Harddrive manufacturers suck...

[Jim Alfredson]

So I have in my hand yet another Western Digital harddrive that's gone down. This makes for about 6 in the last 7 years or so. I have stopped buying WD drives long ago, but they still pop up in other people's computers. This particular one is from my wife's grandfather's computer. It is completely dead... it won't even power up. It's two years old.

Up until about the mid-90's I believe, harddrive manufacturers had a 5 year warranty on their drives. If they died, you could send them back and get a replacement. Then they shortened the warranty period to 3 years. I got many a new drive from warranties, mainly from WD. Now it's only 1 year. And every manufacturer is the same. Why? Because they know their drives are crap and they will fail.

In a stunning display of a universal sense of humor, the computer of the lead singer of my r&b band also has two harddrives that fried this week. The brand? Western Digital.

I made the mistake of using an older 10gb Western Digital drive (that was originally in an Akai harddisk recorder) in my Fostex 16-track recorder last year on the Organissimo tour with Arno Marsh. I recorded all 6 days of the tour. The 10gb drive had an entire show on it. It died a week after I got home from the tour.

I've been having decent luck with Maxtor. I've had really good luck with Seagate drives. But man, what is up with WD?!? I hate having to call people (like I just did with my wife's grandfather) and say, "Yeah, all the data on your harddrive is gone."

I'll summarize by saying: BACKUP!! Back up your data now. And frequently.

[Big Wheel]

Good to know. I bought a Seagate a few months back on Uncle Skid's recommendation and it's been working fine...keeping my fingers crossed.

Sorry you've had such a hassle!

[scottb]

I got a Maxtor drvie, something like 40 gb for something like $25 dollars on sale at Compusa. I used it to revive an old computer that had died the year before and let my kids play games on it so they would stop crashing mine!

(Ever notice how a toddler can hit a keyboard and do things with one keystroke that you didn't even know were possible? They just touch it and a message comes up, DO YOU REALLY WANT TO LAUNCH NUCLEAR MISSILES AGAINST CUBA?)

[Christiern]

I have 5 Maxtors on 2 machines and no problems yet. I do, however, back up current projects at least twice a day, to my .Mac drive, which is probably in California, but could also--for all I know--be in Hackensack or Peoria.

[neveronfriday]

My 500 GByte WD RAID fried not so long ago.

Unfortunately (because of warranty) I had to go with WD again.

They suck.

[wesbed]

Weird.

The only drive I've had crash on me was an IBM Deskstar. I called it the Deathstar because, after going through two of the damned things in as many months, I switched back to Western Digital and had no more problems. I've always purchased Western Digital drives, except for my mistake in taking a chance on the IBM. I've had Western Digital drives for years. I've never had a problem with them.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I leave my machine on 24/7. Always have. I shut off the monitor when not in use. It could be because of this or I could be just lucky, but I've never had a hardrive fail. Of course, I frequently back up my data too. It never pays to ignore the possibility of something failing.

I have read that the rapid movements that the hardive's mechanisms do during boot are the most stress it gets. Minimizing this by leaving the machine running may help increase the life.

Kevin

[Uncle Skid]

Good to know. I bought a Seagate a few months back on Uncle Skid's recommendation and it's been working fine...keeping my fingers crossed.

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Glad to hear that Seagate is working out for you, Big Wheel. The one I bought has been working great, but now the laptop has other (non-hard drive related) problems.

I've had many Western Digital drives over the years, all the way back to a 40MB (!) that I bought in 1990. None of them ever crashed, so I guess I've been lucky.

My "backup" hard drive is a Maxtor 250GB, and my only complaint is that it seems much louder than the Seagate in my desktop. I ended up putting it in an external USB case, so the noise isn't an issue any more.

[Dennis_M]

I leave my machine on 24/7. Always have. Kevin

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This is the key, folks. I have over a dozen PC's at work and two at home. Once I turn them on, they are never turned off except for cleaning (another key) and vacations. Turning a PC on and off produces much more stress on the machine than just leaving it on. You do have to reboot now and then to set things straight.

[Use3D]

Hate them, they're awful. All the retail machines my store bought back in 2000~ or so had WD in them. Every one of them has blown it since them, that's like 5 harddrives. Just badly made garbage.

We got a new retail system comprised of new Dells two years ago, and Dell, being the craptacular company that they are, also use WD drives. So far none of them have failed, but the server is getting mighty pokey...

[trane_fanatic]

Western Digital has been a rock solid brand for me. I've had bad luck w/ Maxtor and heard horror stories about Seagate. So who knows?

[.:.impossible]

I leave my machine on 24/7. Always have. Kevin

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This is the key, folks. I have over a dozen PC's at work and two at home. Once I turn them on, they are never turned off except for cleaning (another key) and vacations. Turning a PC on and off produces much more stress on the machine than just leaving it on. You do have to reboot now and then to set things straight.

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This makes sense to me, and I do my best not to turn the PC's off, but what about laptops?

[Jim Alfredson]

I leave my machine on 24/7. Always have. Kevin

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This is the key, folks. I have over a dozen PC's at work and two at home. Once I turn them on, they are never turned off except for cleaning (another key) and vacations. Turning a PC on and off produces much more stress on the machine than just leaving it on. You do have to reboot now and then to set things straight.

←

This makes sense to me, and I do my best not to turn the PC's off, but what about laptops?

←

It would only make sense if you have good ventilation. Harddrives get very hot and if they are not adequately ventilated, they'll up and die right quick.

[Jim Alfredson]

Well, the 20gb Maxtor system drive in my main office machine just up and died last night. So there goes my theory that WD sucks. Maxtor sucks, too. I replaced a WD in this computer back in 2002 with the Maxtor after the WD died.

Luckily I saw the warning signs months ago and have been backing stuff up. Unfortunately, re-installing software is going to be a pain (have to call Microsoft and tell them that yes, this is my copy of Office, I'm just installing it on a new computer because my old one died). I'm seriously considering spending the $500 and getting the Mac Mini, but then I'd have to re-buy all my software, which is not a very happy proposition for me. I have Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, a $40 fax program, Office, etc. This is all stuff I use regularly and it's expensive software (although I got good educational discounts 'cos my sis works at MSU).

Drag. I should probably just stick with a PC. Go buy a new harddrive for $60, reload XP and all my software and try to get back on with it.

[Jim Dye]

I've got a WD 80 gig SATA Hard Drive i'm not using. My first one was bad out of the box. I got an RMA from WD and they sent me a new one. Does your machine support SATA? I'd be happy to send it to ya.

[Jim Alfredson]

No, my machine is too old for SATA, but thanks! I'm going to go to CompUSA and get a 40gb Seagate. I'll see how they fair, since I've owned numerous Maxtor's, WD's, etc.

[White Lightning]

Just a bit of info:

Regular harddrives support regular work hours, ie apprx 9 hours per day. I these days of downloads 24 hrs a day, these harddrives simply overheat and die.

You may want to buy the harddrives thaat are especially buily for strenuous work - WD SE series and MaxLine by Maxtor. They cost about 15% more, though.

[Jim Alfredson]

So I got a 120GB ... Maxtor. It was on sale, what can I do? $69 for 120GB's??! That's crazy!

Anyway, I've been working on this damn thing since 9pm (it's now almost 3am) and I'm tired, so I'm hitting the hay. I have most of my software re-installed.

[neveronfriday]

This is unbelievable.

The second set of WD disks in my Raid system died on me a few weeks after being replaced. This time I managed to backup everything before, but what a bummer. Do those disks suck or do I keep getting mine from the bottom of the pile?

Jesus. Despite the backups, there go another two days to get everything up and running again ... once I get the disks replaced next week. I don't have a recent enough partition image to put back on ... the disks went down the drain while I was making that set (with nearly 280 GByte, that takes a whole lot of backup space and of course, drive C:\ had to malfunction at around 92% of the backup process.

This sucks!

I'll be back in a week or so because technical support won't be back at work until Monday morning, technician here on Tuesday, settting up for a day or two, ... bummer.

Lots of time to listen to jazz ....

[neveronfriday]

Don't buy a Dell system.

Their service in Europe has been "outsourced" to people who don't really speak any of the EU languages properly and who are told to be absolute blockheads.

I already had a mail from Dell management which stated that because the disks had failed for the second time in a few months, they should be replaced by a different brand (BTW: large Maxtor disks above 150GB show a major decline in quality control as well), but nobody had told the technical service department. It took me almost 45 minutes to talk the guy into doing what his bosses had already decided.

Also the last time the disks had to be exchanged, the Dell technician (same guy, btw, somewhere in the Czech Republic) didn't believe me the disks were shot (or simply didn't understand subject-predicate-object sentences of the simplest kind) and it took two technician runs to my place (one without replacement disks, one with) to get things fixed.

Had I not insisted now on getting things done right, the same thing would have happened again ... and I would have lost another day in a phase in which I NEED the stupid machine just about every minute.

This was my second Dell PC and my last. At least in Europe they have started to suck majorly. With my first PC, which ran for a very long time and did not have major trouble, the two service calls I had were dealt with by different people much more efficiently. Today they treat everyone like DPUs (dumbest possible users) on the phone , albeit with (fake) friendliness. They WILL NOT diverge from the routine, not an inch, even after it should be clear to any DPT (dumbest possible technician) that the system is screwed up majorly.

They suck.

And my disks are getting progessively shot.

I'll spend the rest of my current PC time surfing the forums here.

There better be something good to read.

[Jim Alfredson]

Well, I've been using a portable recording rig to capture most of the gigs organissimo has been doing lately, including our hit at The Green Mill this Friday. The system consists of an HP laptop computer, a Presonus Firepod audio interface, and an Acomdata 250gb firewire harddrive.

After the last set, I noticed the computer had a weird error on the screen saying that the harddrive had stopped responding. I didn't think much of it, since it looked like it had gotten most of the third set and the club was trying to clear the stage for the late-night jam session to start, so I just packed everything away.

Well, tonight Joe comes over so we can listen to what we got from the Mill and I plug the harddrive in and guess what? Totally dead. The computer won't recognize it by name, won't access it, nada nothing zip. So I take apart the case to find...

... a Western Digital harddrive inside. I HATE WESTERN DIGITAL! Unfortunately, the Baker's gig from October we recorded was on there as well. I used it to record the HotHouse in November, but I transfered that one off. I don't know why I didn't transfer the Baker's hit. I'm kicking myself now.

So, anyone know of any portable RAID firewire drives? I was looking at the G-Raids, but they are only RAID 0, which means no redundancy (so what's the point?)

[Chuck Nessa]

Have you tried whacking it with a screwdriver handle? Not kidding - my old computer needed an occasional "hit" to get it going.

[Jim Alfredson]

No, I've seen harddrives do this too many times. It's gone. The Acomdata cost me $160 and when I opened it and found a Western Digital Caviar drive in there (the cheapest model they make), I was very pissed. I took the drive out, hooked it up directly (via IDE) in my desktop and still no luck accessing it. It's dead.

Right now I'm looking at something like this:

http://www.firewiredirect.com/product/323/

Just the case is $289, but it has RAID 1 and I could put some nice Seagates in there. And RAID 1 is redundant, so if one drive fails, the data is still there, on the other drive.

[Jim Alfredson]

UPDATE: I have had luck recovering files in the past with a piece of software called Davory, but it could not even see the drive this time around. So after some intense googling, I found this site:

http://www.runtime.org/

Like most recovery software, it allows you to do a search first before buying the program. That way you're not stuck with paying for something that doesn't work. Unlike most recovery software I've tried, however, it also saves that data, allows you to register the software, and continue on where you left off. This is very very handy, since scanning for files on a large harddrive that is damaged usually takes 6 to 8 hours.

Anyway, it looks like my files are intact. As I suspected, the boot sector and FAT32 table fell apart for some reason. Right now I am copying the Baker's gig files off the drive onto another harddrive and they all seem to be there. Next I'll try the Green Mill files.

I highly recommend this piece of software if you ever need it. $69 is reasonable, considering how easy it is to use and how effective it is. I am very impressed that it was able to even see the drive, since Windows and every other piece of software could not find it.

[Jim Alfredson]

By the way, Chuck... I tried the screwdriver method to no avail yesterday while trying to get Davory to work! But thankfully the drive is mechanically sound, otherwise the data would've been truly lost.