Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

[Sabaron]

So, a little under two years ago (roughly 20 months), my "old" Western Digital Hard Drive (approx 3 years old at ToD) blew up and needed to be replaced. I was upset, because sitting in my computer as we speak is an old Maxtor 1GB drive that purrs like a kitten and has done so for 11 years since I bought it as a Freshman in college. I replaced my "old" Western Digital hard drive with the new Western Digital "Caviar" Drive model "WDC WD1200JB-00EVA0". This drive is now dead at 20 months and out of warranty of course.

I will never buy another product from Western Digital--ever. I love the name "Caviar" because Caviar is an expensive delicacy that rich people throw money away on and makes a perfect analogy to the value of your money when invested in a drive from Western Digital.

[Please note: Whenever a piece of equipment on my computer fails to meet my standards of quality, I promptly notify as many people as possible with negative feedback]

In this particular case, Western Digital had two chances to impress me and failed miserably both times. I don't give three strikes--most companies only get one.

[Minimee]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

i am currently using a pair of hitachi hard drives, since they are a little more than a year old i cant say they are any better. as far as western digital have you tried one of their raptors? i think you will be pleased not only with the added speed but with the 5 year warranty. hard drives are at best most of the time unreliable due to many things.

[Eohmer]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

I've always used SeaGate... they are pretty sweet!

[neighbortaru]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

Hmm, I've not had any problems so far (/knock wood) with my WD drives and I've gone past the 3 year mark on them. Maxtors, however, have been really touchy for me but luckily they've failed within warranty.

as for raptors, they are excessively expensive and power hogs. if you want 5 year protection, go for seagate. I only own one seagate drive, but i've had no problems with it.

[Sabaron]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

I'm really not looking for a warranty. It does me no good to have to send my hard drive in for 6-8 weeks to some facility in Paraguay to be fixed and then sent back. What good is a warranty if my computer has to be down for 2 months just to invoke it? What about my data (I was able to get my stuff off the drive after I noticed the croaky, deathy, grindy sound)?

I'm not looking for a good warranty. I'm looking for a good lifetime. You can "guarantee" me 10 years, but if I have to wait even 1 week for the stupid drive to be repaired, your warranty is useless to me.

I have been looking at Seagates though... Maybe I should just buy a RAID controller.

For those of you who own a Western Digital here are the failure symptoms:

. If you power off the PC, the drive will not "spin up" for an excessively long, but rather random time (it sometimes comes right up, and sometimes I had to wait over a minute for the drive to start).
. S.M.A.R.T. Failure at boot-up.
. Progressive system speed degeneration.
. Periodic "ticks" where the machine will freeze briefly and then go back to business-as-usual.
. Extremely unusual noise (the deathy, croaky, grindy sound like a sheet of needles being ground down from the tip with a metallic grinder--It's surprisingly loud).
. When the BIOS trys to spin up the drive, it will go into shutdown sequence a few seconds afterward. This repeats until the BIOS gives up.

[Effedup]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

I feel your pain...my main hard drive failed on me about a month ago. It wasn't like a "boom, I'm dead" kinda thing; it just kept acting twitchy for no apparent reason...I'd wake up to "Hard Disk Boot Error" screens every other morning, and then the computer would randomly reset itself.

The best part is, I take my computer in to work to have the Tech's check it out, because I had 2 other hard drives laying around my house from old computers and the computer wouldn't even post with them in there. The Tech's spend 2 days poking and prodding my machine and tell me that most likely it's a Motherboard issue, as the computer resets itself at completely random times and that everything else (power supply, ram, slave h.d.d., vid card, etc) checks out ok on the Diag machine.

So I price out a new motherboard, and of course there is like nothing out there that supports AMD socket 939 procs and AGP Vid cards (well, I found 1 mobo but it was micro-atx with 1 PCI slot and I've got 2 PCI devices, not to mention my vid card has a huge heat sink and fan that actually takes up the slot below it, so that was out) so I ended up having to buy a new mobo AND video card because everything's PCI-E now (which kinda pissed me off...I now have a Radeon X800T, which was a damn good card that cost me $300, ran new games fine for my tastes, that is pretty much useless to me now). Anyways, $500 dollars later and I'm all set to rebuild my computer.

Get everything put back together with the new components, and the computer is STILL screwed up, so of course I'm in a rage, pulling out my hair trying to figure out the problem. Then, just for kicks, I pull out my old master Hard drive and re-jumper my slave as the new master and everything work's fine. So after all that it turns out it really was just my hard drive (a Western Digital Cavier 120 GB that was about 3 years old that is also out of warranty). However, my 300 GB slave (now my master) is also Western Digital, and that's been running for almost as long as the other one with no prob's so far.

So right now for me Western Digital is 50/50. The funny thing is, I've been using their drives since the 80486 days and never had a problem. Back then Western Digital was considered the cream of the crop as far as H.D.D.'s go. My father's still using a 20 Gig WD drive from 1998 as his Windows boot drive and it's still going strong.

All I know is I'm glad my bro picked up a 250 GB external h.d. a couple months ago...I managed to save all my music, video's and photo's when I noticed things were getting twitchy, and I woulda been hella pissed if I would have lost everything (again).

Anyways, I agree with Eohmer as far as Seagate goes...they're getting all the raves from the peeps at work, and I'm prolly gonna give them a shot myself when I pick up a new slave drive. Western Digital seems to have gone downhill as of late...

Sorry for the long post...just had to get that off my chest ^^

[Effedup]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

Maxtors, however, have been really touchy for me but luckily they've failed within warranty.

Maxtor drives suck, bottom line. I've tried their drives a few times off and on over the years and they ALWAYS fail on me within a ridiculously short time-span. Stay as far away from them as possible. I'll never use a Maxtor hard drive again...

[Liquidedust]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

So, a little under two years ago (roughly 20 months), my "old" Western Digital Hard Drive (approx 3 years old at ToD) blew up and needed to be replaced. I was upset, because sitting in my computer as we speak is an old Maxtor 1GB drive that purrs like a kitten and has done so for 11 years since I bought it as a Freshman in college. I replaced my "old" Western Digital hard drive with the new Western Digital "Caviar" Drive model "WDC WD1200JB-00EVA0". This drive is now dead at 20 months and out of warranty of course.

I will never buy another product from Western Digital--ever. I love the name "Caviar" because Caviar is an expensive delicacy that rich people throw money away on and makes a perfect analogy to the value of your money when invested in a drive from Western Digital.

[Please note: Whenever a piece of equipment on my computer fails to meet my standards of quality, I promptly notify as many people as possible with negative feedback]

In this particular case, Western Digital had two chances to impress me and failed miserably both times. I don't give three strikes--most companies only get one.

A batch of the first revision of the 120GB WD1200JB drives from Western Digital had major problems a few years back when released (tracking and disc issues).

Due to this bad batch of drives WD did have a drive where they replaced all the rev.1 drives of that model number with the rev.2 of that particular Drive free of charge (with proof of purchase).

Basically it were all over hardware forums etc . . . , and no-one touched WD's middle-end drives for a good six months.

Today basically all HDD drives come with 3 years factory replacement guarantee (e.g. only need proof of purchase and the manufacturers replace the HDD if it is within 3 years of purchase).

Just remember to register your HDD with, in this case, WD at the time of purchase and they'll give you 3 years factory gurantee on regular drives (Caviar model) and 5 years on enterprise drives (Raptor, RE and RE2). And will replace the drive for you within 14 working days at any place in the world in case of disk failure.

Personally I hate Maxtor drives, have had 4 fail on me so far in as many years (2 of the failure were replacements from factory guarantee even).

Seagate is usually a good choice, usually most known for having the most silent drives for desktop systems there is. Only owned 2 Seagate drives so not much experience with them, none has failed so far though.

I do like WD drives though, high peformance and reliablity for me so far (knock on wood), never owned a Caviar model though. Only personal experience I have so far with WD are the Raptor drives which I have used as system and application drives for almost 7 years now with no failures or problems whatsoever.

My personal favorites for data storage and scratch disks are Samsung though, big space fairly silent while not that best access speed if you just use it for storage it doesn't really matter. And the best part, Samsung disk are very cheap and fairly reliable (no disk fails for me so far on them, but only owned Samsung for 2 years so we'll see).

[Sabaron]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

Maxtor drives suck, bottom line. I've tried their drives a few times off and on over the years and they ALWAYS fail on me within a ridiculously short time-span. Stay as far away from them as possible. I'll never use a Maxtor hard drive again...

Haha! I must've got a rare good one. I did make a slight error, though. My 11 year old 1GB Maxtor is not the one currently in my computer (that one has been relegated to the storage drive on my #2 PC because it's so small). It's the 7 year old Maxtor 20GB drive (storage on #1). It's primary use is for back-up and contingency purposes--most of my documents exist on both drives and they auto-batch to the secondary drive every 24 hours (Ghetto RAID controller). Obviously it's now a low-access drive and will not age nearly as quickly as a primary, therefore it should not be expected to have a lifespan comparable to a primary drive that chugs away during operation.

I'm going with the Seagate. Their drives have a 5 year warranty which means that, post-research, Seagate decided that a majority of their drives will last at least 5 years (I set my lifespan expectancy for a HD at around 7 years) which is as close as I, as a manufacturer, would want to get unless I had a really bomb-a$$ product.

After 5-7 years, most drives (especially on higher-performance machines) have already been relegated to secondary storage as the technology will be far ahead of the old drive. This is "nursing home" for oldy-but-goody HDs that just aren't up to snuff in terms of speed/size anymore.

I always register my components, but it rarely matters. I've never received a recall notice or notice of defect--obviously it wouldn't be "cost-effective" to have everyone return the HDs for a replacement, and I'm not sure if this one is a rev.1 series, but it may very well be.

[Effedup]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

Haha! I must've got a rare good one. I did make a slight error, though. My 11 year old 1GB Maxtor is not the one currently in my computer (that one has been relegated to the storage drive on my #2 PC because it's so small). It's the 7 year old Maxtor 20GB drive.

I figured that was a typo...I mean, what could you even do nowadays with a 1 GB drive?

My father is still holding on to his WD 750 MB drive from waaayyyyyy back in the day, it still works and he refuses to throw it away. I can't talk, though...I've still got my P3 1 gHz Compaq Presario (preloaded with Windows M.E., oh the joy!) rotting in my closet because I'm determined to find some use for the thing; it cost me over a grand new and I just can't bring myself to toss it...

[Raydeus]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

You could use it for virtual memory.

I'm using a Maxtor right now and had no problems with it so far. That being said, I haven't found any HDD brand more reliable than Seagate, that's for sure.

[Sabaron]

Re: Sabaron's Hard Drive is Dead... Again!

It's not a typo. It is, in fact, a 1GB hard drive. My documents are currently running 1.8GB which is why it's not in my main computer. It is designated as a Linux VM Swap partition (good guess Raydeus). It is not a Maxtor, though, I had to look. It is a Samsung.