Hard Drives: Why have so many been failing?

[jer2eydevil88]

I am not a person who likes to have information handed to them but my past month of hard drive experience is either the worst luck in man kinds history or something I am missing entirely.

I have a custom built windows computer along with my MBP, this computer had three hard drives in it. One 136gb Raptor, one 500gb Seagate Hard Drive and one 400gb Western Digital drive.

Two weeks ago my computer reported that the smart status on the 500gb drive was poor and I should replace it. I use this drive for my music (among other things) which puts a lot of wear and tear on the the drive. I bought a seagate 500gb and three cradle/rack kits for 5.25" bays off newegg that would keep my drives cool and reliable. Once everything was up and running I proceeded to copy over the music and some other important files.

After the successful transfer I still wanted to wait at least two weeks before sending the old drive in for RMA repair since in my experience bad things always happen to data that isn't properly backed up. After less than a day of operation with this new 500gb drive it started failing, it would not report its temp at above 10 degrees celsius and it was slower than all hell when reading data.

I quickly bought another 500gb drive from newegg and had it sent 2 day mail. In two days time I had a new 500gb Western Digital drive. I completed a clone from the old (10 degrees Celsius) drive to the new 500gb Western Digital drive today. Now... Smart is again reporting that this drive and my 400gb are failing... Whenever I try to listen to music or play video back it stalls a lot....

I have purchased another two 500gb drives from newegg because I have lots of important files on these drives but I am about to go broke trying to fix this thing. Can someone tell me if I am missing something? I have never had this bad of luck with hard drives before! Can bad data actually cause S.M.A.R.T. to misreport?

 

[Super Macho Man]

HDs fail so much because of price pressure - if you want 500 gigs for $100 then something has to be sacrificed. It's better for a HD maker to sell a drive that will fail in 6 months than to not be able to sell it at all because the competition is cheaper. People want cheap ****, it's as simple as that. Few have even noticed that typical warranties have shrunk to 1 year when they used to be 3 years.

Reliable HDs do exist - they are marketed as enterprise-class and are more expensive. But they usually also have much longer warranties (5 years vs. 1 year) which might even make them cheaper in the long run.

 

[gnasher729]

I am not a person who likes to have information handed to them but my past month of hard drive experience is either the worst luck in man kinds history or something I am missing entirely.

I have a custom built windows computer along with my MBP, this computer had three hard drives in it. One 136gb Raptor, one 500gb Seagate Hard Drive and one 400gb Western Digital drive.

Two weeks ago my computer reported that the smart status on the 500gb drive was poor and I should replace it. I use this drive for my music (among other things) which puts a lot of wear and tear on the the drive. I bought a seagate 500gb and three cradle/rack kits for 5.25" bays off newegg that would keep my drives cool and reliable. Once everything was up and running I proceeded to copy over the music and some other important files.

After the successful transfer I still wanted to wait at least two weeks before sending the old drive in for RMA repair since in my experience bad things always happen to data that isn't properly backed up. After less than a day of operation with this new 500gb drive it started failing, it would not report its temp at above 10 degrees celsius and it was slower than all hell when reading data.

I quickly bought another 500gb drive from newegg and had it sent 2 day mail. In two days time I had a new 500gb Western Digital drive. I completed a clone from the old (10 degrees Celsius) drive to the new 500gb Western Digital drive today. Now... Smart is again reporting that this drive and my 400gb are failing... Whenever I try to listen to music or play video back it stalls a lot....

I have purchased another two 500gb drives from newegg because I have lots of important files on these drives but I am about to go broke trying to fix this thing. Can someone tell me if I am missing something? I have never had this bad of luck with hard drives before! Can bad data actually cause S.M.A.R.T. to misreport?

There are three possibilities: 1. You have an awful lot of bad luck. 2. You are treating your harddisks really badly. 3. Something is wrong with your computer.

1. is possible. If there is a 10 percent chance to get a dodgy hard disk, then there is a one in thousand chance of getting three in a row, and this _will_ happen to some readers here.

2. Your judgement. I guess you don't play football with your harddisks, right?

3. Seems a possibility. For example, a slightly broken ATA cable that supplies slightly wrong power might damage hard disks quickly. Or the whole ATA hardware on your computer might be broken. I'd try to order an external USB harddisk.

And copying bad data cannot damage a harddisk. Actually, you cannot copy "bad" data on it. You might copy data that is wrong (for example if you copy from a disk that is close to dying), but the new harddisk would just record that wrong data without any problems.