Author Topic: Bad News: My hard drive failed. (Read 4388 times)

K-man · « **on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 06:06:12 PM »

Good news: It was one day before the warranty expired.

Seriously, how often does shit happen this way? It's usually the other way around for me.

W7RE · « **Reply #1 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 06:10:39 PM »

Yea pretty much everything I have that fails, it happens right after the warranty runs out.

MysterD · « **Reply #2 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 06:56:29 PM »

Quote from: W7RE on Sunday, January 25, 2009, 06:10:39 PM

Yea pretty much everything I have that fails, it happens right after the warranty runs out.

I smell a conspiracy here by those selling you the product...

Ghandi · « **Reply #3 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 07:09:03 PM »

Quote from: K-MaN on Sunday, January 25, 2009, 06:06:12 PM

Seriously, how often does shit happen this way? It's usually the other way around for me.

My last two hard drives have failed. I just had one fail about a month ago (see help forum) and it lasted probably 2 1/2 years before it died. The one before that which wasn't in this laptop lasted about that long as well, maybe a little longer.

As I understand it, they will all fail eventually. Mine just seem to do it sooner rather than later. It's a pain in the ass.

scottws · « **Reply #4 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 08:16:07 PM »

I've never had a hard drive fail on me. I don't know if I'm just incredibly lucky or I just replace them before they die. I do keep a close eye on their SMART status though.

I'm not too afraid of a failure at this point. I bought a backup program and have started backing up my data.

Quemaqua · « **Reply #5 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 09:34:36 PM »

I've had a great number of them fail. A few times it's caused me pretty dastardly problems. Seagate thankfully has a pretty good warranty on theirs, so I managed to avert financial problems last time.

Pugnate · « **Reply #6 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 10:21:12 PM »

The thing about Seagate is that while they do have an excellent warranty program, I sometimes wonder if they tend to fail more. This past year, I replaced both my Seagates with WDs. Let's see how they serve.

K-man · « **Reply #7 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 10:22:27 PM »

The one that failed me was a WD, and I replaced it with a Seagate.

Ghandi · « **Reply #8 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 10:52:50 PM »

My HD that just failed was a Seagate. And I think my other one was as well. I've heard that they tend to fail more often than the others.

Quemaqua · « **Reply #9 on:** Sunday, January 25, 2009, 10:55:04 PM »

I heard that too, which shocks me because they were such a great and reliable company for so long. But my first new Seagate drive in this rig died, and I actually thought for a while that my 2nd was going out. It still unnerves me a little.

K-man · « **Reply #10 on:** Monday, January 26, 2009, 07:32:21 AM »

Honestly it's a crap shoot. I had a maxtor drive go out 2 months after I got it, but its replacement has been going strong for nearly 7 years.

Pugnate · « **Reply #11 on:** Monday, January 26, 2009, 11:55:30 AM »

Could be. But I'll tell you one thing, I've had about 5 Seagates, and I haven't found them nearly as "right" as my current WDs. Like half the new Seagates I have gotten have started to make a strange WHRMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM noise a few months after use.

I sometimes wonder about these companies like WD, and EVGA and XFX that offer such unreasonably good warranties or/and "Step ups". You have to wonder what they do with any harddrive they receive. I bet they repair and sell as new.

While BFG offers excellent tech support, their warranty isn't as extensive as that of XFX, nor do they offer such a ridiculous step up program like EVGA, yet they also have the better reputation.

I am damn sure that any video card that EVGA receives for stepup is packaged and sold as new, which is unfair, because you never know how poorly that card was treated, even if it was the first three months of release.

K-man · « **Reply #12 on:** Monday, January 26, 2009, 03:26:40 PM »

Honestly every company has had bad runs. I can remember times when both WD and Maxtor were regarded as some of the worst HD's you can buy. I've also seen them be regarded as the best. Seagate's reputation has absolutely skyrocketed as compared to 10 years ago when they were considered absolute shit.

Pugnate · « **Reply #13 on:** Monday, January 26, 2009, 03:33:51 PM »

Yea I remember that about Maxtor.

Cobra951 · « **Reply #14 on:** Monday, January 26, 2009, 07:22:50 PM »

I think I've had at least one of every drive brand mentioned fail on me at one time or another. But it seems WD is the most reliable and Seagate the least, going by my experiences. We'll see if that holds. The differences are not that great to begin with.

scottws · « **Reply #15 on:** Monday, January 26, 2009, 08:09:48 PM »

I've had five Seagates, two Maxtors (before the buyout), two Western Digitals, and a Samsung. I have yet to have any trouble with any of them. The Maxtors were my favorite as they absolutely screamed in comparison to anything that was out at the time and they were whisper quiet. Even my supposedly silent Samsung makes more noise than they did.

Seagates are fine drives. The ones you want to stay away from are IBM/Hitachi Deathstars... I mean Deskstars.

Xessive · « **Reply #16 on:** Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 04:00:11 PM »

I recall WD drives were regarded as crap around 2001-02.

The only drives I've ever had trouble with are Fujitsu. Apparently they only work with other Fujitsu drives. One of my older systems had a 40gb Fuji as the primary drive and when I got a Maxtor as my secondary internal drive the system refused to boot up, I returned it and got a WD, same problem. I kept the WD and tried it on another system only to find that it was working fine. So I decided to run some tests with a Maxtor, WD, Seagate, the 40gb Fujitsu in question and another Fujitsu. All I could conclude was that both Fujitsu drives would not run at all with any other IDE drive attached to either IDE cable. However with both Fuji drives inside it booted up fine. Frickin' weird.

More recently one of my WD 500GB USB drives failed.. It started making that clicking sound and inevitably stopped working. Luckily, I had already backed up everything on it the moment I heard the clickity noise.

scottws · « **Reply #17 on:** Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 05:30:22 AM »

I don't want to insult your intelligence, so if I do please forgive me.

These were IDE drives, right? Did you have the jumper settings on CS (cable select)? I've had issues like that with CS before and I have to revert to the tried and true master/slave setup, which always seemed to work for me. Though I've never dealt with Fujitsu drives (never knew they even made hard drives).

Xessive · « **Reply #18 on:** Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 01:07:26 PM »

Quote from: scottws on Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 05:30:22 AM

I don't want to insult your intelligence, so if I do please forgive me.

These were IDE drives, right? Did you have the jumper settings on CS (cable select)? I've had issues like that with CS before and I have to revert to the tried and true master/slave setup, which always seemed to work for me. Though I've never dealt with Fujitsu drives (never knew they even made hard drives).

No worries man

I was advised to just avoid CS with IDE drives in general. I always go with the master/slave setup, which as you said is more reliable. That's why it was baffling me. I thought I must have been doing something wrong so I took it down to a shop to look at it and they confirmed to me that Fuji drives just don't wanna work with others. I think this is no longer the case but then I haven't come near a Fuji drive since.

Cobra951 · « **Reply #19 on:** Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 02:41:39 PM »

Really? I've always done CS since I learned about it. No problems. The only time I may think of setting it to master is in an external enclosure. But I don't think that has been an issue either. Now I'm not sure. I may have changed the jumper for this at least once.

gpw11 · « **Reply #20 on:** Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 06:05:18 PM »

Do you need special IDE cables in order to use CS?

Cobra951 · « **Reply #21 on:** Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 06:16:39 PM »

I don't think so. If I remember right, the system and the drives must be CS-aware. I don't think the cable changed.

scottws · « **Reply #22 on:** Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 06:56:45 PM »

Right. The IDE controller and the IDE hard drives both must support it. Of course the hard drives would if they had a CS setting.

This must be the longest IDE-related conversation I've had in a few years.

K-man · « **Reply #23 on:** Wednesday, February 18, 2009, 10:44:08 AM »

So after a few weeks of delay, WD finally shipped me an actual brand new caviar black drive. 750 gig capacity (the original drive was 400)