hard drive problem for the past 6 years that I can remember. I'm still using a 5.4GB Fujitsu and 4GB Western Digital Drives in my Pentium 133 system. Perhaps this is another story - "They don't make drives like these anymore".

I've had more than few instances of accidentally dropping my hard drives from the height of about 30cms (1 foot) now and then, and they still work. All my newer drives fall into one of these : Western Digital, Maxtor or Seagate. All have proven to be reliable for me so far.

Anyway, the culprit I mentioned is a Western Digital 1TB Scorpio Green that I bought about the end of last year for my sister's system. 2 months ago, Windows 7 was booting into recovery mode, and went into infinite loops of reboots and recoveries, and checking. When I try to low format or repartition the drive, the system hangs while trying to access the drive - it keeps seeking the drive. I have replaced the drive with another 1TB Seagate drive. Didn't try to repair the WD yet.

the WD green drives have been pretty bad... I'd stick with blue at the very least

for me personally, I'll be sticking to the WD blacks from now on... worth the little extra money for more warranty and FASTAR speeds 😁

Malik wrote:

for me, hard disks are some of the most trusted components.

So far my track record, not counting replaced-under-warranty/repaired equipment:

Dead or Dying Joysticks/Gamepads: 7
Dead or Dying HDs: 4
Dead or Dying Mice: 4
Dead or Dying Graphics Cards: 3
Dead CD Drives: 2
Dying CRT Monitors: 2
Dead Motherboards: 1
Dead PSUs: 1

About the only components that've never died on me are CPUs, sound cards, modems and keyboards. The 5 1/4" floppy drive on my Tandy 1000 SX did die at one point while Dad still owned the machine, but was overhauled and has worked since. Also, much to my surprise, the LG CD-RW drive in my Windows 98 machine in my office still works despite the extreme amount of use it's seen and being about a decade old.

It has been a good few years before I last burned or had a drive fail on me. The last memorable failure was a Maxtor that burned out its controller in a puff of blue smoke when one of my redneck engineered power adapters touched the case then sparked. Knocked the whole system out but everything except for the maxtor survived. I have gotten over the past year a lot of outdoors salved rigs that have been left out to rot and the drives that survive are the ones without a breather hole except for one Conner drive that was produced in China. All the rest the heads rusted out and the drive spindles sound like a dryer loaded down with a few pounds worth of nickles.

My bad luck is mostly limited to power supplies either being dead before I get them or being low quality. The worst is a NZXT unit that I bought new last year that decided to burn out its 8pin eps phases.

Always have backups, and RAID is not a backup.

I recently had to try to get data off of a dieing 150GB WD Raptor for a friend and it took hours because it was just barely functional (eventually died altogether). That drive has a 5 year warranty though and he was luckily still within that by a few months.