Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Data Storage Hardware

Any Recourse for Failed Drives? 115

Posted by Cliff from the if-it's-smokin'-it's-probably-broken dept.
mijoe asks: "I have been using various HDDs in my boxes with the exception of Western Digitals since I had some problems with them in the past. My recent issue was with a pair of Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120s. I had both drives fail in about a 2 month span. One of them is 14 months old, and is out of warranty. The logic board is bad (I swapped with a good one and recovered my data), but Maxtor was very short with me when I asked where I could buy replacement boards. Since then, I've switched to Seagate drives for the 5 yr warranty and quiet performance. Is there any place I can buy parts? It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order. What can I do when drives break down? Should I just switch to another manufacturer until I suffer a rash of failures again and then move to the next company?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Any Recourse for Failed Drives? More

Any Recourse for Failed Drives?

Comments Filter:
  • I just had 2 maxors Die in the last week! I think maxors are set to self distruct in april-may.
    • I just had 2 maxors Die in the last week! I think maxors are set to self distruct in april-may.

      Hmm, my 250GB Maxtor died in early April... I think you're on to something. ;-) On the plus side, it was still under warranty so they advance-shipped me a refurbished drive within a week.

      • ...They replaced your drive with a refurbished (i.e., used) drive? That's some warranty policy.
        • ...They replaced your drive with a refurbished (i.e., used) drive? That's some warranty policy.

          Yes unfortunately. It's got a 90 day warranty or the balance of the original warranty, whichever is greater. I will remember that in the future when choosing a new vendor. A 5 year warranty may not make much difference in whether your drive fails or not, but it'll save me a couple hundred bucks I would've sunk into replacing it for 5 years.

      • i also lost SEVERAL maxtor drives recently (April). Actually had some of them melt a certain chip on the logic board!!

        These were actually in a raid5 array. This SHOULD have protected the data, but i lost 4 drives in tital. ALL of them maxtor maxline series. 2 under warranty and 2 just 1 or 2 months out.

        Lesson: Dont buy maxtor.
        • Bigger Lesson: A RAID Array should contain different types of drives.

          • For certain!
          • Most controller manufacturers recommend exactly the opposite -- almost every controller I've ever used explicitly stated that best case was to use identical drives in the array.

            Someone suggested earlier in the thread to use the same model drive, but get drives from different batches/sources. Seems like a decent way to hedge your bets a little bit.
            • If performance is your goal, I believe there could be significant benefits to using the same drive. If the integrity and availability of your data are most important to you it should be stored on redundant drives that are ideally from different manufacturers.

              This latter part is what the linux High Availability Howto says, also.
            • Most controller manufacturers recommend exactly the opposite -- almost every controller I've ever used explicitly stated that best case was to use identical drives in the array.

              Yes.

              What I did was use 8 Seagate 7200 baracudas. But I specifically did not buy them all at once. I bought 3 drives from different vendors and different lots. Then setup a 3-disk RAID5 with the Raidcore BC4852 card [broadcom.com]. I then gradually built up from a 3-drive to an 8-drive RAID5 (using the special transform function that allows y
    • The Maxtor drive in my computer has it's own massive heatsink + tiny fans, primarily because it runs as blazing hot as the failed drive it replaced. I doubt I got the only two overheating-prone drives Maxtor makes, and so I wouldn't be surprised if other customers see an increased failure rate as their homes and offices warm up this time of year. I'm still getting used to the idea that my graphics card needs a fan; it would never have occurred to me to check power and temperature specs before choosing a *
    • I just noticed they where the same as the artical 2 maxtor diamondmax plus 9 120's

      All my WDC's are good though
    • Were they 7200 RPM drives or 5400 RPM Maxtor drives?

    • Re:Hmmm Strange (Score:3, Informative)

      by Roadkills-R-Us ( 122219 )
      I'm not convinced that SCSI is necessarily better. I *am* convinced that you need to buy server-class drives. We lose a greater percentage of SCSI disks on our filers than we do in our compute servers. But the way we do things, the compute server disks actually get heavier usage, overall (lots of scripts using local commands, and lots of i/o to /tmp).

      We've been buying nothing but WD IDE/ATA drives for the compute servers (and desktops) for 4 years. At first, we had a bad batch of WD, which they replace
      • My Seagate drives were dying at an alarming rate. Like one every two months. I switched to WD raptors 10k drives and had no problems since.
        • You too?

          I purchased 40, Barracuda 7200, 160GB Drives.

          In 3 months I've had 5 of them go bad!

          I don't know what the exact number should be, however I know for sure that a 12.5% failure rate is unacceptable.

          Luckily all of these drives were in raid5 cabinets, so we didn't lose any data
    • Wow. I had WDs failing in droves a few years back, as did several of my friends. We all switched to Maxtors, and so far so good, until the other day. I had a Diamondmax 200 GB that started to develop errors after about 13 mos in service (yep 1 yr warranty).

      May seems to be a bad month for these things. Replacement is a Seagate with 5 yr warranty...

  • You're in luck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jgaynor ( 205453 ) <jon@nOSPAm.gaynor.org> on Monday May 09, 2005 @04:36PM (#12481093) Homepage
    It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order.

    It is a waste. the vast majority drives die when their platters or head goes - very few actually lose a logic board. As such, there are LOTS of dead drives with good logic boards floating around. Just fleabay/Craigslist for your drive model along with the word 'parts' or 'repair'. Pick up a drive with bad surfaces and cannibalize the still-good logicboard . . . Win/Win.
    • A friend had a failure of a WD drive a year or so ago, and he asked me that very question. I know some engineers at WD, and this is what they said:

      "If the drives are pretty close in serial number you might be able to do it. There are firmware changes during production and it is likely the change could make "this" PCBA not work with "that" HDA." So beware.

      It took me a couple days to catch up with them and ask the question so by the time I got back to him he had sent it in under warranty.

      I als
      • My grandmas Maxtor Diamondplus 8 just failed recently (boot would hang with it plugged in) - actually it wasn't a diamond plus, it just had a big ass sticker on it that said "Refurbished" - my bro bought her the cheapest computer he could, though she's not poor.

        I jumped on to ebay and bought the best condition 40gb Diamondplus 8 w/ pictures that I could.
        Upon arrival, I swapped the logic board, recovered her data.

        Maybe I just got insanely lucky? I don't know. I did this same thing a couple years ago on a q
        • "I jumped on to ebay and bought the best condition 40gb Diamondplus 8 w/ pictures that I could."

          I did the same for a coworker a while ago. Found a drive with the closest firmware I could, swapped the logic boards, and recovered the data.
          Swapped the boards back, got a replacement drive under warranty, and now I have 2 drives for the price of 1.

          There are undoubtedly people who will recommend against doing this, claiming you can make the problem worse, permanently corrupting the data, etc.
          That may be true i
        • I recently bought some hard drives from bestbargianpc.com for my company.
          Company policy is to log the serial numbers of all hardware, but I couldn't find the serial numbers. I called Maxtor (the drives were labeled as Maxtor drives) and after discussion with Maxtor tech support, including the Maxtor diagnostic software returning a blank serial number, and sending them photocopies of the label sides of the drives, they informed me that the drives were never manufactured by Maxtor and were completely counter

  • You get what you pay for. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Codename_V ( 813328 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @04:40PM (#12481143)
    I think without a warranty you're pretty much screwed. For future purchases, my advice is to get disks with 5+ year warranties. I even recommend you go with SCSI disks, since they always seem to last longer and perform better, the extra money is well worth it.
    • Your strategy makes economic sense. But consider why they can sell drives that fail so quickly, and still stay in business: drives are cheap. So even if you don't get that extended warantee, you're not out all that much money.

      I think what pisses this guy off is the sheer waste of so much hardware ending up in the landfill after only a year or two in service.

      • The retail boxed IDE drives had a 3 year warranty until a couple years ago, and they mostly made it that long. The new ones come with a 1 year warranty, and they will often barely make it. Sad.

        But they *ARE* cheap now! 120mb for $39 after rebate a week or so ago. Wowee.

        I guess I would rather pay more and have drives that were less likely to fail and take my data with them. Oh well.
        • Well, you can pay extra for a drive that is less likely to fail. But no matter how much you pay, you can't buy a drive that will absolutely never fail. Which is why God invented backups.
        • I don't get. I'm looking for a ~160GB SATA drive right now. I have some giftcards to Best Buy I was going to use, but everything lists a 1 year warranty. I go to newegg and find an OEM version of the same drive for 75% of the cost with a 3 or 5 year warranty. My power supply has SATA power connectors so I don't need a converter and the motherboard came w/ 8 SATA data cables so I don't need whatever comes in the box.

          HD's seem completely opposite of CPU's in regards to warranties.. boxed CPU gets 3 years
          • I'm betting that the 1 year warranty at Best Buy means that you can return it to Best Buy for a year. As far as I know, most mainstream drive manufacturers offer at least 3 year warranties will all their drives. The drive you buy from Best Buy with 'only' a 1 year warranty on it actually still has a manufacturer's warranty on it, for 3 to 5 years. In order to make use of it, though, you'd need to swap the drive with the manufacturer itself.
  • Western Digital (back in the Caviar days) were the WORST drives ever. Back then the only drives I used were Quantum fireballs - fast as hell, and reliable (I still have a 20GB FB Plus LM in use today). But overnight, on a new manufacturing process, Western Digital stole the performance crown, and their "Special Edition" "J" series drives have been rock solid and stable. If I had stuck with my hatred of WD through the "Caviar" drives, I'd have missed out on these great drives, and their even-greater 10K RPM "Raptor" drives as well.

    And before Quantum? All I used were Seagate, and Micropolis (remember them?) In every case, something changed, and they weren't the performance leader anymore. I changed, and for the better each time.

    When you lose a drive, how do you know its bad manufacturing? And (with the exception of incidents like the IBM Deskstars) - I haven't seen any evidence that a particular modern-day drive is more "prone" to failures than any other - and I can't honestly believe that one person or entity can purchase enough drives to create an empirical sample-set.

    But that's just me. YMMV, but I wouldn't blacklist a company because they "used" to make bad drives. I mean, who do you end up hurting but yourself?
    • Funny WD Drives have never been a problem with me, I still have a 3 yr old 60GB caviar drive in my comp that hasn't failed just yet. Then again what is their failure age... and besides mileage may vary from drive to drive (hey you can't make ALL drives bad right??? Something would have to accidentally be a good and reliable drive)
    • IBM used to be one of the best hard drive manufacturers on the planet in terms of reliability.

      It took only one model of hard drive made for about two years to change all that. Witness the horrendous destructive power of the Death Star!
      • Well not entirely true. The only death model was the 70/75 Gig. That had the worst track record among IBM products. All the other capacities are actually fine. Anyways, it's all Hitachi Deskstar nowadays.

        • Nope, the 30/45Gb models were notoriously flaky as well. All of my DeathStar drives died at around the 3.5 year mark or earlier. My Hitachi notebook drive died at 11 months. I'm using a Toshiba drive in my PowerBook now, and will try Seagate for my desktops.
        • Nearly all of the Deathstars from that era had problems.

          My 30 gig unit included.
          • Damn, you got hosed by the DeathStar too? I think I lost at least two of the 30GB IBM drives I had. I forget which manufacturing plant they were from but they clearly had some quality issues there. I did have a few other 30GB Deskstars in machines at work, and those seem to have survived nicely. Still, after losing enough personal data TWICE, I won't touch another IBM drive ever again.
      • Heh...this was back when the HD manufacturing was done at Rochester, MN and before they farmed it out all outsourced and in the far east. Not saying that people out there can't make quality products also, but it was the culture of constantly trying to cut costs and corners to boost profits that led to the huge problems.
    • Gee. My WD Caviar 80 GB bought in 2001 is still working well. Also, my 120 GB (from 2002) "Death Star" is working excellently as well. Then again, my ASUS motherboard (which got great reviews with the most noted negative points being the price and, well, the location of the floppy connector) is acting up and needs to be replaced.
    • Ah, Seagate. One of my computers it still running an old 40MB drive I bought back in 1994. Slow and small yes, but it does the job. Waste not want not.
    • The irony of your statement about Deskstars is that I have a 40GB deskstar that served as my system drive for about 2 years, and for the past year has been an MP3/AVI storage drive, that I use regularly(Read every day.). Never had a problem with it. I had a Fujitsu 20gig drive that lasted for almost 6 years, and I've got a WD Caviar 20GB that's been around for almost as long. The only drive problem I've had in my new computer is that my Seagate Barricuda will randomly not get detected on boot.
    • Over the past 15 years I have purchased about 500 drives for work, friends and family. And over that time I have seen the full range of drives. I have 5 Meg Seagate MFM that still works, 150 Meg Micropolis ESDI's (pair in a mirror set) that test perfect. I have a 20 Meg quantum apple SCSI that still works perfectly despite the blistering heat it generates. I have a raid set of the Micropolis AV Gold SCSI that were the highest streaming drives available for 4 years. I have thrown dozens of drives away, mo

  • Pithy summary (Score:3, Funny)

    by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @04:47PM (#12481234) Homepage Journal
    "I bought Maxtor drives. They broke rapidly and had no warranty. I bought a Seagate drive, it had a 5 year warranty and hasn't broken. Should I maybe buy Seagate instead of Maxtor?"

    Oooh, lemme ponder that tough question for a while.

  • it's about cooling (Score:2, Interesting)

    by spudgun ( 39016 )
    Drives often die because they get too hot , or too cold, don't turn PCs off overnight in winter if they are in a non heated enviroment.
    and install fans pointing at your drives !

    Anyone remember those fujitsu drives (20-40s) ?
    those failed because a chip didn't like it hot or cold
    • Cold? This is news to me.

      How does cold increase the probability of failure?

      My 40gb Seagate has been going for about 3 or 4 years without a problem (and I turn my machine on and off religiously). I'm not a fan of leaving a machine on if it isn't doing anything and I'm even less of a fan of finding something for an idle machine to do just for the sake of keeping it on. The tree hugger in me doesnt like wasting electricity (and indirectly, destroying our ecosystem) simply to maintain my uptime. Its a
      • Various things about the cold could cause premature failure- expansion/contraction of bearings and moving parts. Viscosity increases as temperature decreases causing the motor to work harder. Increased friction. But I personally can't see these affecting anything much, especially on such a small scale the changes are negligible...
        • Frequent temperature change can cause stress fractures in solder joints as well.

          It may seem like it wouldn't make a difference at such a small scale, but you have to remember that the tolerances are proportionally tighter as well. Fine pitch parts and BGAs don't have a lot of solder holding them down, and a drive platter spinning at 7200 or 10k RPM with a read head flying a microscopic distance above it needs to have a very smooth ride.

      • I'm not a fan of leaving a machine on if it isn't doing anything

        Fair enough; but there are valid reasons to leave it on; it seems to me that some of the little fans fitted to a number of motherboards stick or are noisy when powered up from cold. I find it more convenient to just leave the machine running since it seems to help overall reliability of the system. This machine I'm using now has only been rebooted for OS changes since 2001 and is still going strong.

        Also, I get impatient with waiting for the

        • Power-up is the most stressful time for your hardware, especially components with moving parts.

          I had some test servers at my last job that were very reliable if you left them running, but when they did go down (like when we had some problems with our UPS. Ouch!) we'd have to smack them on the side to get the HDDs to spin up again.

          A big part of the job was testing replacement drives for video servers (think $100k Tivo for a TV station). We found that, as they get older, 73GB Cheetah IVs start drawing a lot
    • Anyone remember those fujitsu drives (20-40s) ?
      those failed because a chip didn't like it hot or cold
      Interestingly, I got a shitload of those for free (upgrades) and I use them as flying test drives (from one machine to the other). Despite them becoming so hot you burn yourself when you touch them, they are actually very reliable.
      Of course it might be a different kind of logic board, too...
    • When you turn equipment on, changes are higher that you will break it then if you had left it running.

      The electrical resistance of a part varies with its temperature. In general, the colder a part is, the smaller its resistance.

      Current I=U/R
      So the smaller the resistance, the greater the current.

      Consider that most lightbulbs break when you turn them on.
  • http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/12/116241 [slashdot.org]

    My experience [slashdot.org] remains the same, except now I have similar content for seagate drives. I still hate maxtor and recomment western digital.

  • My experience (Score:5, Informative)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Monday May 09, 2005 @04:56PM (#12481341) Journal
    I got a server from Dell with two 250gb Maxtor MaxLine II drives. Within 9 months, one of the drives failed. The next week, the other drive failed. This was in the middle of winter so I doubt heat was an issue.

    I searched online, and found that _everyone_ has been having trouble with this model of drive, with it often failing like clockwork within the first year, though it had a 3 year warranty.

    Since it was under warranty, I quickly got two replacement drives from Dell, this time from Western Digital.

    During my troubles, I found a nice website called storagereview.com. Though you need to register an account to reach it, they have a survey of every major model of hard disk with thousands of reviews and percentile ratings for each model. The Maxtor MaxLine II drives I had were rated in the 3rd percentile (making them nearly the worst drives every created). Your model scores in the 23rd percentile, still pretty awful. Looking at the storagereview reliability ratings, just about every manufacturer ships at least a few lemon models, not just WD or Maxtor.

    You'd probably do well to consider scsi for servers, if only because it seems that many sata drives marketed for server use are really of desktop quality. Also be sure that you keep your servers adequately cooled with good airflow reaching the drives, as it seems that the models of drives that fail most often tend to do so because they run hotter than other models. And when possible, favor older models of hard disks with a high reliability track record on storagereview or similar sites.
    • Yep - exactly the same thing; Dell with pair of maxtors, one fell out of the RAID mirror and while rebuilding the other one went.

      Another Dell server with maxtor drives lost its drive after 2 months.

      One odd thing; in the first one SMART showed the drive was fine - passed every test, had no remapped sectors - but still had a log entry of uncorrectable error (seen by both the OS and in the SMART logs). WTF!

  • Seagate Western Digital Maxtor IBM/Hitachi (Score:3, Informative)

    by Wwolmack ( 731212 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @05:00PM (#12481397)
    Seagate has done the right thing by instituting a 5-year warranty. If you care about preserving your data first, and performance second, Seagate wins. Seagates are also eerily silent; I had to make sure one of them was on by feeling for heat/vibration the first time i installed one.

    Western Digitals tend to have slightly better transfer rates, but unless you get OEM drives (3-year warranty), you are stuck with a 1 year warranty. You can extend the warranty to 3 years for $15, so factor that into the price if thats what you plan on doing.

    Maxtor seems to have had a bad couple of years. Bad enough that I no longer trust their drives. Their 1-year warranty does nothing to inspire confidence. OEM Maxtors have a 3 year warranty, but they are harder to find that oem WD's.

    Short warranty terms really only protect you from horrendous, data-murdering drives, i.e., the absolute worst of the worst. There has to be something VERY VERY WRONG with a drive for it to fail within a year. There is almost no reason to consider a drive with only a 1 year warranty.

  • I've never had a Maxtor drive NOT go bad. I have always considered them to be junk. If a customer has a bad drive it is always a Maxtor I find when I crack the case.

    I've only had one WD die in the last 10 or so years, and that was a LONG time ago, when drive capacities weren't measured in gigabytes. That's why I will only put WD drives in my personal machines at this point.

    Most of the time I wind up replacing them with higher capacity drives before they have time to wear out.

    At the same time, any importa
    • Lost 3 drives in the last 2 month. 3 of them are Maxtor. The other 7 are good. The good thing: I now have no Maxtor left to go bad.
    • Ive had one WD drive go dead on me. The PC it was in was almost always on, got shut off overnight, next day afterwork, never started up again. Weird, i know. To be fair the drive was 3+ years old, and i put it through ALOT in that time. 3 different machines, many os installs, etc. I still have an old 2.5ish gb WD drive from circa 1996-7 that still works great. Its in an old machine, running routing software/firewall, but it still works well.
    • I had 5 broken Maxtor drives out of 10 i bought in the last 3 years. 3 of them broken with classical "click-of-death" symptoms, 2 of them with classical "system slowdown, then BSOD in Windows and then no reboot". They were installed on different desktop PCs, no swap, no server-like stress on them whatsoever. Won't buy Maxtor again until this trend is changed. In my personal workstation I have 3 Seagate Cheetah in SCSI RAID-5 (LSI ctrl) with a proper fan to cool them. I love that. My data is worth more than
    • That's funny, I am still running a couple of 10GB Maxtors from 1999 or so. Since then, I've had 60G, 80G, and 120G WD drives fail...I really wanted to like WD, but I'm afraid I'm done with them for now.
    • I've never had a Maxtor drive NOT go bad. I have always considered them to be junk. If a customer has a bad drive it is always a Maxtor I find when I crack the case.

      Thats nice to hear. I have a dead WD2000JB in front of me now. Just over a year old and it's already developed the clunk of death.

      I have tons of drives, both WD and maxtor. In many different systems at many different locations. And WD isn't any better than maxtor. They both fail at disturbingly high rates.

      Storage densities have become insane

  • Keep your drives cool! Each drive should have its own vibration-isolated fan. Use flexible nylon straps to isolate the vibration.

    Using this method, we have had one failure in four years with 60 Western Digital drives.
    • I just make sure to leave an empty slot above and below the drive for airflow. No need for dedicated fans, IMO.

      I've been building machines for friends and family for almost 10 years now, and only had one drive fail.

  • Just swap the logic board (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dark Coder ( 66759 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @05:34PM (#12481835)
    In my fifth failed drive, I often have a working drive (on the shelf) in which I can carefully remove the logic board and exchange it with the failing drive.

    Only the 3rd time, the spindle was jammed or the motor is dead (no spinning), in this case, it was the RAID that save the day (as usual).

    In all cases, these drives were selected for their highest reported reliability (that I can determine from various websites). Then I research for the latest drive models with the best uptime and go out and buy them.

    You do DO backup, don't you?

    Something like 23% of all IT folks ever bother doing backup period. Less than 5% do backup daily. Its a common theme with small/medium business not having an IT staff.

    For SMB IT folks, invest a lil' extra in H/W RAID; it'll save your hide (not to mention your job). If you're budget-constrained (another common IT issue), go with software RAID.
  • i like that idea about getting PCB on Ebay... one thing I've done is using a script to capture error messages regarding drive errors...I run the script prior to warranty or service contract expiration to save money on hardware replacement cost. this might save the replacement cost of 5% of the hard drives.

  • Unless you happen to have a spare clean room in your basement that can filter out ultra-fine particles and perhaps a loaner Intel-style bunny suit, you're not going to be opening up any hard disks and expecting them to work for very long afterwards.

    Sometimes you can get away with straightening a bent pin on the connector or even changing out the drive electronics or repairs of that nature, but in general hard disks are about as non-user-serviceable as a cathode ray tube.

    • RTFP (Score:2)

      by Andy Dodd ( 701 )
      You don't even need to RTFA, he's asking where to get parts for the types of repairs you just described as possible. (In his case, replacement of the logic board).

      As another earlier poster pointed out, there is no market for such replacement parts because 95%+ of hard drive failures involved the portions of the drive that are basically not repairable. Specifically, almost all drive failures involved the mechanical parts that are sealed within the drive. Logic board failures are VERY rare.
    • I think it should be noted that typically the logic board is the PCB that is on the bottom of the OUTSIDE of the drive. Theoretically you can replace the logic board on any drive without cracking the drive, but there are often many practial concerns. Still, its likly the most complicated part of a hard drive that is still (power) user replacable
  • Never EVER put two drives from the same batch in the mirror (raid1)! If possible, use two drives of same/similiar size from two different manufacturers. As expirienced by many, all manufacturers ship a batch of disks that die sooner that expected every now and then. To reduce the chance of both drives in a mirror failing shortly one after another, use different drives.

    I should know ... I put 30 drives in raid10 and all 30 had the same firmware bug ...

  • Some insight into the HDD industry (Score:5, Interesting)

    by itwerx ( 165526 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @06:38PM (#12482581) Homepage
    Historically there have only been enough top-notch HDD design engineers to make about one and a half design teams. The rest are decent enough engineers but they're not "gurus". So every hard-drive manufacturer tries to steal and keep the good guys with one degree of success or another.
    The sudden increases and decreases in drive quality seen in every manufacturer over the last couple of decades is a direct result of these guys getting poached.
    And then there's the whole assembly line QC problem which I won't go into here.
    The short version of this is that Seagate has the best assembly lines right now (good article on it in Business 2.0 recently) and the best team.
    The other good guys are scattered around the other mfg which is why other drives are mediocre at best. (I don't think Maxtor has anybody good right now at all which is why they are crap at the moment.)
    But Seagate has a good retention plan for their guys going forward so I'd stick with Seagate for at least the next few years after which other mfg will either be out of business or have caught up to what Seagate's doing right now whereupon who knows...?
  • You can get a new 160 GB Seagate drive for $50 on a rebate special most weeks. Messing around with trying to replace electronics seems to be a waste of time.

  • Drives, esp. IDE drives are a commodity. You really don't have any excuse in my book for not having hot backups of pretty much everything. I haven't had a machine without matching internal devices for *years* for this exact reason. If I take a media hit, it's no big deal. Yank it, pitch it, new one installed in a few hours.

    And yes, I have a completely separate backup process for disasters. The duplicate drive is for media problems and Stupid Human Tricks.

  • I had several hard drives and a few PCI cards go bad in a short period of time, and since I'm running a UPS I know it's not over/undervoltage problems. I replaced the $10 power supply with a decent one by Sparkle that puts out ~600 watts, and I haven't had a problem since. If you use the power supply that came with your case, or paid less than $40 for a new one, it probably sucks. That issue aside, I prefer WD Raptors when possible (their SCSI heritage gives them double the MTBF), and WD JB drives otherw
  • Had this same issue with a maxtor drive. I had others from what I thought was the same batch but turned out the boards had variations in them so I ended up buying a working used one off ebay after I confirmed with the buyer the board revisions were the same. It was worth it to me to get the data off it but since that's not the case with you why not just get a new drive that is less likely to fail on you in the future and could be covered under a 3-5 year warranty?
  • Instead, find reviews and reliability data for the specific drive. Each drive a manufacturer comes out with could be an entirely new project, with new designs and engineers. Which means that the same company could put out both a lemon and an immortal drive. Can't base your decision on the brand name. The drives are most likely all made in the same factory in China anyway.

    If you can't be bothered to hunt down information on every drive you buy, then definitely go for something with a good warranty. And neve
  • I have had three failures with Matrox DiamondMax 9 160GB drives in a year. Every time i a got a new HD in factory package but they still seem to break on me. This current Maxtor HD that just came to replace the last one that broke has been in use for 3 weeks and yesterday i had some CRC errors with it. So i scanned it and voila, 19 relocated sectors, i scanned again 107 relocated sectors. So it seems that it's dying on me again. I have changed the motherboard, power supply, IDE cable and i do have surge pro

  • Some (former) professional advice... (Score:5, Informative)

    by twilightzero ( 244291 ) <mrolfs.gmail@com> on Tuesday May 10, 2005 @01:14AM (#12485425) Homepage Journal
    1) They won't sell you the logic boards. Ever. Or the connectors. Or any other parts other than a complete drive. As someone further up stated, each batch has slight firmware revisions between them that could make a board from batch A not work on a drive from batch B. The other part of this equation is that before leaving the factory, each drive/board pair is individually tuned when the servo control data is written on the platters (I'd draw you a diagram but it's a bit difficult in text).
    When this happens the entire platter surface is scanned and any imperfections are mapped out and stored in the servo control chip. Every drive out there ships with a small amount of imperfections on the surface of the platters and this is how they are accounted for. When you swap boards from drive to drive, even with the same firmware, you could run into the problem that essential data from one drive is stored in an area marked as a unusable sector on the other drive.

    2) Asking about this and pressing the question is a really quick way to get your account on their call tracking system flagged that you void your drives' warranties and make any future dealings with them VERY difficult. Trust me, the techs don't like to talk to people with account warnings on, and they can and will skim your old calls when you call in.

    This is from the perspective of someone who worked support for a major HD manufacturer for quite a while. If you care about the data on your failed drive at ALL, send it out for professional data recovery. Otherwise, be willing to accept the risk that you yourself may destroy all of your data. The other thing I would say to do is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make either daily backups or mirror your most important data. Getting an external backup drive like one of the Maxtor external HD's that do autobackups or setting up a simple RAID 0 is not that expensive compared to losing your data.

    Anywya that's my $.02 on the subject. If you want the full $1.00, email me (and make the subject stand out so I can easily sort it out of the spam).
    • Guess it never occurred to them to make the servo control chip socketable?
      • Probably, but not even remotely worth the cost of doing so, especially in the insanely cut-throat hard drive market. Remember we've lost some good players in recent years simply because they didn't cut costs far enough and were undersold to the point where they caved in.

    • The other thing I would say to do is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make either daily backups or mirror your most important data. Getting an external backup drive like one of the Maxtor external HD's that do autobackups or setting up a simple RAID 0 is not that expensive compared to losing your data.

      RAID 0 is not redundant and will not protect you at all against data loss! In fact, it may render you more vulnerable to data loss because many RAID 0 implementations will lose the entire array in the case of a sin

    • Know any good mirroring software for winxp?
      • Not really, I tend to shy away from software solutions for hardware problems. I'd personally reccomment going with a hardware RAID controller from 3ware or Promise (both make decent cards at fairly decent prices without getting into enterprise stuff). Any software mirroring has the potential to significantly slow down your data access because it's leaning on the main system processor to do all the mirrors and also writing twice as much data to the drives, whereas with a hardware card the controller takes
  • I had my ~1Tb music server die on me last year. Was a buttload of Maxtor's, and they worked perfectly.. until the power supply suddenly decided that if 12V was good for hard drives, 110V must be better!
    Happily I had got paranoid a few months earlier and backed up all the static data, but for my database I was having one drive backup onto another daily. Now _that_ was a bad idea.
    I did eventually get the db data back by (as suggested above) swapping logic boards between non-dead and dead drives. It worked rea
    • Why was backing up one drive to another a bad idea? I'm just curious because I do the same thing here at home. I have about 250 gigs on one striped LVM set that I sync up with rsync nighlty. That way if the one set dies, I still have the other set. The worst I'm out is a day's worth of data.
  • Just buy a new one that's not like the old crappy ones.

    For most people drives are cheaper than their data (whether they know it or not is a different issue).

    After all most people buy drives to store stuff, not to keep tinkering around with them(overclockers excluded).
  • Most of the drive failures happen predictably, and that's what SMART technology is for. Install a monitor of some sort (losta free & not-so-free solutions around), and you'll get a warning when your drive is about to die (unless, of course, it's a violent death, electrocution or such), usually weeks to months in advance.

    On another note, DiamonMax 9s come with a 3 year guarantee. It should be valid, so get a replacement.
  • These are precision devices with moving parts. They will fail, it's inevitable.

    The problem is that platter densities have become astoundingly high, and failure rates have increased accordingly.

    I've owned literally hundreds of drives and no manufacturer is noticeably better than the other (with the exception of the infamous IBM GXP fiasco). Often people will 'swear by' some manufacturer -- right up until their first drive failure.

    The best you can do is buy a drive with a sufficiently long warranty, and re

Slashdot Top Deals

"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne

Close