My computer's hard drive failed today, I lost several Terabytes of data, but I have come to terms to that. What I want is some sort of idea of what may have been the cause of the failure so that I don't buy a new drive and have it die as well.
The Hard drive crashed while I left the computer unattended for approximately 15 minutes, when I came back every shortcut to things on that drive were broken, and the drive could no longer be seen by my computer at all.
The disc still spins, but when it starts up it makes horrible clicking sounds.
If anyone could give any indication to the cause of failure so that I can prevent it in future if possible, that would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
>>129128
Uh, thats the life of an HDD - betwee age and manufacturer quality controls, its impossible to diagnose a electro/mechanical problem THIS way.
Instead of worrying getting a bum drive, I hope you make it a habit to regularly back up your data.
>>129177
It was a 4.5 year old Seagate drive (drive pictured is the exact model). Is a lifespan like that normal for such a drive? I mostly wanted to know if my computer always running a little bit hot could have been the sole cause.
Going to be replacing it tomorrow and just wanted to make sure I dont destroy the new one. I have heard Seagate has poor reliability even among hard drives, is there any truth to this?
>>129189
Some drives die after a few months, some after 10 years. 4.5 is pretty good in my book.
High temperatures can play a role.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/
But drives will fail no matter how ideal their operating conditions are. You can't guarantee your drive's safety, but you can guarantee your data's safety by backing it up.
If I remember correctly, reliability varies wildly between models for all manufacturers. And it's usually not that easy to find good data on models that are still in production.
>>129189
Well there's your problem right there: 4.5 years is pushing it.
>>129128
that sound is very characteristic. ugh, i hate it.
>>129189
hard to tell. the brand Seagate has been going around for decades.
yeah, it happens. contributing factors:
-bad luck if you buy a sub-par device - nothing you can do about it
-speed. depending on what model you buy the disks inside rotate at ~5k to 10k rpm. even tiny disturbances will wreak havoc on something that spins around 10k times a second. i usually buy the slowest available and over the last 20 years have found them to be a) quieter, b) more reliable and c) longer lasting. they are quite a bit slower though, naturally.
-cycles. on and off is more harmful than leaving it running. i boot and shut-down every day and that's fine, but the more you do it, the more harmful for the disks. i've seen server disks chugging along for years and years, but as soon as i shut down the system they failed. never touch a running system :-)
-high temperatures, like someone else mentioned - there's case fans for making sure there's a bit of air blowing across it at least
-vibrations. it should be obvious, but nothing kills a disk quicker than dropping the case or bumping into it while the disk is writing - be extremely careful with your disks.
-orientation. never flip a disk or change the orientation from horizontal to vertical. the disks "get used" to their orientation and will very quickly fail when re-oriented.
-time. components age and fail - nothing you can do about it.
ways out:
-the three golden rules of data security: 1) backups. 2) backups. 3) backups.
-redundancy. RAID is the way to go for the paranoid.
-regular changes every couple of years.
-SSDs. no moving parts means waaaay less potential to fail. plus they're *much* faster. seriously, it's the biggest upgrade you can give your PC today. not yet economically viable for large amounts of data though.
-archives. if you don't need data every day, no need to keep it on a spinning disk. external drives you only boot once a month will last you decades.
I had a bunch of those seagate externals from walmart. some would die while under warrant. others would die right after. but they died. so i switched to western digital and they all died under warranty. so they fix them for free but they still die and you still lose everything stored on them.
