[NBLUG/talk] Another hard disk bites the dust!!!

[A.C.]

Greetings,

I worked for SyQuest before they went out of business, and I can 
honestly say that I've spoken to many, many people in the same situation 
as you.  I lost count of people who had gone through three drives in a 
row, and were replacing their fourth.  Admittedly, this was downright 
common with the SyQuest SparQ drives (which had an 18% failure rate 
within 3 months), but there were many people with the more reliable 
SyJet drives in the same scenario.

In reply to your current situation, I have seen hard drives fail from 
every vendor, and while there are some vendors I trust more than others, 
not a single one is immune to failure.  As with most products, hard 
drive manufacturers gear their drives to be as reliable as possible with 
the cheapest parts available.  They take into account the risk of 
failure and factor the potential replacement cost into their 
manufacturing costs.
What that really means is that they are accepting the fact that some 
drives will fail and trading that off for a product with a lower sticker 
price.  Most major vendors also offer more expensive drive models with 
longer warranty periods, but the price is usually much higher.  In most 
cases, it's cheaper to buy the standard drive and invest in a decent 
backup system.

OK, getting into the opinion section here:  The vendors that tend to 
fail the least often are Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital, and the 
vendors that tend to have higher failure rates are IBM Deskstar, Samsung 
(or anything with Samsung drive heads), and any drive manufactured by 
someone you've never heard of.  As with anything else, some people have 
had terrible luck with one line and great luck with another (hatred 
between Maxtor and Seagate runs deep in some places), but overall the 
big three are about equal.

Some quick suggestions for your next drive:  The biggest thing that 
kills drives nowadays is droppage (other than pre-existing contaminants 
inside of the drive, which you can't do anything about).  Heat can cause 
problems, but a failing drive itself can cause excessive heat, so it 
goes both ways.  The best tool I have ever found for maintaining a drive 
is a program written in assembly language named SpinRite (available for 
purchase at http://www.grc.com or your local torrent site if you're into 
that kind of thing).  SpinRite can tell you the internal temperature of 
your drive, so if you're thinking heat is the culprit, this can help you 
narrow it down.  SpinRite can also recover drives that have suffered 
extensive damage and mark previously bad sectors as good if they prove 
to be OK.

At any rate, best of luck, and feel free to post again if you're looking 
for details,

A.C.
******

Lincoln Peters wrote:

>Back in late August, I had to replace a 160BG hard disk that was failing
>but still recoverable.  Thanks to Maxtor's warranty, I was able to get a
>refurbished 250GB hard disk to replace it, copy all of the readable data
>from the old hard disk to the new disk, shred the contents of the old
>disk (for security reasons), and send it back.
>
>Unfortunately, the new hard disk appears to be failing (I've detected
>342 bad blocks), and I will have to replace it.  Fortunately, it is
>still under warranty (I can get a free replacement as long as I put in
>the request by Tuesday), but I can't help wondering why this hard disk
>failed so soon after the hard disk that it replaced.
>
>I think I can recover all of the important data from the disk, as I did
>before (again "rebuilding" whatever cannot be recovered), but I do have
>to wonder...
>
>Has anyone in this group experienced anything like this (i.e. a hard
>disk fails, you replace it with a very similar model, then the
>replacement fails)?  If so, did you find any pattern in the failures? 
>Maybe it wasn't well-enough ventilated and it overheated?  Maybe the
>failures were restricted to a single brand of hard drives?  Am I just
>experiencing a streak of bad luck?  I don't know where to look for an
>explanation.
>
>---
>Lincoln Peters
><sampln at sbcglobal.net>
>
>QOTD:
>	I'm not bald -- I'm "hair challenged".
>
>	[I thought that was "differently haired". Ed.]
>
>
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