Is there such a thing as a reliable HD?

And how do I go about getting one?
I suspect that my HD may be slowly failing. Lately I have experienced weird episodes of windows unreliability and sluggishness that disappear when i reinstall the HD drivers in device manager.
The SMART stats dont look very promising. Is there anyone who can help me with this?
I already lost an HD last year. I dont want to buy an HD every year. I want to buy an HD every 5 years or so. I have 120gigs of space and 90 gigs free, for crying out loud.
Is there a way to sorta "RAID" my single drive so that I will have everything mirrored on another partition if I get a bad sector on this one?

Pretty pictures enclosed. The ancient 20 gig HD is my gf's old spare that she lent me when my pc wouldnt boot.

HD's do go bad unfortunately. In my case, I have never lost one. OTOH, my father can't seem o keep one working for more than 6 months - even tho we always buy him the same type that I have - or a midel up.

That being said, in my experience, some HD difficulties are actually HD controller problems, not HD themselves.

My suggestion is that you test the HD controller - if it is integrated onboard your motherboard, you will need to install a separate HD controller card and go into the bios to turn off the integrated MD/HD controller. Then run that way for a day or two and compare performance.

Why am I saying this when you mentioned SMART stats? Well, again, in my experience, SMART stats can easily be influenced by a bogus/dying controller.

Personally, I only buy Western Digital drives and have never had one go bad on me. OTOH, I have also been given Seagate drives with nearly similar results --- only 2 have failed on me in 20 years. YMMV of course.

To RAID my drives requires an external or card-based controller, but a few motherboards are now including that as an option in their integration.

When I upgrade, I purchase using www.pricewatch.com orders....

Good luck.

Edited to add... I don't know of any way to "RAID" a single drive as you suggest...

Thanks for the help Korg. I dont have any money or even know where I could find an external controller. A common problem with living in a stupid backwards country is that you can only easily find the most mainstream of mainstream products, since we are a tiny market that no one gives a shit about. For instance, the NES console was only launched in Portugal around 1991 or so... shortly before you people got the SNES.
I'm pretty sure my HD is dying since I have experienced a small amount of data corruption on it, and sometimes it wont be detected by the BIOS, but the older HD that my gf lent me seems to be working fine.
Time to locate my warranty papers :\

I've lost two Maxtor drives to hard failures in the past 1.5 years which was a mite annoying. I've replaced them with Seagates which cost a little more but seem no less available. Everything else has remained the same in the environment.

As an almost commodity product, market forces have pushed hard drive manufacture to really skimp on components. My Maxtor experience was likely a statistical bad toss, but I'd overseen 500+ drives in a previous life and saw two failures in three years. These were all SCSI drives which are less "cost-optimized" but have little to do with their SCSIness.

I have now implemented "RAID -1" which is identical sized drives for the important ones where I periodically copy the contents of one to the other. This may be the most economical solution for a student type in a limited market.

One thing to consider... if you have lost a hard drive already this year in the same system, there could be a system issue that is causing the failure - especially after so short a time.

The only common things between two different hard drives installed in the same system at different times are the power supply and the hard drive controller.

If the power supply fluctuates, then additional stress is placed on the hard drive (or any electronic component for that matter) in terms of maintaining the power necessary to spin the disk at the correct speed.

Given that... your problem may not be with the hard drive itself... It would be the result of continued stress over time.

How would you check this out? Only time or extreme stress would likely show this to be true or false in your case. I have often benchtested electronic equipment "not under load" and found it reached/met design specs... only to find the item failed as soon as I actually installed the damn thin.

Probably not directly helpful for you... but, it could be a simple or a complex problem to fix... This is mainly a commiseration post.

Modern hard drives come with a certain number of sectors reserved for when live sectors go bad. They get swapped in as needed and invisibly to you.

Eggy, I agree with Korg. I'm a huge Western Digital Fan. Never had a problem with them (knock on wood).

That being said, however, nothing inside a computer is foolproof. HD's, like all components, can simply die at any moment for no apperent reason. I usually blame it on cosmic rays from space myslef.

Sorry to hear it's so hard to find what you need in Portugal. My brother lives in Spain, which seems to be in a similar situation. I remember him saying onece that there is only one juice company in all of Spain. I can only imagine what it would be like for computer parts. Anyway, I'm pretty sure online stores like TigerDirect will ship anywhere in the world. I could be wrong about that, but it's worth investigating.

Oddly enough, you're not far off. Cosmic rays do tend to cause memory-based crashes in computers from time to time.

TigerDirect will certainly ship anywhere.... However, I find them overpriced... maybe that's just me.

If you don't like pricewatch.com, then ebay usually has something... and I have yet to be stuck if I was merely reasonably cautious when using them. As a matter of fact, the HDs I have in two of my backup computers are ebay deals.... but I specifically bought them from there knowing I did not need th elatest and greatest.... though those are offered at times.

I replace one of my drives every 4-5 months. I've went through every major brand, too: Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, few others I can't think of. Maxtor told me was the kind of work I do -- video editing and special effects using Maya, 3DSMax, etc...

I go through drives so quickly I have the Warranty RMA pages of all the hard drive manufacturers bookmarked.

Like Korg, I have had very good luck with Western Digital HDs. I would recommend not buying Maxtor drives. I have had 3 of them go out over the years. It seems to be right after their warranty expires.

Buy a SCSI drive. They are generally much more reliable and have lower failure rates.

SCSI = expensive

another thread on this issue
/111/82/27571/1.html

If you're willing to spend the money, get a SCSI hard drive. They're usually warrented for 5 years (as opposed to the one year that IDE hard drives are warrented for), and they're designed for 24/7 usage, while IDE is designed for no more than about eight hours a day. Of course, reliablity costs money.

Another option is to buy a Seagate IDE hard drive. Seagate gives five-year warrenties on all their drives.

Essence, I know, but the thing is, if a sector goes bad I already lost its data before it gets remapped to a better one
I have considered SCSI... It's 4 times the price for 3 times less space, so 12 times more expensive and I dont even know how much the controller would be. I guess I'm stuck whining about it :\
I'm seeing hardware failures about once a year, which incidentally is how long the warranties last. What a coincidence, eh.
My graphics cards fail as well, memory starts dying. I think it's heat death. At least on the first one the fan failed. I had to run it underclocked to keep it working long enough for me to buy a new one.
My PSU seems ok, the ASUS monitoring tool shows a straight line for the voltages.
I also have a shitload of fans so its not heat. Could be vibrations, or dust. I have a lot of animals and I have a very busy bus stop below my window.

Try putting a dust filter in front of the case air intake, and making sure the heatsinks aren't clogged.

And like I said, Seagate gives five-year warrenties for all their hard drives, even the IDE ones.

There are internal tricks a hard drive can do to remap a bad sector to a good one without losing data. The data on the hard drive is stored using a technique called "ECC", which lets you reconstruct the original data even after minor failures, so if the hard drive detects too many failures on a given sector, it declares that one "bad", reconstructs the data, and moves it to a good sector. All this is done invisibly, so if you're seeing bad sectors in a hard disk scan, it means the drive has already used up all the spares.

> My graphics cards fail as well, memory starts dying. I think it's heat death.

Does sound like heat. Portugal is shit hot.

As people are saying, keep 'em cool.
My personal setup has a couple of 80mm fans running air over my drive section, which is helping to minimise avoidable death.
My preference drive-wise is for Western Digitals - they appear to be one of the last remaining producers to offer a 3-year warranty for their hardware, which goes a way to minimising the pain if a drive goes. For data integrity I run 2 120G drives in RAID 1.5 (a mirror for safety, with a bit of speed boost - not available on many motherboards though), but thus far I've not had anything fail, so I can't make any hard-n-fast statements regarding recoverability yet.

That's my tuppence, anyroad. Best of luck.

also, check your power supply.

If the power supply starts to go, multiple part failures are the result.

Don't get a power supply under 350 W, 400 is recommended, esp if you are running a modern graphics card with a fan. Fans draw a lot of power.

That said, I do think the heat has something to do with it.

I stopped trusting all hard drives after the IBM DeskStar fiasco. I only buy them in matched RAID1 pairs now.

As has already been said, keep the drives (reasonably) cool.

My son works at Europes (worlds ?) #1 Data Recovery Company, and they just sigh when they see another IBM/Hitachi disk. About 90 % of the disks they get in is IBM.
Apparently, IBM stopped testing the drives at the manufactiring line, as it was cheaper to just replace a disk under warranty. That the user most likely looses a lot of data is not their problem, they think. Well, it will be in the long run.

All my old IBM disks are now replaced with Seagate, which is the disk type the recovery
company delivers recovered data on. Including the one that blew up a week after he started working there, and made me to go visit

Wrong. Fans draw almost no power. It's the part the fan is cooling that draws power.

Reliable power to the system is also important, all five of my HD equipped systems (3 PCs, 1 Playstation 2, 1 Microsoft Xbox) have access to a uninterruptable power supply, for times when the local power company likes to press this button and see what happens.

A few years back on my old 486 system just a week after replacing everything (out of my pocket) to a surge over the phone line power was cut for some reason and restored an hour later. My PC was on and I was having a blast with Afterlife when power went out. When power was restored I waited for an hour then went back to my 486 to continue from my last save.

Turned the power on, and did not hear the HD spin up. 15 seconds later, whiiiiiiirrrrr clink clink clink clink clink clink... followed by a louder clink and a loud scraping noise.

A brand new 80MB drive gone. Being the idiots the power company was they refused to pay for a single component without proof that the power cut destroyed it.

An agonizing month passed before I could afford a new HD, a 120MB Western Digital drive had a new home working reliably for five years before being destroyed in a lightning surge along with a 266mhz Pentium II.