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Hard Drive Has Died.. What Are The Odds??

M

MichaelThomas

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 3, 2007
98
0
My hitachi drive in my 2.53 Unibody has just died this evening!
Have tried repairing disk from disk utility whilst booting from the install disk and couldn't find the drive. Tried a clean install and it wont find the drive. Also I have tried resetting pram to no avail.

I guess I will have to ring apple in the morning however I need to be back up and running tomorrow. What drive should I replace it with as I have no idea about this. Also is it pretty safe to say that my drive is no long gone or might there be a chance of getting some of the data back off it? I backed up a Uni project last night but have just lost one as well. Typical since I was looking at drives today in order to start using time machine and look what happens!!

If anyone can help me out would be really appreciated! Thanks!
 
So what are your choices? If this is the original hard drive, you can have apple replace it under warranty. Or if you can not wait and you can get your hands on another suitable 2.5" SATA drive, you could change it out and reinstall from DVD now.

From the tone of your post, it sounds like you do not have a recent bootable image. Not to preach, but a weekly image saved off line is a must (at least it is for me). I am a SuperDuper fan.

Neil
 
neilhart said:
So what are your choices? If this is the original hard drive, you can have apple replace it under warranty. Or if you can not wait and you can get your hands on another suitable 2.5" SATA drive, you could change it out and reinstall from DVD now.

From the tone of your post, it sounds like you do not have a recent bootable image. Not to preach, but a weekly image saved off line is a must (at least it is for me). I am a SuperDuper fan.

Neil
Click to expand...

I highly recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. You should do a weekly backup, or daily (if you are like me and you constantly add music to your library)
 
I had 3 HDDs die on the same day about a week ago…
Well 1 died and 2 had SMART errors it they said failing.

Sorry to it happen to you.
 
I had my backup drive die and take all my data, since my laptop was in for service and was reformatted by Apple. That was a Seagate drive though, so failure was to be expected. ;)

If Apple can't meet your time constraints then replace it with any SATA 2.5" 9.5mm-height drive. There are plenty to choose from.
 
noodle654 said:
I highly recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. You should do a weekly backup, or daily (if you are like me and you constantly add music to your library)
Click to expand...
Always having a backup is a great idea. I use my original 120 GB Apple drive as the backup. I don't have that much on my 320 GB to being with...
 
Eidorian said:
I think the odds are 1 in 500. I'm don't remember over time period though.

It does sound like it's dead though.
Click to expand...

Um, it's failure over x amount of time. Everything have a 100% failure rate if enough time has passed.
Some drives are rated for 24/7 operation while other drives are not.

Odds are fairly low (look at the harddrive specs at manufacturer's web site),
but depends on usage, power line fluctuation (having UPS helps), and other factors.

However you always hear about the ones that fail instead of the ones that don't fail.
Having backup is definitely essential.
 
Consultant said:
Um, it's failure over x amount of time. Everything have a 100% failure rate if enough time has passed.
Some drives are rated for 24/7 operation while other drives are not.
Click to expand...

Exactly, the moral of this thread is all drives fail, i've never had a hard drive not fail in some way at some time so if you dont back up its your own fault.

There are ways to get all the data off the drive, its not even difficult but its fairly specialist and you have to know what your doing. Depending on what failure you have will decide which technique to use. Is it just not mounting? Is it corrupted? Platter Scratched? Needle broken? Platter Melted? Demagnetized? System Files Corrupted? etc etc

Whatever you do dont give the computer or drive to Apple because they'll wipe the drive and wont give it back, its company policy to keep all broken Hard Drives and send a new one back to the customer.
 
Saw probability table on HD failure based on the Google servers.
It is highly unlikely to have a HD failure the first couple years, but as I recall
it is still around 8-10%. Then its around 18-20% each succeeding year.

Agree with previous posters to use Carbon copy or other clone program to image your disk. Stick with WD or Seagate. Hitachi is ok too.
 
My Drive failed in-store a few weeks ago. When I went to see
a genius to get a buzzing fan replaced. Had my MBP (uni)
since October. Well luckiliy he had a fan in house so that repair took
all of 2mins. I was stoked! yeah in and out back on track!:D Then He was taking forever to re-boot like 4 mins elasped:confused: I got up off
my stool and look around at my screen and was like did my harddrive just fail:confused:


He hooked up the diagnostic external drive and confirmed my suspicions:eek:
So he ordered me a new one under apple care actually bumped me to a 7200rpm from my fail 5400 on the house:p But I still was:mad:
To make things worse i called and they told me my drive had arrive

I thought this would be an easy repalcement,due to how easy apple made it to replace the HD.
Well it was crowded that day and I wanted to get the HD and install it myself instead of having to come back the next day for an appointment. i had my #00 screwdriver in my incase bag. They were like NO that will void your warranty if we give it to you to replace:eek: I was heated:mad: telling them don't make the damn HD so user serviceable if I cant do it damn self. Any way had to come back the following day for the 60 second "repair":mad::mad:
 
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