The life of a hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ablang
  • Start date Start date
Please define "low level format" What software do you use ?
Click to expand...

Well, using FORMAT x: or formatting inside of Windows
using Disk Manager is not considered a low level format.
Since I'm not the O.P., I can't say what they're
considering to be a "low level format".
 
Ken said:
No. IDE and SCSI drives now have the same hardware
(the electronics differ).
Click to expand...

That may be the case for 7200 RPM SCSI drives, but I doubt (for example) the
Seagate Cheetah 10/15K RPM SCSI drives are mechanically the same as their
Barracuda series (IDE and SATA)...
 
Thought most manuf's recommended against low-level
formats with modern drives?
Click to expand...

Most manufacturers have a diagnostic utility that also writes zeros to the
drive. Some people confuse that with the old lowlevel format needed for MFM
& RLL drives. New drives can't be lowlevel formatted except in a lab with
special equipment. The diagnostic utility gives the same effect, and will
remap bad blocks from the spare block pool available on newer drives if
spares are not used up. End result looks like a low level format, but the
process is very different

JT
 
ToolPackinMama said:
The last 6 dead drives I replaced just happen to all be WD. Two this
week. Coincidence?

They don't seem to go more than 3-4 years, at best.
Click to expand...

Very odd. I have never, ever had a WD drive fail.
The one drive I have lost in the last 14 years was an IBM 4Gig.
 
Don't say that! ;-)

After having Seagates for 5 years, I'm going back to WD in the new machine. I
had great luck with WDs for the 12 or so years before that, but Seagate happened
to come in this machine...

Very odd. I have never, ever had a WD drive fail.
The one drive I have lost in the last 14 years was an IBM 4Gig.
Click to expand...

I've never had a HD fail in a home machine since I got my first one in '86 or
so. I don't count the ones I pulled out of office machines when I was
troubleshooting in a 350+ workstation stock brokerage...
 
Ablang said:
How long are hard drives supposed to last anyway (in your
experience)? I know some probably have an MTBF of about 30 years, but I
had a WD 6.x GB HD that just became as good as dead a few weeks ago (too
many bad sectors; scandisk ran forever).

So tell me about the bad ones in your life?
Click to expand...

My Fujitsu MPG3409AH E died on Sunday. "Primary Master Drive Fails" after a
pleasant BSOD in XP - haven't had one of them since Win 95.

Fortunately, was recoverable and managed to retrieve my files today after a
*lot* of effort searching for software to help.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
Did the job with a boot disk scan finding no errors - even though XP still
ran ChkDsk and tidied it up.

Still going to return the thing though. Don't trust it not to fail again.

Nick
Hoping the disk doesn't die again before I can get that 8 Gig of Buffy on to
the new, bigger, better Barracuda 160gig.
 
news-text.dsl.pipex.com said:
My Fujitsu MPG3409AH E died on Sunday. "Primary Master Drive Fails" after a
pleasant BSOD in XP - haven't had one of them since Win 95.
Click to expand...


I once had a hardrive which failed on a Wednesday.
 
Ablang said:
How long are hard drives supposed to last anyway (in your
experience)? I know some probably have an MTBF of about 30 years, but I
had a WD 6.x GB HD that just became as good as dead a few weeks ago (too
many bad sectors; scandisk ran forever).

So tell me about the bad ones in your life?
Click to expand...

On the subject, what would the symptoms of a hard drive failure be?
Would the system randomly rebooting itself be an indication?

I ask this because I was having a problem with my old computer
rebooting itself randomly, even during Windows booting. It wasn't a
virus because I run Liveupdate on Norton Antivirus everyday and do a
full system scan once a week. I built a new computer but kept the old
hard drives, and it wouldn't boot into Windows properly. It would
reboot itself. I tried to repair Windows and it would get to the same
place every time and then reboot. So I formatted the partition and
reinstalled Windows and it worked fine. For a while (it's been less
than a week since I finally got it up and running again). Last night,
while playing "The Longest Journey," it rebooted. Now I have
encountered some errors in running this game, but this concerned me.
The drive has seemed to be running slowly and I have abused it over
the last less-than-two years. It's a 120 GB Western Digital Caviar IDE
drive (5200 RPM, I believe). My computer rarely ever goes off, and I
run Folding@Home in the background constantly (distributed computing
program, so it does access the drive). Could this drive be going bad,
and would randomly rebooting be a symptom?
 
On 22 Apr 2004 16:15:21 -0700, (e-mail address removed) (Dalboz) wrote:

| On the subject, what would the symptoms of a hard drive failure be?
| Would the system randomly rebooting itself be an indication?
|
| I ask this because I was having a problem with my old computer
| rebooting itself randomly, even during Windows booting. It wasn't a
| virus because I run Liveupdate on Norton Antivirus everyday and do a
| full system scan once a week. I built a new computer but kept the old
| hard drives, and it wouldn't boot into Windows properly. It would
| reboot itself. I tried to repair Windows and it would get to the same
| place every time and then reboot. So I formatted the partition and
| reinstalled Windows and it worked fine. For a while (it's been less
| than a week since I finally got it up and running again). Last night,
| while playing "The Longest Journey," it rebooted. Now I have
| encountered some errors in running this game, but this concerned me.
| The drive has seemed to be running slowly and I have abused it over
| the last less-than-two years. It's a 120 GB Western Digital Caviar IDE
| drive (5200 RPM, I believe). My computer rarely ever goes off, and I
| run Folding@Home in the background constantly (distributed computing
| program, so it does access the drive). Could this drive be going bad,
| and would randomly rebooting be a symptom?

Could be, but maybe not. If you're running WinXP, go to Control Panel
System > Advanced tab. Under Startup and Recovery, click on the
Click to expand...
Settings button. Under System failure, uncheck "Automatically
restart." OK and get out. You'll have to reboot.

The true problem is often masked when the system is set to restart
automatically when something happens. There are several things that
can cause this type of problem. One is a failing PSU. Another is
overheating. Yet another is RAM. Or it could be something as simple
as a corrupted driver.

As for your WD hard drive, go to

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#windlg

and download DLG Diagnostics to run from DOS or Win DLG to run from
Windows.

Larc



§§§ - Change planet to earth to reply by email - §§§
 
Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:55:27 GMT: written by Larc
<[email protected]>:

~snip~
The true problem is often masked when the system is set to restart
automatically when something happens. There are several things that
can cause this type of problem. One is a failing PSU. Another is
overheating.
Click to expand...

I've encountered both of these.

I would have the random reboots while playing Quake and it was a Power
Supply problem. I upgraded to a 300W Enermax and have had nary a
problem.

As for overheating, that would cause my system to have a hardware
failure and now that I have the sides of the case off, I haven't had a
problem. I'm just waiting for the new case to arrive.
 
Larc said:
On 22 Apr 2004 16:15:21 -0700, (e-mail address removed) (Dalboz) wrote:

| On the subject, what would the symptoms of a hard drive failure be?
| Would the system randomly rebooting itself be an indication?
|
| I ask this because I was having a problem with my old computer
| rebooting itself randomly, even during Windows booting. It wasn't a
| virus because I run Liveupdate on Norton Antivirus everyday and do a
| full system scan once a week. I built a new computer but kept the old
| hard drives, and it wouldn't boot into Windows properly. It would
| reboot itself. I tried to repair Windows and it would get to the same
| place every time and then reboot. So I formatted the partition and
| reinstalled Windows and it worked fine. For a while (it's been less
| than a week since I finally got it up and running again). Last night,
| while playing "The Longest Journey," it rebooted. Now I have
| encountered some errors in running this game, but this concerned me.
| The drive has seemed to be running slowly and I have abused it over
| the last less-than-two years. It's a 120 GB Western Digital Caviar IDE
| drive (5200 RPM, I believe). My computer rarely ever goes off, and I
| run Folding@Home in the background constantly (distributed computing
| program, so it does access the drive). Could this drive be going bad,
| and would randomly rebooting be a symptom?

Could be, but maybe not. If you're running WinXP, go to Control Panel
Settings button. Under System failure, uncheck "Automatically
restart." OK and get out. You'll have to reboot.

The true problem is often masked when the system is set to restart
automatically when something happens. There are several things that
can cause this type of problem. One is a failing PSU. Another is
overheating. Yet another is RAM. Or it could be something as simple
as a corrupted driver.

As for your WD hard drive, go to

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#windlg

and download DLG Diagnostics to run from DOS or Win DLG to run from
Windows.
Click to expand...

Well, I'll run the diagnostics when I get home from work. I think my
PSU may be slightly under powered, even though it is new and 400
Watts. I checked this site http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/
and found that with my hardware, 400 Watts isn't quite enough if it
runs everything at once at full power. But I need to check the memory,
because I'm using 1 GB of new Kingston RAM. But an interesting thing
here: I checked the event viewer at the time that the reboot occurred
and it showed a restart from a bugcheck (I don't have the code at the
moment; it's on my home computer; and I'm not a programmer, so I don't
necessarily understand the codes), but using Google, it seem that it
may have something to do with antivirus software. Upon further
inspection, it seems that the most common things with most rebooting
problems was a combination of antivirus software and an nVidia
graphics card. Could Norton Antivirus (2003) possibly be grabbing the
Detonator drivers for some reason?

As for overheating, it's possible, but not likely. While my system is
running hot (CPU 50C, motherboard 36-40C; I'm currently trying to fix
this problem), the computer was running over the weekend without
rebooting and it was running way hotter (CPU 60C; motherboard 45C)than
that before I turned the chasis fan around (for some reason it was
blowing into the case) and replaced the CPU fan. I suppose the GeForce
FX 5950 could be raising the ambient temperature in the case, but
after the reboot I checked temp, and it was still cooler than it had
been over the weekend.
 
Fri, 23 Apr 2004 02:55:27 GMT: written by Larc
<[email protected]>:

~snip~


I've encountered both of these.

I would have the random reboots while playing Quake and it was a Power
Supply problem. I upgraded to a 300W Enermax and have had nary a
problem.
Click to expand...

I've got a 400W PSU. It should probably be enough, but checking the
power demand website revealed that it might not be. I'll probably try
to replace it, although I don't think that's really the problem.
As for overheating, that would cause my system to have a hardware
failure and now that I have the sides of the case off, I haven't had a
problem. I'm just waiting for the new case to arrive.
Click to expand...

Could you explain how the case was causing it to overheat and how a
new case will fix it? This is a serious question because I've been
having some heat issues myself. I've been trying to simply establish a
proper airflow through the computer by align fans and strategically
blocking ventilation (covering the back ventilation with duct tape
except for the fan grates so that hot air that was just blown out
doesn't get sucked back in), and while it's helped somewhat, it
doesn't seem to be doing enough.
 
I've got a 400W PSU. It should probably be enough, but checking the
power demand website revealed that it might not be. I'll probably try
to replace it, although I don't think that's really the problem.
Click to expand...

Forget about what that website claimed, I have several systems it claims
need over 500W, running from good name-brand 300-420W power supplies.

The key is not that your unit is labeled as 400W, but whether you can
trust the manufacturer's rating.
 
Ablang wrote
How long are hard drives supposed to last anyway
Click to expand...

while you didn't ask...
one strategy I've employed is to always have critical data on an
external usb drive in addition to burning a CD once a month for items
I absolutely cannot live without if I had to install a new HD and
reinstall the OS

now having said that, I also use tools like Diskkeeper 8 and Spinrite
in fact, there is a new Spinrite 6 just about to be released from
grc.com that will work with NTFS and just about anything else.

...because a HD may be bad immediately and what you perceive as a new
drive may in fact have 1 or 2 years of life already on the components,
it may look new to you but it may have included previously used parts
 
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