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Any Recourse for Failed Drives?
mijoe asks: "I have been using various HDDs in my boxes with the exception of Western Digitals since I had some problems with them in the past. My recent issue was with a pair of Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120s. I had both drives fail in about a 2 month span. One of them is 14 months old, and is out of warranty. The logic board is bad (I swapped with a good one and recovered my data), but Maxtor was very short with me when I asked where I could buy replacement boards. Since then, I've switched to Seagate drives for the 5 yr warranty and quiet performance. Is there any place I can buy parts? It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order. What can I do when drives break down? Should I just switch to another manufacturer until I suffer a rash of failures again and then move to the next company?"
I just had 2 maxors Die in the last week! I think maxors are set to self distruct in april-may.
It seems like a huge waste to throw out a 120 gig drive with the mechanical bits in good working order.
It is a waste. the vast majority drives die when their platters or head goes - very few actually lose a logic board. As such, there are LOTS of dead drives with good logic boards floating around. Just fleabay/Craigslist for your drive model along with the word 'parts' or 'repair'. Pick up a drive with bad surfaces and cannibalize the still-good logicboard . . . Win/Win.
I think without a warranty you're pretty much screwed. For future purchases, my advice is to get disks with 5+ year warranties. I even recommend you go with SCSI disks, since they always seem to last longer and perform better, the extra money is well worth it.
Free will is just an illusion
Western Digital (back in the Caviar days) were the WORST drives ever. Back then the only drives I used were Quantum fireballs - fast as hell, and reliable (I still have a 20GB FB Plus LM in use today). But overnight, on a new manufacturing process, Western Digital stole the performance crown, and their "Special Edition" "J" series drives have been rock solid and stable. If I had stuck with my hatred of WD through the "Caviar" drives, I'd have missed out on these great drives, and their even-greater 10K RPM "Raptor" drives as well.
And before Quantum? All I used were Seagate, and Micropolis (remember them?) In every case, something changed, and they weren't the performance leader anymore. I changed, and for the better each time.
When you lose a drive, how do you know its bad manufacturing? And (with the exception of incidents like the IBM Deskstars) - I haven't seen any evidence that a particular modern-day drive is more "prone" to failures than any other - and I can't honestly believe that one person or entity can purchase enough drives to create an empirical sample-set.
But that's just me. YMMV, but I wouldn't blacklist a company because they "used" to make bad drives. I mean, who do you end up hurting but yourself?
"I bought Maxtor drives. They broke rapidly and had no warranty. I bought a Seagate drive, it had a 5 year warranty and hasn't broken. Should I maybe buy Seagate instead of Maxtor?"
Oooh, lemme ponder that tough question for a while.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The Maxtor drive in my computer has it's own massive heatsink + tiny fans, primarily because it runs as blazing hot as the failed drive it replaced. I doubt I got the only two overheating-prone drives Maxtor makes, and so I wouldn't be surprised if other customers see an increased failure rate as their homes and offices warm up this time of year. I'm still getting used to the idea that my graphics card needs a fan; it would never have occurred to me to check power and temperature specs before choosing a *hard drive*.
Drives often die because they get too hot , or too cold, don't turn PCs off overnight in winter if they are in a non heated enviroment.
and install fans pointing at your drives !
Anyone remember those fujitsu drives (20-40s) ?
those failed because a chip didn't like it hot or cold
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/12/116241
My experience remains the same, except now I have similar content for seagate drives. I still hate maxtor and recomment western digital.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I got a server from Dell with two 250gb Maxtor MaxLine II drives. Within 9 months, one of the drives failed. The next week, the other drive failed. This was in the middle of winter so I doubt heat was an issue.
I searched online, and found that _everyone_ has been having trouble with this model of drive, with it often failing like clockwork within the first year, though it had a 3 year warranty.
Since it was under warranty, I quickly got two replacement drives from Dell, this time from Western Digital.
During my troubles, I found a nice website called storagereview.com. Though you need to register an account to reach it, they have a survey of every major model of hard disk with thousands of reviews and percentile ratings for each model. The Maxtor MaxLine II drives I had were rated in the 3rd percentile (making them nearly the worst drives every created). Your model scores in the 23rd percentile, still pretty awful. Looking at the storagereview reliability ratings, just about every manufacturer ships at least a few lemon models, not just WD or Maxtor.
You'd probably do well to consider scsi for servers, if only because it seems that many sata drives marketed for server use are really of desktop quality. Also be sure that you keep your servers adequately cooled with good airflow reaching the drives, as it seems that the models of drives that fail most often tend to do so because they run hotter than other models. And when possible, favor older models of hard disks with a high reliability track record on storagereview or similar sites.
Seagate has done the right thing by instituting a 5-year warranty. If you care about preserving your data first, and performance second, Seagate wins. Seagates are also eerily silent; I had to make sure one of them was on by feeling for heat/vibration the first time i installed one.
Western Digitals tend to have slightly better transfer rates, but unless you get OEM drives (3-year warranty), you are stuck with a 1 year warranty. You can extend the warranty to 3 years for $15, so factor that into the price if thats what you plan on doing.
Maxtor seems to have had a bad couple of years. Bad enough that I no longer trust their drives. Their 1-year warranty does nothing to inspire confidence. OEM Maxtors have a 3 year warranty, but they are harder to find that oem WD's.
Short warranty terms really only protect you from horrendous, data-murdering drives, i.e., the absolute worst of the worst. There has to be something VERY VERY WRONG with a drive for it to fail within a year. There is almost no reason to consider a drive with only a 1 year warranty.
Argh, the subject should be:
Seagate > Western Digital > Maxtor > IBM/Hitachi
I've never had a Maxtor drive NOT go bad. I have always considered them to be junk. If a customer has a bad drive it is always a Maxtor I find when I crack the case.
I've only had one WD die in the last 10 or so years, and that was a LONG time ago, when drive capacities weren't measured in gigabytes. That's why I will only put WD drives in my personal machines at this point.
Most of the time I wind up replacing them with higher capacity drives before they have time to wear out.
At the same time, any important data is on a mirrored volume, and some of that data is backed up off-site. I can't back up the 10+ 11-Gb dumps of the video tapes of my kid, but a raid controller and second drive for a mirror is relatively inexpensive considering how long it takes to pull the data back off the video tape, or to edit the movie again...
Time is the quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn't seem to be working. -Anon
Keep your drives cool! Each drive should have its own vibration-isolated fan. Use flexible nylon straps to isolate the vibration.
Using this method, we have had one failure in four years with 60 Western Digital drives.
In my fifth failed drive, I often have a working drive (on the shelf) in which I can carefully remove the logic board and exchange it with the failing drive.
Only the 3rd time, the spindle was jammed or the motor is dead (no spinning), in this case, it was the RAID that save the day (as usual).
In all cases, these drives were selected for their highest reported reliability (that I can determine from various websites). Then I research for the latest drive models with the best uptime and go out and buy them.
You do DO backup, don't you?
Something like 23% of all IT folks ever bother doing backup period. Less than 5% do backup daily. Its a common theme with small/medium business not having an IT staff.
For SMB IT folks, invest a lil' extra in H/W RAID; it'll save your hide (not to mention your job). If you're budget-constrained (another common IT issue), go with software RAID.
What you can do with an unused/partly broken HD:
- Open it and look how interesting it is
- Make a mobile out of the platters
- Use it to show other people how hard drives work/look like
- Use the motors for some easy laser shows
- Use the gyros for some advanced laser shows
btw, in my experience Samsungs are even quieter than Seagates. Just stay away from IBM DTLAsi like that idea about getting PCB on Ebay... one thing I've done is using a script to capture error messages regarding drive errors...I run the script prior to warranty or service contract expiration to save money on hardware replacement cost. this might save the replacement cost of 5% of the hard drives.
Unless you happen to have a spare clean room in your basement that can filter out ultra-fine particles and perhaps a loaner Intel-style bunny suit, you're not going to be opening up any hard disks and expecting them to work for very long afterwards.
Sometimes you can get away with straightening a bent pin on the connector or even changing out the drive electronics or repairs of that nature, but in general hard disks are about as non-user-serviceable as a cathode ray tube.
Never EVER put two drives from the same batch in the mirror (raid1)! If possible, use two drives of same/similiar size from two different manufacturers. As expirienced by many, all manufacturers ship a batch of disks that die sooner that expected every now and then. To reduce the chance of both drives in a mirror failing shortly one after another, use different drives.
... I put 30 drives in raid10 and all 30 had the same firmware bug ...
I should know
IBM used to be one of the best hard drive manufacturers on the planet in terms of reliability.
It took only one model of hard drive made for about two years to change all that. Witness the horrendous destructive power of the Death Star!
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
You don't even need to RTFA, he's asking where to get parts for the types of repairs you just described as possible. (In his case, replacement of the logic board).
As another earlier poster pointed out, there is no market for such replacement parts because 95%+ of hard drive failures involved the portions of the drive that are basically not repairable. Specifically, almost all drive failures involved the mechanical parts that are sealed within the drive. Logic board failures are VERY rare.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Historically there have only been enough top-notch HDD design engineers to make about one and a half design teams. The rest are decent enough engineers but they're not "gurus". So every hard-drive manufacturer tries to steal and keep the good guys with one degree of success or another.
The sudden increases and decreases in drive quality seen in every manufacturer over the last couple of decades is a direct result of these guys getting poached.
And then there's the whole assembly line QC problem which I won't go into here.
The short version of this is that Seagate has the best assembly lines right now (good article on it in Business 2.0 recently) and the best team.
The other good guys are scattered around the other mfg which is why other drives are mediocre at best. (I don't think Maxtor has anybody good right now at all which is why they are crap at the moment.)
But Seagate has a good retention plan for their guys going forward so I'd stick with Seagate for at least the next few years after which other mfg will either be out of business or have caught up to what Seagate's doing right now whereupon who knows...?
You can get a new 160 GB Seagate drive for $50 on a rebate special most weeks. Messing around with trying to replace electronics seems to be a waste of time.
Drives, esp. IDE drives are a commodity. You really don't have any excuse in my book for not having hot backups of pretty much everything. I haven't had a machine without matching internal devices for *years* for this exact reason. If I take a media hit, it's no big deal. Yank it, pitch it, new one installed in a few hours.
And yes, I have a completely separate backup process for disasters. The duplicate drive is for media problems and Stupid Human Tricks.
Yes (?!)
I had several hard drives and a few PCI cards go bad in a short period of time, and since I'm running a UPS I know it's not over/undervoltage problems. I replaced the $10 power supply with a decent one by Sparkle that puts out ~600 watts, and I haven't had a problem since. If you use the power supply that came with your case, or paid less than $40 for a new one, it probably sucks. That issue aside, I prefer WD Raptors when possible (their SCSI heritage gives them double the MTBF), and WD JB drives otherwise.
Had this same issue with a maxtor drive. I had others from what I thought was the same batch but turned out the boards had variations in them so I ended up buying a working used one off ebay after I confirmed with the buyer the board revisions were the same. It was worth it to me to get the data off it but since that's not the case with you why not just get a new drive that is less likely to fail on you in the future and could be covered under a 3-5 year warranty?
MooCow
Instead, find reviews and reliability data for the specific drive. Each drive a manufacturer comes out with could be an entirely new project, with new designs and engineers. Which means that the same company could put out both a lemon and an immortal drive. Can't base your decision on the brand name. The drives are most likely all made in the same factory in China anyway.
If you can't be bothered to hunt down information on every drive you buy, then definitely go for something with a good warranty. And never put yourself in a position where losing a drive will hurt you. This means backups and ideally a nice fat RAID box.
I have had three failures with Matrox DiamondMax 9 160GB drives in a year. Every time i a got a new HD in factory package but they still seem to break on me. This current Maxtor HD that just came to replace the last one that broke has been in use for 3 weeks and yesterday i had some CRC errors with it. So i scanned it and voila, 19 relocated sectors, i scanned again 107 relocated sectors. So it seems that it's dying on me again. I have changed the motherboard, power supply, IDE cable and i do have surge protection by UPS.
I think there are two options now, heat or just really freaking bad harddrives from Maxtor (the same machine has 3 Samsungs in it and they have been working fine all the time).
What is the recommended temperature range for harddrives, what about Maxtor harddrives? My Maxtor drive shows 39-40 degrees celsius when in use, is that too much?
1) They won't sell you the logic boards. Ever. Or the connectors. Or any other parts other than a complete drive. As someone further up stated, each batch has slight firmware revisions between them that could make a board from batch A not work on a drive from batch B. The other part of this equation is that before leaving the factory, each drive/board pair is individually tuned when the servo control data is written on the platters (I'd draw you a diagram but it's a bit difficult in text).
When this happens the entire platter surface is scanned and any imperfections are mapped out and stored in the servo control chip. Every drive out there ships with a small amount of imperfections on the surface of the platters and this is how they are accounted for. When you swap boards from drive to drive, even with the same firmware, you could run into the problem that essential data from one drive is stored in an area marked as a unusable sector on the other drive.
2) Asking about this and pressing the question is a really quick way to get your account on their call tracking system flagged that you void your drives' warranties and make any future dealings with them VERY difficult. Trust me, the techs don't like to talk to people with account warnings on, and they can and will skim your old calls when you call in.
This is from the perspective of someone who worked support for a major HD manufacturer for quite a while. If you care about the data on your failed drive at ALL, send it out for professional data recovery. Otherwise, be willing to accept the risk that you yourself may destroy all of your data. The other thing I would say to do is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make either daily backups or mirror your most important data. Getting an external backup drive like one of the Maxtor external HD's that do autobackups or setting up a simple RAID 0 is not that expensive compared to losing your data.
Anywya that's my $.02 on the subject. If you want the full $1.00, email me (and make the subject stand out so I can easily sort it out of the spam).
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
I had my ~1Tb music server die on me last year. Was a buttload of Maxtor's, and they worked perfectly.. until the power supply suddenly decided that if 12V was good for hard drives, 110V must be better!
Happily I had got paranoid a few months earlier and backed up all the static data, but for my database I was having one drive backup onto another daily. Now _that_ was a bad idea.
I did eventually get the db data back by (as suggested above) swapping logic boards between non-dead and dead drives. It worked really well, and NONE of the drives had suffered worse than a toasted logic board. Spindle and seek motors etc were fine, as was the db data.. when I eventually got it back.
Swapping the controller boards on the drives was very very easy indeed - with many models you can just undo a handful of screws and without even yanking out connectors it's a piece of cake. Obviously try your best to get a board from the same model/batch of drive (firmware differences etc) however I found them to be remarkably interchangable.
[FrLz]
First, IANAL
If you are in the UK, you are coversed by the Sale of Goods Act, which states,
1. Goods must be of reasonable quaility
2. Goods must be fit for purpose
3. Goods must be as described
To get a refund from the seller ( not the manufacturer ) you only need to prove the product does not fit one of the above.
I am sure that it could be argued that a hard drive should last longer than 14 months - so it is either not of reasonable quality, or it is not fit for purpose. If the manufacturer advertises the drive, decribing it as safe for long term data storage, then it is not as decribed.
Note, in the UK, all of the above is not affected by the warranty, in fact it is a crime for a shop or manufacturer to claim otherwise!
If you still have the recept, take it back to where you bought it and ask for a replacement. If they refuse, phone your local trading standards - thats what they are there for. All it might take is a legaly worded letter. They have helped me in the past with a very stubborn car showroom.
Like I say, this is in UK - YMMV
The comment just below is correct. One way to assure hard drive temperature is low is to put space above and below each hard drive, and have an internal case fan that moves the air around inside the case.
We bought the straps we use from a surplus store, and we don't know how to describe them. They are very flexible nylon, with holes. The nylon is stiff enough to hold the fan, but flexible enough to prevent conducting vibration.
Just buy a new one that's not like the old crappy ones.
For most people drives are cheaper than their data (whether they know it or not is a different issue).
After all most people buy drives to store stuff, not to keep tinkering around with them(overclockers excluded).
Most of the drive failures happen predictably, and that's what SMART technology is for. Install a monitor of some sort (losta free & not-so-free solutions around), and you'll get a warning when your drive is about to die (unless, of course, it's a violent death, electrocution or such), usually weeks to months in advance.
On another note, DiamonMax 9s come with a 3 year guarantee. It should be valid, so get a replacement.
Bigger Lesson: A RAID Array should contain different types of drives.
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If you're using RAID to protect your data in case of a drive failure, you are probably going to be using a RAID 1 variant of some sort, or RAID 5.
Yowsers.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
And that's patently bullshit. IBM/Hitachi got a bad reputation due to a couple bad batches a few years back, but everything else they've ever made has been rock solid. Actually I love the fact that they have a bad rep because it means their drives are generally cheaper than the others. Good for me!
I've got 5 of their drives, ranging from 1 to 4 years old, all going strong. So nyah nyah, my anecdotal evidence cancels out yours!
Funny, I've used all of the drives mention above and for IDE I have a subconscious preference for Western Digital. I've never had a WD drive fail on me after more than ten years and dozens, possibly hundreds of drives. This is obviously anecdotal, just as all of the previous comments about their choices and why.
But, on the factual statistics side, I have had approximately 300 Compaq Deskpros with Quantum Bigfoots in them and 237 of those drives failed completely. That's a 79% failure rate and all of them were within the first year! In fact, it was such a problem that Compaq and Quantum issued recalls on a large series of BigFoot drives.
You see, the Quantum BigFoot and the IBM Death Star were in fact terribly flawed drives. Their manufacturers acknowledged that fact and withdrew the drives. Most of the other drives are more or less average but, people allow their individual anecdotal experience to make them say; "I'll never use XYZ Brand again! I'll only ever use SHIT Brand because mine hasn't gone bad yet". That's after the failure of a single drive! Silly isn't it? Adn yet, here we are...
I recently bought some hard drives from bestbargianpc.com for my company.
Company policy is to log the serial numbers of all hardware, but I couldn't find the serial numbers. I called Maxtor (the drives were labeled as Maxtor drives) and after discussion with Maxtor tech support, including the Maxtor diagnostic software returning a blank serial number, and sending them photocopies of the label sides of the drives, they informed me that the drives were never manufactured by Maxtor and were completely counterfeit! They actually do show up as the correct size in BIOS, but I wouldn't trust them to actually store important data on.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
The sampled dataset is WAY too small to make ANY determination at all. Perhaps after several drives of whatever brand have failed for him, then he might be able to draw a reasonable though anecdotal conclusion. But, 'this failed and that hasn't yet', isn't adequate for making a decision on something such as a hard drive that usually has less than 2% failure rate.
Nearly all of the Deathstars from that era had problems.
My 30 gig unit included.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
For certain!
(stolen from DaBum) I am dyslexia of borg - your ass will be laminated.
...eBay??? Just a thought.
I had 5 broken Maxtor drives out of 10 i bought in the last 3 years. 3 of them broken with classical "click-of-death" symptoms, 2 of them with classical "system slowdown, then BSOD in Windows and then no reboot". They were installed on different desktop PCs, no swap, no server-like stress on them whatsoever. Won't buy Maxtor again until this trend is changed. In my personal workstation I have 3 Seagate Cheetah in SCSI RAID-5 (LSI ctrl) with a proper fan to cool them. I love that. My data is worth more than the price of 3 high-end drives. As for big IDE drives, I'd go for WD.
If performance is your goal, I believe there could be significant benefits to using the same drive. If the integrity and availability of your data are most important to you it should be stored on redundant drives that are ideally from different manufacturers.
This latter part is what the linux High Availability Howto says, also.
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These are precision devices with moving parts. They will fail, it's inevitable.
The problem is that platter densities have become astoundingly high, and failure rates have increased accordingly.
I've owned literally hundreds of drives and no manufacturer is noticeably better than the other (with the exception of the infamous IBM GXP fiasco). Often people will 'swear by' some manufacturer -- right up until their first drive failure.
The best you can do is buy a drive with a sufficiently long warranty, and replace the drive when the warranty expires.
There are only a few things you can do to extend your drive life, the easiest is cooling. The second is dont spin them up and down all the time. The third is make sure they have good, constant clean power -- ditch the old shitty PSU in your PC and get a decent one. And a good UPS.