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12/08/2011 08:37:08 AM · #1 |
This morning I had a harddrive failure. It's been starting to freeze over the the last month, but I was hoping it was just Firefox or Flash since it was usually during a video. This morning it was working fine, I was browsing my normal morning websites, no video just local news, and then it locked up. I rebooted and it failed to boot saying there was a disk error. I've restarted multiple times, and sometimes it lets me in to start repairs, but it always just goes black after it loads the files.
No biggie, everything is backed up somewhere. The problem is, this is my third harddrive failure this year. There has to be an underlying reason for this. What the hell is going on? |
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12/08/2011 09:08:17 AM · #2 |
Some drives are just problematic. If a drive is going to be an unreliable one, it will usually fail when it is still relatively new. I had a 1Tb Seagate fail on me without warning about 5 months after building my newest computer. Fortunately, I had a recent backup. Seagate replaced it and the replacement went a few months before it too failed. The second time it started giving me warning messages, however, so I had a chance to backup and get another warranty replacement. I replaced it with a 2Tb Hitachi which has so far been fine. The replacement for the replacement Seagate is in my wife's computer and still working fine after almost a year.
I have two physical drives, one for the OS and applications, and another for files. When the data drive failed, I was still able to boot the computer. Big drives are so cheap now that I recommend all new systems have at least 2 drives.
When you say this is your 3rd HD failure this year, do you mean 3 different drives, or the same one? Lots of things could be causing the issue, or it could just be random bad luck.
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12/08/2011 09:14:47 AM · #3 |
wow 3, I am no expert in computers, trust me I can turn it on and off, then scramble for help on DPC if anything goes screwy. But it could it be power surges either the electrics or actually in the computer? Do you use the same plug hole to plug your computer into?
I know, about as useful as dog snot, sorry! |
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12/08/2011 10:20:37 AM · #4 |
3 Hard drives is alot...Is this a custom computer or store bought...
I would suggest replacing it with a Western Digital drive...I have never had any probs with them in any pc that I have built.
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12/08/2011 10:30:21 AM · #5 |
| If you've gone through 3 different HDs in that period of time, I'd probably be looking at the power supply... |
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12/08/2011 12:27:21 PM · #6 |
When did you buy the 3 hard drives.. Certain manufacturers drives have an "average" shelf life of x years. If you bought the same drives at the same time then it's possible they will all start to go around the same time period.
I had 4 drives die on me within a 2 week period. Granted they were running in a corporate data center environment and were running all day every day for about 2 years. |
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12/08/2011 12:48:28 PM · #7 |
| if your case is too hot that can be a cause of harddrive failure. |
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12/08/2011 12:50:20 PM · #8 |
I've had all the major brands fail on me at some point, Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Fujitsu, Samsung... it matters not really, although I currently have 5 Seagate drives and all are running fine (and 2 have been on a NAS drive that is powered and drives spinning up for 24 hours a day for last 4 years).
Ultimately, every single drive will fail at some point. They have a physical shelf life. Depending on usage, haldling and storage conditions will determine how long each drive will last. For 3 to fail so close together is unusual and may indicate an environment outside of thier recommended operating guidelines (humid, dusty, vibrations etc).
At least you are doing the right thing in ensuring that everything is backed up. If you expect your drive to fail at some point, and cater for it, you are streets ahead of those that blindly expect them to run for ever.
Every drive will fail eventually - that's why the manufacturers record the MTBF (mean time between failures - i.e. average life expectancy) on the drive specifications. Remember that and you won't go too far wrong :-) |
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12/08/2011 01:00:09 PM · #9 |
You have just motivated me to do a backup this evening...
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12/08/2011 01:58:37 PM · #10 |
Originally posted by cowboy221977:
You have just motivated me to do a backup this evening... |
yep me too |
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12/08/2011 02:15:35 PM · #11 |
I had two fail on the same system within a month... one internal, the other external. Three does seem like a lot. If you don't have a case that's too hot, it may well just be a run of bad luck. Heck, I went almost a decade without a hard drive failure prior to this year, LOL.
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12/08/2011 08:38:02 PM · #12 |
Thanks for the responses. I'm going to try to answer a bunch of the questions posted all in one. Here goes...
- This is a custom computer.
- The harddrives have all been Western Digital. The last two have been Caviar Blacks. The most recent was a warranty replacement for the second failure. I believe the first one maybe have been a Caviar blue?
- I have two Caviar Blacks that are raided currently. I believe they are set up as Raid 1 if anyone cares. I really hope it's just one of the two that blew, but I haven't had a chance to troubleshoot yet.
- After the second failure I got a full sized tower with gigantoid fans. The power supply cable inside was damaged at some point, so that has also been replaced. Both old and new power supply are 850W.
- The box is plugged into a surge protector.
- My husband's computer has almost exactly the same guts as mine. Same chip, motherboard, video card, power supply, etc. He has not had any problems. My computer typically runs cooler than his. Right now his drives are running at 33C and 31C as I type this.
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12/11/2011 12:19:36 PM · #13 |
A bit of an update:
The silly thing actually booted up yesterday and made it through the Windows repair. I double-backed-up a couple files for work and started doing some casual browsing with the Performance monitor up. I clicked a link someone posted for a video and the CPU usage jumped to 98%. Since my husband and I have the same chip and board I tried the same thing on his and it jumped, but not much above half if I remember correctly.
For curiosity sake I scheduled a bootscan through my antivirus program and rebooted. It came back 100% clean, so I ran an Ad-Aware scan that also came back clean with the exception of a couple cookies. While Ad-Aware was scanning the CPU usage would typically run between 0% and 35% with some spikes around 65%. But at a couple points it jumped to 100% and stayed there for several minutes before it dropped back down to normal.
I browsed for a couple hours and then left it idle for a few hours while I made some stew. At some point it went to sleep. I came back, woke it up, and looked at a few DPC threads. I moved on to reading Strobist when it completely froze up and had to be shut down with the power button. I haven't messed with it since.
I'm starting to think that while a drive going bad may still be the immediate problem, the cause may be a dying chip (Intel E8500) or motherboard (DRI X38). They're not overclocked or anything, but they're getting pretty old. There was a time I was running pretty hot, and they've seen many hardware changes around them.
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