I am a system builder. In the past couple of months I've had 5 hard drives bite the dust (Out of 30). 4 crashes were new Samsung 7200 60GB and 80GB drives. Diagnostics showed physical defects. I switched to Western Digital 40GB and 80GB 7200 8MB buffer drives. A 40GB WD crashed yesterday - also physical because it's clicking. Is this just incredibly bad luck? I use all static precautions and treat the drives gingerly while preparing and installing. Any ideas?
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SYS BUILDER REPEATED HD FAILURE
- Thread starter dmchall
- Start date
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Technical User
are the drives failing on the same computers over and over or just rnd one?
I remember a few years back, Maxtor drive died so often they were referred to as door stops. Out of 30 machines you would lose 2 a month.
Have any disgruntled employee's around ?
Had one site where one was kicking a machine; he managed to trash 3 drives in 2 months. We thoroughly cleaned any scuff marks from the machine after the first time; each time a drive died, an obvious scuff appeared. Never pinned down the culprit but the observation was mention to a few employees, mysteriously the drives stopped dying. In another site, similar situation but I figure someone was just picking the machine up and slamming it.
Have any disgruntled employee's around ?
Had one site where one was kicking a machine; he managed to trash 3 drives in 2 months. We thoroughly cleaned any scuff marks from the machine after the first time; each time a drive died, an obvious scuff appeared. Never pinned down the culprit but the observation was mention to a few employees, mysteriously the drives stopped dying. In another site, similar situation but I figure someone was just picking the machine up and slamming it.
- Thread starter
- #5
Drives that fail are from machines installed in different businesses and homes. One machine has had 2 drives fail - both Samsung 80GB. Although the motherboards and processors are all Intel, they are generally different models &/or speeds. Memory mfg. are also different although usually Lifetime branded. The shipment question is interesting one. I'll start marking the drives with vendor info because you may have hit the nail on the head. I'm not seeing any abuse from the users. All thought-provoking comments - thanks!
Shipping should not be an issue anymore if they have at least some packing. All drive are mechanically "parked", I believe most need a 100g of a short duration shock to damage the drive; unless UPS guys take the drive out the box and play soccer with it, damage should not occur. How about heat, the biggest drive killer? or voltage transients or poor power supplies. Probably just a bad run of Sam sung drives, the other drive could be a normal drive failure.
During the period of the Maxtor failures, if you talked to another Tech, and mentioned the name Maxtor, the guy would utter profanities, the failure rate was incredible; now many people love them, they are reliable again.
During the period of the Maxtor failures, if you talked to another Tech, and mentioned the name Maxtor, the guy would utter profanities, the failure rate was incredible; now many people love them, they are reliable again.
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