The Drives that Lived!
Dead: 750 GB Seagate, chirping, scratching, and thunking. Data recovery tech: “Yeah, we’re getting a lot of those in right now.”
Wiped: 500 GB Maxtor, verified “just fine” by multiple diagnostics.
Not Dead Yet: 250 GB Western Digital, making occasional worrisome noises.
Revived: TeraStation, via necromancy (reflashing the firmware).
Surviving Unscathed:
- All of Ruth’s drives, on the other end of the room.
- A pair of 400 GB Hitachi SATAs (disconnected for the past month).
December 15th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
“Yeah, we’re getting a lot of those in right now.”
Well that’s a decent consumer tip.
December 16th, 2006 at 12:07 am
The guy mentioned that any time there’s a newer, bigger line of hard drives released, there’s a good chance they’ll suck. In general, when the 750 gig drives come out, buy 500. OTOH, Seagate released a 300 gig drive with pretty much the same hardware, and it’s failing just as frequently. So I don’t really know.
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:53 am
I just got a new computer with two Western Digital drives — a 150 gb 10,000 RPM and a 500 gb 7500 RPM. The 150, the boot drive, is super, but the 500 gets a S.M.A.R.T. bios error on startup. I wasn’t able to figure out what array of problems are covered by the SMART system, but the manufacturer (Velocity Micro) is sending over a new drive.
January 3rd, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I had a SMART diagnosis tool that explained the codes pretty well– I don’t remember what it was.
Most of the codes sounded pretty serious, such as the drive not spinning up as quickly as it should, and more read failures than normal. The idea is that once you start getting values like that, it’s going to continue to degrade (either slowly or immediately) into a totally broken drive.
From what I’ve heard, ignoring a SMART warning usually leads to a dead drive: there aren’t too many false positives.