Please read: wierd experiences with hdd's

[Bahadir]

Hi,
I dont seem to have any luck with hard drives as my second hdd is dying in less than 2 years of service. Unfortunately the seagate was warranted for a year (could you believe that!) and my previous Maxtor that died was also warranted for a year.

Anyway to cut the story short, I noticed in my first hdd (the Maxtor one), it was clunking pretty badly and it would crash during booting up of Windows but unfortunately I didnt back up any data so I had to scramble fast to copy data to my portable hdd. What I noticed was that orienting the hdd vertically (I have a midi desktop tower) instead of horizontally fixed my clunking issues!

Now, I am having the same clunking problems on this Seagate hdd, and it came to a state where I could not retrieve any data from it. However, after I set it in the vertical position, it started working again.

So, what the #@$# is going on? Can someone please explain what positioning the hdd vertically seems to get rid of the clunking issues I have experienced with 2 hdds so far?

Bahadir.

 

[maaoouud]

They are probably getting better cooling when mounted vertically. How hot is it in your case ?

 

[Bahadir]

its the opposite really. when they were mounted horizontally (with 4 screws), the closed case has a side fan that blows air directly onto the motherboard and the hard disk.

However, now I simply removed the hdd and without mounting it, just let it dangle vertically inside the case and the side fan is turned off. So, basically I have no case fans running and the hdd is fine.

Bios reports about 29c for the mobo temp (considering the ambient temp is around 23c)

 

[maaoouud]

Shouldn't be temperature related then. Perhaps just bad luck, drives do die but seldom that soon. Do you have them spin down into power save mode alot ? Spinup cycles are a limiting factor to a drives lifetime, however 2 years seem absurd considering it's like 50k cycles normally IIRC.

 

[Bahadir]

I think its just plain bad luck. I turn the PC on and off almost every day but its still no reason as to why they are dying on me. Also, I still dont understand why standing it vertically helps it to survive, although I dont know for how much longer it can withstand this.

 

[Humus]

Perhaps just bad luck, drives do die but seldom that soon.

In my experience drives either die soon, or they live forever. I've had drives die from ever major vendor, and they were pretty new when they died. At most a little over a year old.

 

[Bahadir]

In my experience drives either die soon, or they live forever. I've had drives die from ever major vendor, and they were pretty new when they died. At most a little over a year old.

I agree with you completely there. My other Maxtor drive is about 4 yrs old now and has no problems whatsoever (touch wood).

I am frustrated at the hdd vendor's RMA policy because in order to RMA a drive you must prove the fault by running their diagnostic utilities. I have experienced many hard drives that had intermittent "clicking" or "clunking" sounds from day 1 (the Maxtor was one example), and these diagnostic tools will report "error free" when in actual fact you know the hard disk is going to die eventually.

I have noticed these utilities will only report an error once your hard disk is screwed and you can no longer load the OS or retrieve any data out of it!

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

The most common things to break hard drives are (1) bad handling, usually initially poor shipping (2) poor power supply (3) overheating.

You should use a SMART monitor like HD Tune or HD Inspector to let you know if your hard drive is deteriorating quickly.

 

[_xxx_]

Maxtor is crap. There are countless threads in this forum alone about their HD's crapping out (I alone lost three of their shitty HDD's within 2-3 years).

Oh, and Seagate just bought Maxtor.

EDIT: my recommendation is, next time go WD or Samsung.

 

[Bahadir]

The most common things to break hard drives are (1) bad handling, usually initially poor shipping (2) poor power supply (3) overheating.

You should use a SMART monitor like HD Tune or HD Inspector to let you know if your hard drive is deteriorating quickly.

Well i use the SMART utility pretty often and I am typing this message on the hard disk that has issues and just ran the SMART utility. If you know what each entry means I can dump the info here, but all of them lights up GREEN!

 

[Bahadir]

Maxtor is crap. There are countless threads in this forum alone about their HD's crapping out (I alone lost three of their shitty HDD's within 2-3 years).

Oh, and Seagate just bought Maxtor.

EDIT: my recommendation is, next time go WD or Samsung.

Yeh my friend always has issues with his Samsung hdd. Looks like we are running out of choices here.

 

[Sxotty]

Maxtor is crap. There are countless threads in this forum alone about their HD's crapping out (I alone lost three of their shitty HDD's within 2-3 years).

This is a true statement.

Seagate makes fine HDDs though. I was sad they bought maxtor since maxtor is the lowest quality. Seagate has 5 year warranties now btw, and 5 years is long enough. The last drive that died on me was the deathstar, but that is b/c since then I bought higher quality drives, SCSI, raptors etc..

 

[_xxx_]

Forgot to add: although Maxtor are crap, I never had any trouble getting a new one in exchange imediately. They're obviously well-prepared for RMA's

 

[Bahadir]

Forgot to add: although Maxtor are crap, I never had any trouble getting a new one in exchange imediately. They're obviously well-prepared for RMA's

Yeah I didnt have any trouble getting a new one for Quantum when it was owned by Maxtor at the time.

 

[Basic]

Maxtor is crap. There are countless threads in this forum alone about their HD's crapping out (I alone lost three of their shitty HDD's within 2-3 years).

And most of those post are you telling your story...

 

[Bludd]

Just thought I'd recommend a nice free SMART temperature monitoring program:

http://www.rsdsoft.com/hdd-thermometer/index.php

There's really only 1 issue that I have with the software: even though registration is free, you have to register it anew if you reinstall Windows (maybe even if you reinstall the program); the program generates a machine ID that is used for registration purposes. That means you can't save your reg. info if you format.

Anyway, it's fast and easy to register and I've used it for several months and noticed no stability issues. It doesn't use much memory while in the tray either: right now it's at 248K with a peak mem usage of 5872K and a VM size of 4812K.

 

[Simon F]

Forgot to add: although Maxtor are crap, I never had any trouble getting a new one in exchange imediately. They're obviously well-prepared for RMA's

I had exactly the same experience with mine too

 

[_xxx_]

And most of those post are you telling your story...

Hehe, not really. Once per thread, just for keeping our people informed

 

[pcchen]

Personally I used WD's diagnostic program to check my HD periodically. A quick scan which takes about 2 minutes is quite good for catching a bad HD. I recently have two HD unable to pass the quick scan, and I replaced one of them (which contains some important data) with only few files unreadable. Another one is not very important so I replaced it a few weeks later, but unfortunately almost all files are lost. Note that both drives have perfect ok SMART status.

So basically I think the best strategy (without resolving to RAID) is to check them on a regular basis and replace them as soon as they failed to pass the tests.