My hard drive’s about to fail, any advice?

[Kyle_K_ski 1]

Hello All,

I’m in the midst of having a major hard drive catastrophe: to make a long story short, I found out from the two Dell technicians that I spoke with late last night that with almost 99% certainty, my current hard drive is about to die on me. My computer was so bad yesterday that it was unable to launch the Win OS. I was VERY lucky to call back and get a different technician who was able to walk me through a “backdoor†way to try and get the hard drive to work for another brief period (from a couple of days to a week) just so I can make a backup of our critical files to our external hard drive. He had me run CHKDSK, and luckily the hard drive was intact enough that I could create a new bootsector, as it was corrupted. This allowed the Win OS to finally load so that I could get to our files. I can’t begin to describe to you how panicked I was that we could lose the last three months of our family photos, and not to mention all of our recent work!

So, as I race against time to backup up our important documents, I would very much like to have your advice on replacing my hard drive, the type I should get, and suggestions as to where I could purchase it from. Needless to say, we want a manufacturer who is dependable; the hard drive that is now failing us is barely three years old! We want, at the minimum, the following specs for our hard drive replacement:

200 GB 7200 rpm.

If I get a replacement drive through Dell, it’ll cost us $144 (this price does NOT include taxes and the cost of shipping and handling).

If you know of a RELIABLE parts supplier that could meet or exceed the above parameters, PLEASE list the specific details in your post. We’re in a race against time, and if I have to use the Internet to order the new drive, I’d rather do it through our home system, as I can trust in our Internet security measures.

Ideally, I’d have the new drive before the old one fails us completely, that way our down time would be greatly reduced. If possible, I’d love to make our failing drive slaved to the new drive, that way all I’d need to do is copy the documents from the old drive to the new, without even having to rely on our backup that’s sitting in our external hard drive.

I’d also greatly appreciate your advice in regards to a reliable and cheap national chain of computer service stores, just in case I’m unable to hookup the new drive properly. I’m talking about stores such as Best Buy, CompUSA, etc., etc.

That’s it for now. I thank you in advance for any speedy assistance in this matter.

As always,

Yours!

Kyle

March 8, 2006

.

[theavonlady 2]

Seagate, Western Digital. What's the difference?

[JdB 151]

Well, I have personally favored Maxtor HDD's over the last 5 years or so, as they have never malfunctioned, but that was with P-ATA HDD's, not the newer S-ATA drives. I have no SATA drives so I can't help you with that.

Quote[/b] ]200 GB 7200 rpm.

Is it a P-ATA or an S-ATA drive (I suspect the last, but certainty always helps)?

I prefer Maxtor, but as with all preferences, it is a personal preference...

To help you a bit, here are the connectors that go from the mainboard to the drive. First up is the older P-ATA, second is the newer S-ATA.

P-ATA (Left connector)

S-ATA

[-Ash- 0]

From past experiences with Maxtor where I work...I would suggest not buying one!!!

[EiZei 0]

I have had plenty of matroxes over the years and only one has gone bad so far but in it's defence I really did mishandle it by letting it run way too hot.

In my opinion, getting a good hard drive these days is a coin toss really unless you are going for something more expensive than your average sub-100e ATA hard drive.

[JdB 151]

@ Mar. 08 2006,17:17)]From past experiences with Maxtor where I work...I would suggest not buying one!!!

Do you mean that as in general, or a specific type?

From my own experiences I would never recommend a Western Digital or Seagate as they are prone to failures similar as that described by the topicstarter.

Though I must add that I have never had any problems with any of my HDD, even the Seagate and Western Digital one that I own (fairly old ones).

It's not just the brand of the HDD that matters, it is also the way that the owner handles it, I've seen abuse so many times that you'd start to wonder why they ever came up with ''warranty'' (not saying that the HDD in question was abused)

[Ares1978 0]

My first HDD, a Seagate, still works after 11 years. The two IBM's I've had all failed just after the warranty expired, as did one of two Quantum Fireball drives that failed. One of the three Maxtor drives I've had since then failed too, with three months (or was it three weeks?) left on the warranty.

Can't draw any conclusions regarding different brands based on my experience and I don't have any personal preferences.

[crashdome 3]

Quote[/b] ]My hard drive’s about to fail, any advice?

They make pills for that sort of thing now!  

Quote[/b] ]From past experiences with Maxtor where I work...I would suggest not buying one!!!

From my past experiences they have been A-OK at my work (25-30 workstations all w/ Maxtor). I have nothing but Maxtor in 5 home PCs and only once did I get one that failed after 2 years use. Most importantly when it started to fail, I got plenty of warning. Not like others I just had up and die one morning, unable to retrieve any information off of them.

I am not a Maxtor fan... I just go with the cheapest of the most reliable. Maxtor is cheap and reliable. So is Western Digital, but not as cheap. In the end, it doesn't matter what brand you get as they all have propensity to fail. Just do backups if needed and save some money and get a cheap one with atleast a year warranty.

[Added]

Quote[/b] ]My first HDD, a Seagate, still works after 11 years.

What is that? like a 100MB drive? 1GB? 2GB at most?! ... my RAM is bigger and faster! (lol that sounded funny). It must be like ATA-1... what on earth would you use that for? (just curious - cuz I just dumped a box of ten or twelve 100mb drives last year since I could find no use for em)

[JdB 151]

The two IBM's I've had all failed just after the warranty expired, as did one of two Quantum Fireball drives that failed. One of the three Maxtor drives I've had since then failed too, with three months (or was it three weeks?) left on the warranty.

Can't draw any conclusions regarding different brands based on my experience and I don't have any personal preferences.

IBM's should be avoided regardless of personal preference, if someone offers you one for free, hit them on the head with it and then run away as fast as you can

Those are alot of hardwarefailures, are you sure that it is not due to the power supplied to your house being unstable or something?

4 HDD's with problems is alot.

Quantum Fireball 1,8GB

Maxtor 4,3 GB

Maxtor 13GB

Seagate 40GB

Maxtor 80GB

All work perfectly fine.

[Ares1978 0]

What is that? like a 100MB drive? 1GB? 2GB at most?! ... my RAM is bigger and faster! (lol  that sounded funny). It must be like ATA-1... what on earth would you use that for? (just curious - cuz I just dumped a box of ten or twelve 100mb drives last year since I could find no use for em)

A mighty 400MB.  Hell, you don't just throw something out just because it's old (except maybe a wife). Besides, I've still got Quarantine installed on it.

Those are alot of hardwarefailures, are you sure that it is not due to the power supplied to your house being unstable or something?

Yes, I'm sure. One of them could possibly have been due to a faulty power source, but the rest were all mechanical failures with all the typical sound effects.

[shadow 6]

Personal experience on HDs are irelevant. One person owning or have owned 5-10 drives does'nt create a very representative statistic does it?  

Now if you work with HDs and read manufacture reports its a different story.

Basicly stear away from Maxtor, Fujitsu and Quantum. They are all from the same assembly line, they are noisy and generate alot of heat which wear them out.

They also go through sub-par stress testing compared to the following:

IBM (now Hitachi, and actually been that way for allmost 10 years), Seagate, Samsung and WD are all great drives. Seagate being the most silent one.

Want a reliable and silent drive then you only have one choice: Seagate.

This does'nt mean these drives will never fail. Its just statisticly less likely. I've personally had one WD Caviar and a IBM Ultrastar fail, but like I said earlier; this does'nt mean didley.

Kyle_K_Ski, get a new drive before the old one breaks down and mirror it. That way you dont have to do any config and installation work.

A thought for those who still swear by Maxtor and Quantum: No branded mid- to hi-range server comes with either. Only some low-range servers use Quantums every now and then (noisy, expensive workstations).

My observation from work during the last ~10 years anyway.

[JAP 2]

I ll second NOT buying Maxtor.

They are having serious problems the last year.

Selling alot of pc's / parts i must say over the last year the only drives that we re replacing are Maxtor. All die after about 6 months to a year.

It s so bad we switched completely to Seagate.

My advice, buy seagate.

Cheers

[kegetys 2]

A thought for those who still swear by Maxtor and Quantum: No branded mid- to hi-range server comes with either. Only some low-range servers use Quantums every now and then (noisy, expensive workstations).

I thought there haven't been any Quantum drives for quite a while since Maxtor bought them some years ago. I even have a "Maxtor Fireball" drive, which, as the name tells is really a Quantum one and even has the exact same sounding bearing noise after years of use that all Quantums I have had (sounds like a circular saw )

And, Maxtor was bought by Seagate last december. That seemed like a pretty odd move to me, and if I'd buy a Seagate drive now I'd make sure it really is a Seagate and not a Maxtor one under the Seagate brand... I had a 120GB Maxtor fail on me a while ago, the 60GB "Maxtor" Fireball that makes unbearable noise from its bearings, a 40GB Maxtor that has some bad sectors (still runs fine though) and a 6GB maxtor that also has some bearing failure and sounds awful. So I'll stay away from their drives.

Seagate, Samsung, WD and IBM(Not the deathstar ones) drives have worked fine for me so far. Seagate has five year warranties on their drives which is a good sign to me (Others seem to usually have 3 or 1 year warranty)

[ralphwiggum 6]

My HDD on this PC is Maxtor. Got it 5 years ago and have no problem. But since then their reputation has been compromised.

I tried western digital 1 yr ago and it failed really bad on me.

I heard Segate is still reliable

my 2 cents

[crashdome 3]

I still say putting all your eggs in one basket is bad, which is why I have extra HDs lying around and constantly backup or mirror important data. In those scenarios, I don't care how good a HD is... it's still a risk. Might be a lower risk, but all-in-all I think even the worst manufacturer has a low enough risk that you can live with.

If we could transplant real-life statistics and come up that manufacturer A is the best at (1% possibly failure) and manufacturer B is worse at (3% possible failure) then who cares? you still have 97%+ chance with any drive and you still have a small chance it will fail.

I say go with the cheapest, but maybe that's because I've always been the one to prefer the most economical....Maxtors may suck compared to others, but I bought a lot of 10 of em and they are cheap as hell! Never had the whole lot go bad on me so it's them until someone else drops their price or they get close enough to be the same (which it looks like all brands are pretty much the same price nowadays).

Recommending any particular brand for quality is always one-dimensional. It is often biased also. To most people, Maxtor, WD, Seagate... the differences are so narrow nowadays it's all the same in the end... either it works or doesn't. Unless your building a high-grade server or workstation get the one on sale and be prepared to send it back I always say!

Although there might be the case of a particular lot of products that are bad, but those cases are usually rare.

[shinRaiden 0]

Hold on just a second here folks, there's a nasty little devil in the details. Sure, you can a WD2000JB for $92, but the fine print says it's an 'OEM' drive. No problem, that's just a 133t way to get cheap stuff right?

WRONG.

What that means is the manufacturer gives you no warranty at all. Zero. Nada. Zip. Your vendor, if you're lucky, might give you 90 days exchange for defective merchandise. (the fine print says they can get up to two years for pass-through, but that's if they buy direct, not through a channel distributor)

So if you're ok with that route, sure grab an OEM drive and take care of yourself. If you want to wave a paper in someone's face and get a free drive if the new one goes bad, buy that drive if it includes a warranty from Dell, or buy a boxed one at your local non-geek electronics store.

From past experience as a minion in the Dell technician horde, if the rest of your box is still under the standard warranty then you're best going with there recommendation. It will save more grief down the road if something else goes bad.

Me personally, I build all my own and my last three drives were from w00t. Then again, they're all plugged in a RAID to compensate for them being low-cache refurbs.

[EiZei 0]

What that means is the manufacturer gives you no warranty at all. Zero. Nada. Zip. Your vendor, if you're lucky, might give you 90 days exchange for defective merchandise. (the fine print says they can get up to two years for pass-through, but that's if they buy direct, not through a channel distributor)

Odd, around here almost all hard drives that are sold separately are OEM (ie. antistatic bag and the hard drive only) and they seem to always come with a 1 to 3-year warranty.

[Artak 0]

Quote[/b] ]From past experiences with Maxtor where I work...I would suggest not buying one!!!

I second that. In all my IT-life I've seen nothing but failed Maxtor hdd's (ok one IBM too). So _for_me_ Maxtor clearly isn't the way to go.

The perfect drive now seems to be a SATAII with NCQ technology. Not talking about game performance, but just the drop of general loading times and booting up your operating system and copying files. Western Digital has the 10000rmp drive too with 3 (or 5 even?) year warranty, but for some reason I'd still go for a 7200rpm drive.. silly me.

[CameronMcDonald 146]

I've had a Western Digital Raptor 10000rpm 36GB HD for about a year and a half now, and it's run really really well, even with all my lame non-cooled overclocking of every other component in the system!  

[Ironsight 1]

What that means is the manufacturer gives you no warranty at all. Zero. Nada. Zip. Your vendor, if you're lucky, might give you 90 days exchange for defective merchandise. (the fine print says they can get up to two years for pass-through, but that's if they buy direct, not through a channel distributor)

Odd, around here almost all hard drives that are sold separately are OEM (ie. antistatic bag and the hard drive only) and they seem to always come with a 1 to 3-year warranty.

Same here. Bought an OEM Western Digital 120MB about 1.5 years ago after that stupid IBM Deskstar gave up on me just after the warranty period. It runs really great and the 8MB buffer is a must have. Also have a 4 year old 80MB Western Digital (non-OEM) and never had any problems with that one either. Both had a warranty of 2 years IIRC. So I am sticking with Western Digital for a while.

[Placebo 29]

I'm also one of the band of former-Maxtor customers, I bought a new drive, it died, I RMA'd it, it was replaced with a refurbished drive not a new drive which I was not happy about, the replacement drive also died, it was again replaced, again with a refurbished drive, the 2nd replacement works ok but refuses to boot as a master for some reason so I have to use it purely as a storage drive.

[berghoff 11]

I always have WD, only 1 time it failed after few years of abuse :P. We got a little storage pc with a maxtor (or seagate) I think, needed to be changed twice and they make a bit more noise than the WD.

[j w 0]

but refuses to boot as a master for some reason so I have to use it purely as a storage drive.

You have the right connection set on the IDE/SATA-connector. Sometimes you dont have the little pin for slave, sometimes you have to put it master manually, but often it's Cable Select. Check it out, that may be the problem.

[shadow 6]

Seagate and Hitachi OEM drives both have 5 year warranty.

"Dethstar" funny

@Kegetys, when you said the Quantum sounds like a circular saw, did you mean that while they are spinning idly or when they are reading/writing?

Yes, you are right. Maxtor are putting their labels on Quantum drives now. The reason I still mention Quantum as a brand is because of the distinct sound only a Quantum makes. hehe never thought of a circular saw before, I was thinking more sand in the machinery or one of those instruments that detect radioactivity

IBM (Hitachi really) had a single bad batch of IDE-drives. I believe it was a 40 or 60GB-series. Besides that they should'nt be any worse than the others.

I only use Seagates myself because of the low noise-level. Never had a Deskstar, but have had Ultrastars and Caviars in the past.

[j w 0]

Right now I have two Quantums in my PC. One of them whi's when you use it, or just whenever, that's kinda funny

EDIT: Sound like a compressor for a car, like when it sucks in air. Ah, well if you belive Forza Motosport, but that's kinda realistic