Plagues By Hard Drive Failures!

[jyl]

Is it me, or are hard drives getting less reliable?

This year, I've been plagued by hard drive failures. My Toshiba Libretto drive died. My desktop PC drive died (I actually heard it fail, that was interesting). My TiVo drive died. My Apple iBook drive died (although that might have been a motherboard problem).

Is it just that I have more devices with hard drives, so there are more to fail? Or that I tend to run those devices more hours in a day? Or is HDD reliability declining?

(Grumpily packing up TiVo to send off for HDD replacement - but at least I'll get more capacity out of it - getting twin 160GB drives.)

[bryanthompson]

My 2.5" firewire drive is dying.

They're getting really really cheap these days, but the quality is definitely sucking.

[kach22i]

Cut out the porn.

[widebody911]

A drive in my home PC only seems to last 12-18 months, yet I've been running the same drive in my C3000 @ work for several years. The last drive that died was a 200G Maxtor, and it died a quick death; I was sitting there typing one minute, then the next it sounded like marbles in a blender. Normally you get *some* warning; a few errors here and there, clicks, slow starts, etc but this time there was no advance notice that it was going west.

[dd74]

Don't you mean "going south?"

[bryanthompson]

Originally posted by kach22i
Cut out the porn.

Blasphemy!

[widebody911]

Originally posted by dd74
Don't you mean "going south?"

No; if it had gone south, it would have turned red and fornicated with the CPU fan.

[cowtown]

LOL Thom

[dhoward]

Heat is the biggest killer of drives.
Put fans on 'em and thet'll last a lot longer.

[jyl]

I'm getting extra fans installed in my TiVo. When it is returned to me, I'm also going to drill holes in the cover to let hot air escape out the top.

[Joeaksa]

John,

Who is doing the work for you? Looking at doing this on mine as well.

Knock on wood, have not had a HD die on me in years, but I back up and often just in case. Have 3 computers networked together and back up each one on the other, as well as a USB backup drive for all of them.

JoeA

[jyl]

www.weaknees.com

$95 to format and install one or two new drives if you supply the drives. Possibly another $40 or so for brackets, a second fan, etc.

I was originally going to upgrade the TiVo myself, simply to get more recording time. You can download free Linux utilities to format the drives, which you have to plug into your desktop PC. Search "Hinsdale" and look for their how-to page. So I bought two WD 160GB drives - $160 x 2 but with $130 in rebates each for a net price of $30 x 2.

Then my PC died, and I'm not going to fix it, so I have to pay someone to do the upgrade. And WD/CompUSa are taking their sweet time sending me my rebate checks, so to date the darned drives have cost me the full $160 x 2. And the TiVo's original drive failed, so I [u]have[/to] get this done post-haste (the family is rebelling).

In short, I thought it would cost me $60 and some time, now it's costing me roughly $470 and only slightly less time. Not working to plan, this one.