Is it just me or are hard drives not as reliable as they once were?

I remember them crapping out much more often in the past, BUT you seemed to have a bit more warning. But with 50+ HDs over the past 6 years, i’ve only had 7 go bad, and 5 of those were at the 6 year mark.

Hello,

I have noticed more poeple seem to be reporting problems with notebook and external hard disk drives. Perhaps it is an issue with how these devices are used or transported?

You could, of course, replace the various hard disk drives with solid-state hard disks, however, that would be very expensive.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

If you want really reliable, you go SCSI. If you want a lot of storage AND SCSI, you go broke!

I purchased a WD 500 gig external drive on Sunday and it died Monday morning. Now how good is that. I ended up loosing data and photos as well. I didn’t even have time to back them up.

Since 1984, I think I have had 5 drives really fail, out of a possible 20 or so drives.

Some are still good after 5 years, one failed in three years (same PC vendor), my Laptop 20 gb Hitachi is still going strong after 6 years.

I am still using (periodically) a WD 853 Mb for testing friends and families PC’s (if all else has failed). I think it’s acrap shoot. If you examine or use the bits per unit time for failure modes, current drives are far more reliable than their predecessors.

My old MFM 5 MB and 40 Mb HDD never failed in my Rainbow 100+, but got sidetracked when I upgraded to a PC running a 286 microprocessor, and, I think, a whopping 200 MB HDD !!

Bob

When I used to work at Inforex (ca: 1972) we used to repair & recover Hard drives internally (not me, the Disk group), but they used the voice coil and platter that was about 24 inches across to hold the data in a key-to-disk system. The completed assembly weighed around 500 pounds or so with a solid cast aluminum frame.

If you pay attention to the drive specifications, it is a wonder we do not see more data errors. I also recently had two 250GB drives fail; one was a total failure, it just does not become ready anymore, and the other has lost access to 20% of the data (Out of each 100MBs about 80MBs is accessible, the 20MBs that is not, it lost part of it’s servo data).

The problems are due to the increased densities, combined with the fact that the drives store critical configuration data on the platters. Redundancy is used, but if this data gets glitched, the drive will require help using tools that can access this special data.

I’m told that both of my drives can likely be recovered, but it is not worth it for me to pay someone to do it.

To minimize data loss, you should make certain that you have plenty of cooling for the hard drives, use S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools to keep an eye on the drive temperature. Most external USB enclosures do not have adequate cooling for my tastes.

When a drive is brand new is is not unheard of for S.M.A.R.T. to find “Pending Sectors”, writing to every sector should clear these up. I usually burn-in new drives using tools like badblocks and shred to exercise every sector with a few data patterns before I entrust my data to it.

Exo

I have to agree… Hard Drives STORE ALL OF OUR DATA!!!