Harddrive failures getting worse?

[Lazzer408]

I don't know if it's just me but has anyone noticed alot more failures and problems with harddrives over the last 5 years or so? I don't run a server or anything. I play music, watch movies, and play games.

Personally in my own desktop...

Seagate 3.5" 2/5 failed. (RMA'd)
WD 3.5" 2/6 failed. (RMA'd)

I have a good story about my last 250gb 5200rpm 2.5" in my laptop. Month and a half old it died completely. I got WD to ship me a NEW 7200rpm replacement. I gave them the address where I was and the tracking number said it was going to the wrong place but they assured me it would get here. Guess where it went? The second drive they shipped next-day-air also tracked to the wrong address and again they assured me it's coming here. Guess where that went? The 3rd drive finally made it but was defective out of the box! The 4th drive finally showed up along with another 250gb 5200rpm drive as well. Looks like I have a few spares now.

Anyways... This replacement only has 16 start/stops, 303hrs, and already has 8957 load/unload cycles! The clicking gets anoying!

Now lets do some math. In 303hrs/8957loads. The drive is rated for 600,000 loads. At this rate it will reach it's cycle rating in 20,296 hours. Well short of it's MTBF rating. More math... 20,296hrs is 845days is 2.31yrs. Warranty is 3yr so... FAIL!

I can only assume it will get worse over time.

Is this the result of Windows power management? Drive failure? Quality of manufacturing?

EDIT - I can only imagine the new opperating systems don't help. (cough Vista cough cough) I run 7 and it seems to do alot less thrashing with defrag and indexing turned off.

 

[sneekypeet]

I know 5 years ago I was a complete n00b, and from the advice of someone who used to frequent here, I defragged a drive to death, yes death. Aside from that drive I have yet to have one of them fail that were bought new.

I did have one other drive go down, but it was a used HP pull I was getting by on for a while.

I have had WD, segates, and now my Spinpoint, and I have to saw I really cant complain

I think you really just ran into some bad "pick of the bunch" drives.

 

[Lazzer408]

Bad luck does seem to follow me around. All the drives are new retail drives not used or OEM versions.

 

[DMF]

I'm seeing more DOAs and early deaths. But once they get past that first week, they seem to last at least as well. Of course, the newer drives are also the younger...

 

[Steevo]

Engineering for cost. +1

 

[TIGR]

As they say, for every component that fails, there are thousands more out there working just fine. In the scheme of things I have no idea whether HDD durabilitylongevity is getting better or worse. Personally, I've had two drives fail in the past decade, both old IDE: a Maxtor and a Samsung. I haven't personally had one fail in six years now, in which time I've gone through a couple dozen I suppose.

I just took a minute to do the math, and as for my professional builds, about one in 560 has ended up failing in the customer's hands, over a span of four years. However, that doesn't include drives that never made it into customer builds because they arrived DOA or didn't pass my tests. If you count those that exhibited problems within the first 24 hours, the total hard drive problems I've encountered is more like 1 in 52, over a four-year period.

 

[Fourstaff]

Well, as you shrink things, it gets more delicate and the failure rate creeps up. I still haven't have any harddisks that died on me yet.

 

[Lazzer408]

If you count those that exhibited problems within the first 24 hours, the total hard drive problems I've encountered is more like 1 in 52, over a four-year period.

I can only imagine what this does for business reputation. I'm sure there's people that blame the builder. In the few minutes it took me to type this it's reloaded 11 more times. I think I need to RMA this one too.

 

[TIGR]

I can only imagine what this does for business reputation. I'm sure there's people that blame the builder. In the few minutes it took me to type this it's reloaded 11 more times. I think I need to RMA this one too.

That's exactly why I give them a good testing; fortunately when I say ones that failed within the first 24 hours, those are all failures I caught and RMA'd before they got into customer rigs. For those of us builders on our own, not part of a big company with a large advertising budget, reputation and word of mouth really is a big deal!

 

[jjFarking]

I can only imagine what this does for business reputation. I'm sure there's people that blame the builder. In the few minutes it took me to type this it's reloaded 11 more times. I think I need to RMA this one too.

I'd have to start suspecting a bad PSU with that kind of luck..
Do you know what the relative voltages are?

 

[Flyordie]

Bad luck does seem to follow me around. All the drives are new retail drives not used or OEM versions.

Nah, its just UPS thats following you around.

 

[smashed_99cbr]

well I touch between 25-100 seagate/west dig hard rives per week... I maybe see 1 or 2 bad drives in a week... all my drives are returns/damaged goods... so with that in mind I would say that new drives would have a way lower failure rate...

 

[Lazzer408]

I'd have to start suspecting a bad PSU with that kind of luck..
Do you know what the relative voltages are?

It's a laptop. I haven't poked around for voltages but the Seagate in it is fine. It's the WD causing all the trouble. Everything else is working ok.

Does anyone know what Windows is accessing every second? I have searched high and low for years and never figured it out. Clean install, indexing off, no spyware.

 

[Mussels]

hard drives have more data per square inch. The more tightly packed the data is, the more data goes wrong on a failure.

Many drives also spin faster these days, meaning that knocks and shocks while running do more damage.