I've had the same kinds of issues with Western Digital. 5 failed last year alone. It wasn't pretty. Been using Hitachi drives since then which seem to be reliable.
That's odd. I've only ever had 1 hard drive die in the past 11 years. And yes, that means I still have some 11 year old hard drives that work. They've been a mixture of brands (Seagate, Western Digital, Quantum, Hitachi, Toshiba). I also have a tendency to leave computers running without shutdown or restarts for weeks/months at a time. Perhaps that contributes to my lower failure rate? Or maybe I'm just incredibly lucky?
Incredibly lucky, combined with older parts made when things were still built reliably and 5 year warranties were commonplace instead of huge marketing gimmicks.
Incredibly lucky, combined with older parts made when things were still built reliably and 5 year warranties were commonplace instead of huge marketing gimmicks.
I have plenty of hard drives made in the last 5 years, too. Yay luck, though!
13 Jan, 2009, Ssolvarain wrote in the 8th comment:
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I tend to run my machines for long stretches of time as well, and none of my harddrives have failed over the past… eh… 6 years? Course, I have a bad history with mobos.
I tend to run my machines for long stretches of time as well, and none of my harddrives have failed over the past… eh… 6 years? Course, I have a bad history with mobos.
I have the same issue with motherboards! :biggrin:
Also, this makes perfect sense if you take into consideration that hard drives, which have moving parts, tend to suffer the most stress during starts and stops (mostly the stops). Motherboards, on the other hand, just tend to die after so many thousands or tens of thousands of hours of having electric current running through them. Also, heat build-up from prolonged up-times can weaken the solder on the motherboard's connections.
13 Jan, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 10th comment:
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Unfortunately, they go in batches. For YEARS, I recommended Western Digital drives, as I've had ones truck on for 7 or 8 years with no problems at all. Conner (now Seagate) was the manufacturer of DOOM…. Then Seagates become good and the IBM "deathstar" drives died like squealing pigs. Now, I've had 3 or 4 Western Digitals die in the last couple years, and my 5 old Seagate is still doing ok.
So, either it's totally random luck of the draw, or all these guys buy from the lowest bidder, which changes every couple of years. Either way, expect things to get worse with the economy the way it is… corners will be cut everywhere.
13 Jan, 2009, Chris Bailey wrote in the 11th comment:
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I just don't understand the ridiculous timing. It's almost like seagate is watching me and trying to ruin my life lol. The last one was a couple of days before I was going to open up my new mud for play testing (Built on Teensymud, enormous amount of custom work). I learned my lesson though and started using version control, yay. This time the drive goes on me right as I'm trying to commit a somewhat brilliant hack to the repository, hehehe. I thought it had corrupted the svn somehow at first, but it seems to be ok now. =)
You can never have too many backups. I have backups on CD's, flash drives, external HD, internal HD, and servers.
Our game went through a hard drive crash in early 2005. Took away 3 years of work because the coders before me could not be reached and the only backups were on the server that died. I had just started coding so they told me not to download the code and just work from in the shell so that's what I did. So we lost 3 years of work almost and are now to the point where we shoulda been 3 years ago as I have had to create my own stuff from nothing having nothing else to go on.
I've never had any problems with Seagate drives. A few years back I avoided them simply because they tended to be really noisy. At the moment I have two nice and silent Seagate drives bought within the last five years. Modern Western Digital drives are infamous for the circuit board getting fried.
13 Jan, 2009, Hades_Kane wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
I've only had 1 hard-drive begin to go out on me in the last 10 years. I've had of a mix of Seagate and WD I believe.
I've never had any computer part just up and die on me. I have however, through some freak of nature, have two get completely friend by lightning strikes through a surge protector, and while off. The first one was kinda cool, the motherboard turned into this melty mess of green and it was fun to poke and scuplt into different things. The second.. well.. the second was a pain in the ass because it was the only computer I had at the time, so I had to take a little "vacation", Although I did get pretty good at Halo 2 in that "vacation"…
In my experience, drives give you warning. They buzz, or shriek, or click, for a while before the go dead solid kaput. You ignore "Weird new sounds from the PC" at your own peril.
Considering the mechanical nature of them and the stress they undergo, not to mention the physical abuse they often take, it's really kind of a miracle they don't fail MORE frequently.
Maybe I've just been lucky and buying the right brand.
$.02 from personal experience: Watch out for cheap and/or old power supplies. In last few years hdd electronics (possibly NOT by coincidence) had become very picky about the quality of applied power.
13 Jan, 2009, quixadhal wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
Caius said:
Modern Western Digital drives are infamous for the circuit board getting fried.
Hehehehe, not just modern ones. I actually did a Lazarus on one a while ago… My linux server was running on an old 40G WD drive, and one day it just up and died. I asked around, and my friend who worked at the local university, had a small stack of them in a closet and gave me a pair of them. So, I swapped the drive circuit boards to fix the "dead" one, which worked perfectly.
At that point, I decided I was too lazy to do enough regular backups to not suffer when it died again, so I installed the second identical drive on the other IDE controller and converted the system to a software RAID 1 setup. The only caveat now is that when I install a new kernel, I have to remember to run grub on both drives, so if one dies again I can still boot from the survivor. :)
I highly recommend buying drives in pairs and using mirrored raid, especially if you have hardware support for it. It's not a substitute for off-site backups, but it's automatic and saves your from a single drive giving out from wear and tear.