record HD failure - what's yours?

[Mainframeguy]

My eMachines 5116 is having troubles with what looks to be a dicey HD 😡

I am not happy - the machine is great and just what I want, but had not even made it's one month old anniversary! 😡

I'm just wondering, am I right to get real mad? Have I been unlucky, or is it not so unusual to get some bad apples in the world of notebook hard drives? I thought technology should have made this kind of quality a thing of the past now and so I remain basically 😡

All sympathy gratefully received...

 

[Henyman]

i've never had a drive go down on me, main machine makes hell of a noise though 😛

 

[dom02]

its definitly possible for that to be just your bad luck. It should be under warranty though so you shouldn't realy worry about it. just something very annyone to deal with.

 

[GoNz0]

a fact of life im afraid, become a system builder and you see just how bad they can be, they may say they have a low failure rate, but i can assure you 10% dont work out the box and another 10-20% will go down in the 1st month, and 30-40% will have to be RMA'd b4 there warranty runs out.

 

[ming]

LOL. This is a funny thread. Thought I'd see large numbers, but never mind. 😛
I've found bad sectors on my Seagate and Maxtor drives, but not on my IBM one.
Never had WD drive before so can't say anymore.

 

[LeeJend]

Bet it's a maxtor? (Sorry my bias is showing...)

It is not unusual to get an infant mortality on any hardware. Starting last year there was quit a spurt of dead 120-200 gig HD's in the first 2-6 weeks. They probbaly had a manufacturing/design issue.

Also, the high density drives (>80 gig) seem to need cooling so if you don't have air flow across it or excellent case cooling get some or the next may die too. I added an upper front case fan when I went up to 120 gig.

MING - I've been using WD for 15 years (~10 drives) and never had a drive die on me or any bad sectors.

GONZO - what brand(s) are you installing in those systems? All the numbers you quoted are enough to put a company out of business, especially 30-40% dead within warantee.

 

[ming]

Bet it's a maxtor? (Sorry my bias is showing...)
MING - I've been using WD for 15 years (~10 drives) and never had a drive die on me or any bad sectors.

That's cool. I've never had ay probs with my IBM drive too. Also, it's not as noisey as the Seagate and Maxtor ones I've had. 🙂

 

[Mubbers]

Never had a HDD fail!

Aarrg what have I said!! 😱

 

[GoNz0]

maxtor, good rma's lol

 

[LeeJend]

IBM would be my first choice but they aren't available locally and they run such good deals on the WD.

Mubbers you will be punished for that. Makes sign to ward off evil.

 

[Heeter]

LeeJend,

I personally have had horrible luck with WDs. I have switched to Maxtors, and now switching again to Seagates. Mind you, that is not stopping me from picking up two Raptors on Friday morning.

Heeter

 

[toretto]

LeeJend,

I personally have had horrible luck with WDs. I have switched to Maxtors, and now switching again to Seagates. Mind you, that is not stopping me from picking up two Raptors on Friday morning.

Heeter

I hate maxtor, the one i had died early on, the seagate i had was worse, and the WD's are flawless, everything i read on the raptors are sweet as hell, but i can hardly afford em, so i think i will wait for them to drop in price.

 

[Mainframeguy]

It seems to be a recovering (?) Fujitsu

Bet it's a maxtor?

Shoulda said - the eMachines 5116 is a laptop and the HD is a fujitsu 40 GB.

Now the strange thing is that I ran scandisc with the recover/repair boxes both ticked, had to reboot so it could access windows files and had to let it run for like three or four hours. During that time it said it was recovering innumerable bad clusters (the drive has about 15GB in use). The free space scan also took a very long time, maybe hour and a half.

But at the end it appears that the system is "back to normal" 😕

Drive has not lost free space, still have my 40GB. Files are accessible with normal HD activity again. Scandisc with no checkboxes goes through the three phases cleanly and shows nothing up. I am presently running a routine defrag and will scan again after.

What do you guys think - is my drive suspect? It's definitely under warranty, actually will be for another 35 months! What would you do - change it now or wait and see? (Oh and yes, I do have backup on external HD 😎 )

 

[Petros]

I've used Maxtor, WD, IBM, and Seagate. I've seen failures in all four brands, but I recommend Maxtor for their incredible service and three-year warranties. They cross-shipped me a new one without charging me a dime.

Also, the new Samsung drives have 3-year warranties. I'm buying a couple; we'll see how their service holds up if one fails--plus I like to help out the Korean economy. They are gracious hosts to us Air Force types.

100th post! Haha.

 

[GoNz0]

ever tried to RMA a fujitsu ? i tried once, there website waved a large middle finger and told me to go back to where i brought it from, end of story.

great considering that shop had shut dowm , endless email's and i made it into a clock.

would never ever ever buy another one, maxtor on the other hand, great, fill in the online form, if the drive is still working, just showing fault, you can advanced RMA it, they take credit card details, send you a new drive out, give you 30 days to return the faulty unit, or they bill you for keeping it 🙂

you even get the right maxtor approved packing, and 2 nice return slips inc' in the box 🙂 top class service, i dont care my 80gb has died twice now, as each time they replace it you get a fresh warranty.

fujitsu want lining up and shooting for there returns service.

 

[Mainframeguy]

Interesting news all round....

and the next interesting fact is that on what I kinda hoped might be a routine defrag I get (first time) a BSOD and then, next two tries, a stop on the defrag screen with message "The connection to the defragmentation engine has been lost, restart defragmentation"....

I am guessing the HD is maybe a gonner? Luckily RMA to Fujitsu will not be an issue - unluckily I have yet to discover how the store is going to treat this as they have yet to reply to my email and their phone line seems to have a half hour on hold policy...

 

[Bootsy]

Well it was about 4 years ago. I had an 8 gig maxtor drive for a while now...probly about 8 or 9 months. One day I started to hear a slight "clicking" when I turned on the PC. I just shrugged it off (i never shrug anything off now). Three days later I heard loud clicking like someone tapping a paper clip on fiberglass. Next thing I know, black screen. I try to boot, disk failure. I took the drive out to examine and I could smell (the smell of bad news)....BURNT 😡
I had all my files on that drive, I hardly ever did backups. Lost it all. I called maxtor and they told me to send it in and they would send me a replacement. Well the drive itself was probably like 2 years old. I waited three days and got a shiny new 20 gig in the mail. So I guess it sucked that I lost my files (nothing ultra important), but its great that they more than doubled my space 🙄

 

[indyjones]

Ihave have used alot and my 20 maxtor is still going strong after nearly 5 years mind you i have a 1 gig seagate thats still good after about 8 years 🙂 I have now moved to seagate from 2 maxtor drives as the seagate drives are the quietest drives ever (you notice the difference when all your fans are under 20db) 🙂

 

[NerdUprising]

I haven't had many problems - had one IBM DeskStar (40Gb, 7200rpm) that overheated because the case's air circulation was non-existant (and it was pretty damn hot in the room). As it sh*t the bed, when the disc spun up, it sounded as though the gates of hell were opening within my computer, and unleashing an evil not yet known.

the second problem was the 600Mb seagate that didnt want to work (after a thorough drenching in 12M hydrochloric...)

 

[ming]

Ihave have used alot and my 20 maxtor is still going strong after nearly 5 years mind you i have a 1 gig seagate thats still good after about 8 years 🙂 I have now moved to seagate from 2 maxtor drives as the seagate drives are the quietest drives ever (you notice the difference when all your fans are under 20db) 🙂

Bloody hell!! 20 HD's in 5yrs?!?! There must be something wrong. lol.
I've had only one or two between three machines that I've built in the past 3 yrs.