How many harddrives have died on you in your lifetime?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dennis
  • Start date Start date
Dennis said:
I've had about 15 HD's over the years and I'd say I only remember
maybe one or two of them ever dying.. Is that par for the course?

Specifically... I've currently got about 6 HD's in use, some have been
in use for up to 8 years now... never had a problem yet (knock on
wood)... How long can I expect this to last? IE: what are the chances
of a HD lasting 10 years? 20? 50?

What's the average lifespan for modern HD w/ moderate usage?
Click to expand...

I'm going to say 10 years, unless the drive is crowded and not given
enough free air space around it to cool the electronics. I've had only
2 IDE drives go bad on me, both due to electronics. One was a 6.4G or
8.4G IBM that stopped being recognized after a few days (board swap
allowed data recovery), the other a 3-platter 1.6G WD that was part of
a recall (board swap didn't work on it).

But 10-15 years ago the reliability was much worse. Most of the Seagate
40M MFM/RLL drives I knew of eventually glued their heads to the
platters (Google Groups for "stiction"), and a few of the 40M and 60M
drives (same mechanical design but RLL data format, and for some reason
none developed stuck heads) burned out motors or motor driver chips.
Some 5.25" Miniscribes (later Maxtor) burned out motor driver ICs
(Miniscribe tech support gave me the generic part number for this
inexpensive audio amplifier chip) or developed head misalignment (done
optically with a stepper motor, could be readjusted externally). My
favorites were Seagate ST-4096 -- 80M, 5.25", 3" high. They were good
drives, but failure of the servo or head arm driver would make the
heads move back and forth so violently that the drives could walk
across the floor.
 
My
favorites were Seagate ST-4096 -- 80M, 5.25", 3" high. They were good
drives, but failure of the servo or head arm driver would make the
heads move back and forth so violently that the drives could walk
across the floor.
Click to expand...

Some large disk drives used on mainframe systems would shake visibly
when there was a lot of disk activity and the actuators were moving
constantly. I recall engineers placing little plastic hands on a
spring on top of the drives with a suction cup; the hands that waved
back to the engineer the most vigorously were on top of the busiest
drives.
 
Troll


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NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 05:15:04 -0500
From: must work for them
Newsgroups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Subject: Re: How many harddrives have died on you in your lifetime?
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 03:16:00 -0700
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Again, that depends on the purpose.
Click to expand...


What an idiot.
 
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