Laptop Hard drives are evil
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What are the chances that 2 hard drives go out on the same laptop in the same year? I must not be having good luck with laptop hard drives or something. But anyways, here’s the story. I bought a laptop in May and I used the hard drive that came with it, which was a Samsung. Well 6 months later the hard drive got so many bad sectors that it was unusable. So I bought a new hard drive and the new one is a Western Digital. I’ve never had issues with a Western Digital Drive and I’ve never had one fail, not even the one in the desktop which according to the S.M.A.R.T status has been running for 3.6 years now. Anyways, 6 months later I’m finding out that laptop Western Digital hard drive is getting bad sectors and has currently over 1 MB in bad sectors. Oh yeah, and just a little more information, this laptop has never been dropped and I’ve taking very good care that it doesn’t move too much. Most of the time, it sits on the desk.
Feel free to leave comments on what you think the best drive is, especially one for a laptop.
4 Comments
Doug
June 17th, 2008
at 3:50am
After the first hard drive died, did you think about going to the manufacturer for a free replacement under their warranty? Even if you didn’t guy an extended warranty, the standard warranty from pretty much every computer manufacturer is 1 year.
a0369
June 17th, 2008
at 6:43am
Response to Dong: Yeah I did actually. I would have sent the laptop in for replacement, but the hard drive that came with the laptop was only 60 gb. I was planning on upgrading anyway to a 160 gb drive, so the first hard drive going out was an excuse to buy another bigger hard drive. I don’t know if I can send the second hard drive back until it completely dies though.
Bill Pileggi
June 25th, 2008
at 12:16am
Except when price must be kept to a minimum, or the laptop (or desktop) is to have a limited service/use life - I specify Seagate drives for all replacements. They have a 5 year warranty.
For testing, use the manufacturer’s diagnostic software. It can be downloaded from the mfr.’s website. Most likely, you’ll need to burn the downloaded ISO file to a CDROM and boot up from same. It will give you an error code you can use to RMA a given HDD. Frankly, here, we do not tolerate any HDD errors (on our customer’s computers).
I’ll be happy to RMA your first drive, I can always use another laptop HDD to use as an external USB drive
The adapter cables are available from geeks.com among others, usually for $10 or less, not including shipping. Those IDE/SATA to USB cables are incredibly handy….
Tony Poupa
July 8th, 2008
at 10:02pm
We have a HP nx9110 laptop that had increasing errors on it until it wouldn’t boot…about three years old I guess, so not too bad.
We replaced it with a 160Gb as that was all we could get-and I kid you not-1 year and 1 day later it too failed…bad sectors. This one refused to be repaired so had to replace it.
I’d heard anecdotes about equipment failing a day after the warranty expires, but this is the first time I’d witnessed it myself.
The user has an external USB keypad for rapid numeric entry and I suspect he put it up against the side of the laptop…right where the vent is! I guess the HDD just overheated, but we’ll never know for sure…