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Hard Drive Failures

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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 06:58 PM
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Hard Drive Failures

Have any IT guys noticed a increase in hard drive failures recently? I just got my 3rd call in 2 weeks from family/friends of hard drive failure. Might be a coincidence but I was just curious if there was a virus or something going around that corrupted or infected/crashed hard drives..
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:04 PM
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When I was in business, I recieved 5-10 calls a week that turned out to be failing drives. In my experience, that complaint has been a constant for years.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:05 PM
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Not really failures, but getting a shitload of spyware / virus removal calls.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:08 PM
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Originally Posted by Whiskers
Not really failures, but getting a shitload of spyware / virus removal calls.
I wonder how many viruses (viri?) are actually created by those in the industry to keep themselves busy. Like what's to really stop geek squad or fire dawg from sub contracting out virus creation to meet their own ends.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:09 PM
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Originally Posted by Whiskers
Not really failures, but getting a shitload of spyware / virus removal calls.
Tell me about it. I nearly committed suicide when I had to use my girlfriends laptop. I couldn't stand it and had to spend a couple of hours to remove the plague.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:10 PM
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Originally Posted by The Dougler
I wonder how many viruses (viri?) are actually created by those in the industry to keep themselves busy. Like what's to really stop geek squad or fire dawg from sub contracting out virus creation to meet their own ends.

People stupidity > *


There will always be a business..
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:11 PM
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Originally Posted by Whiskers
Not really failures, but getting a shitload of spyware / virus removal calls.

That's been pretty much a constant for me.. But the hard drive failures has been a recent and sudden increase.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:19 PM
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Originally Posted by Jonesi
That's been pretty much a constant for me.. But the hard drive failures has been a recent and sudden increase.
I don't know of any virus that can physically damage a drive.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:21 PM
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Originally Posted by Whiskers
I don't know of any virus that can physically damage a drive.

That's what I was wondering.. If it's possible.. Like I said maybe it's just a coincidence but I've had one phone call in last 6 months for hard drive failure then 3 in two weeks.. So I thought I'd ask in case there's something new out there.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:24 PM
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:28 PM
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my hard drive in my imac died about a month ago.. it was only about 6 months old.. apple replaced it under warranty but it was still a pain in the ass. didn't think much about it until i came across this thread.
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:50 PM
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Originally Posted by Whiskers


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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 07:52 PM
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Originally Posted by Jonesi
Have any IT guys noticed a increase in hard drive failures recently? I just got my 3rd call in 2 weeks from family/friends of hard drive failure. Might be a coincidence but I was just curious if there was a virus or something going around that corrupted or infected/crashed hard drives..
You're in PA. There's a remote chance it could be temprature, humidity, or other environmental changes with the seasonal change. Heaters kick on and all the dust gets spewed out...
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 08:25 PM
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Maybe you're noticing it more because more and more people are buying external drives?
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Old Jan 12, 2009 | 09:16 PM
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Any commonality among the drives? Purchase timeframe, size, brand, internal vs. external?

I know that most every time a manufacturer has completed a leap to a much larger size, there are issues with the first sets of these newer, larger drives. Seagate had issues with their first run of 1.5TB 3.5" drives, but it seems to have been worked out.

Jonesi, I wonder if many of the holiday sale drives were some of these "less than spectacular" drives from various manufacturers, who could afford to discount the heck out of them because they knew they were going to be "issues" with them... I got bit by the Seagate 1.5TB issue twice in populated RAIDs I picked up... Newer revision of the drives were fine.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 06:48 AM
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All of the drives were internal. 2 of 3 came out of Dells but varied in age and size. The third drive came out of HP. They were all under 200GB's and weren't the best or biggest drive at the time(didn't go for newest technology).

The only commonality was stated above. Area. All out of Pittsburgh.

It's just probably a weird coincidence like whisklars said. Must be a full moon..
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 07:35 AM
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We have about 1000 Dell D620s out. Those things fail like its their job.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:15 AM
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Yep, me and my boss were talking about it. I figured since the prices are falling so is the quality.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:18 AM
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Drive failures have been constant for as long as I have been in IT. Nothing new
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:24 AM
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since you guy are talking about his, i have a hard drive that failed last year and i now need some word documents from it. when i plug it in through an external case, i can see the drive but can't get anything from it. i was going to try that software called "recover my files." anyone use it or know if it is any good?
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:28 AM
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You can try. Do you see the disk in device manager? Can you assign a drive to it?
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:34 AM
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when i get home, i'll check through the device manager to see if i can see it. it seems to already be assigned (F: and G: drive)
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:37 AM
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Originally Posted by SG81
since you guy are talking about his, i have a hard drive that failed last year and i now need some word documents from it. when i plug it in through an external case, i can see the drive but can't get anything from it. i was going to try that software called "recover my files." anyone use it or know if it is any good?
Some people swear by SpinRite. I haven't had an opportunity to need it.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:40 AM
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I have seen an increase over the past couple months. We have had about one per week go bad on our lenovos. Usually one goes bad every couple months. The drives have been mostly seagates, but a couple hitachis have gone bad too.
Not really sure what is causing them to go. The computers are approaching 2 years old. We have also seen a huge increase in viruses.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:47 AM
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my coworker's hard drive just crashed.

it's a macbook, and she's been convinced by the folks at the apple store's genius bar that it's because of the intel chip inside.

and after getting rid of antivirus 2010 last week, i got hit with ms antivirus 2009 on saturday. :thumbsdow
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 09:52 AM
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I think that data density is increasing at the same time manufacture process is becoming more sloppy. Higher data density no doubt means tolerances have to be tighter and that has to affect MTBF. I think it is due to bigger drives...
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:02 AM
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Originally Posted by JediMindTricks
and after getting rid of antivirus 2010 last week, i got hit with ms antivirus 2009 on saturday. :thumbsdow
Antivirus 20xx pisses me off. There seriously needs to be some sort of class action against the creators. It technically is not a virus but is an antivirus application. However the free version that forcibly installs itself falsely detects viruses and wont go away unless you buy the full (overpriced) version. The uninstaller breaks and never fully uninstalls.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:10 AM
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^^I made lots of money off of it and malwarebytes gets rid of it.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:15 AM
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My fathers hard drive just died last weekend, he is a super computer geek with a hot rodded computer and it was his first hard drive failure. Though to him it was almost a blessing because it made all of his backups and safety procedures seem justified, not to mention now he gets to put a bigger and better hard drive in.... kids.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:15 AM
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My 2 year old Macbook pro is getting close to hard drive failure as it is beeping every couple of minutes and the drive is making a nice clunking sound.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:17 AM
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www.mozy.com

Has free 2 GB...
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:24 AM
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Originally Posted by JLatimer
I think that data density is increasing at the same time manufacture process is becoming more sloppy. Higher data density no doubt means tolerances have to be tighter and that has to affect MTBF. I think it is due to bigger drives...
Bingo! I think that the increasing data density is the culprit. I def notice that hard drives are less reliable than they were 5-10 years ago
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:26 AM
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Maybe Flash drives will be cheap one day.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:27 AM
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Originally Posted by JLatimer
Antivirus 20xx pisses me off. There seriously needs to be some sort of class action against the creators. It technically is not a virus but is an antivirus application. However the free version that forcibly installs itself falsely detects viruses and wont go away unless you buy the full (overpriced) version. The uninstaller breaks and never fully uninstalls.

We use ComboFix. Works pretty good for a lot of other things, actually.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 10:30 AM
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I work in an office of 10.
Two Lenovo's have suffered complete hard drive failure in the last 10 days. One T61 and one R61i.

Only other comp to have the same problem in the 5 years I've been here was an HP - and that was years ago.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 11:12 AM
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On the flipside... I see far less power supply failures than I did 5 years ago.
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 11:37 AM
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Originally Posted by Whiskers
Maybe Flash drives will be cheap one day.
One can only hope!
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Old Jan 13, 2009 | 11:50 AM
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Bleh, I'm waiting the on the new mini SD 2TB cards...
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Old Jan 21, 2009 | 06:47 PM
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ohh boy...

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/cr...p?DocId=207931

Here's the thread on Seagate forum; it's already 29 pages deep!!

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/...ending&page=29

Originally Posted by Suparookie
Welcome, Seagate hard drive owners. A number of Seagate hard drives from the following families may become inaccessible when the host system is powered on:

Barracuda 7200.11
DiamondMax 22
Barracuda ES.2 SATA

Once a drive has become affected the data becomes inaccessible to users but the data is not deleted. Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured through December 2008.

Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If your drive is affected, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive to prevent this condition.

To identify your drive, retrieve the model number, serial number and firmware revision without removing your drive. There are multiple methods:

1. Seagate DriveDetect.exe method (recommended)

Click here to download Drive Detect: Download Flash

When running Drive Detect you will see a screen like this. Look for the drives that are attached:

Image

In the example above the Drive Name is the same as the Model: ST31500341AS, the serial number is 9VS00J20 and the firmware revision is SD1A.


2.

Device Manager Method :

Use Microsoft Windows Device Manager to see the model numbers of your disk drive.
- Choose Start | Run | type: devmgmt.msc
- Click Ok.

- Expand the Disk Drive branch to see the model numbers:

Image

3. Seatools for Windows Method:

Download SeaTools for Windows which displays all of the required information.

After determining your serial, model and firmware revision please attempt to find your model in the following list of affected models. If you have one of these drives you can choose it from the list for model-specific instructions to update the firmware.

Barracuda 7200.11
ST31000340AS
ST3750330AS
ST3640330AS
ST3500320AS
ST31500341AS
ST31000333AS
ST3640323AS
ST3640623AS
ST3320613AS
ST3320813AS
ST3160813AS


Barracuda ES.2 SATA
ST31000340NS
ST3750330NS
ST3500320NS
ST3250310NS


DiamondMax 22
STM31000340AS
STM3750330AS
STM3500320AS
STM31000334AS
STM3320614AS
STM3160813AS
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Old Jan 21, 2009 | 06:58 PM
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^Yeah, the 7200.11, especially the 1TB are teh suck, although (knock on wood) no issues here yet.

The failure does NOT result in loss of data, just loss of communication between the computer and the drive. There is a firmware upgrade for the PCB on HDD to fix the issue, hopefully.
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