Rant Hard drive reliability

[Scouse]

OK, so hot on the heels of my SSD bricking itself (just plugged in the replacement), I've just come back from a bijou bike ride and the external hard drive that I bought (at the same time I bought the SSD) to replace another external that bricked itself earlier, has bricked itself.

What the fuck?

That's 3 hard drives go, all with less than 12 months on the clock.

How the hell am I supposed to have a semi-reliable backup solution if the media I back up to are anything but semi-reliable?

In order:

A 1TB Seagate HDD went pop.
A 128Gb Crucial SSD went pop.
A 750Gb external Western Digital hard drive went pop.

I'll be able to send it back, but the annoying thing is that, as per fucking usual, I'd just started re-jigging my backups (this morning) and theres some shit on there that was only on there for the period of backup-re-jig time

I'll say again: WHAT. THE. FUCK

and

 

[dysfunction]

Perhaps you are having power surges that are killing the hard drives?
Have you got a power surge protector?

 

[Wazzerphuk]

Have you checked the external HDD itself is alive? It's normally the power that dies on them and the HDD itself is still ok.

 

[Scouse]

Got a surge protector. The current external runs completely off the USB and is sealed in a small form factor but the old one I checked out and nope - was deaded

 

[soze]

Be careful if you open the portable drive up. WD are cunts for using any excuse to void a warranty. Have you checked the WD tools to make sure it completely gone?

As you for backups you have been bloody unlucky. Do you leave the WD connected all the time or just plug it in to run the backup?

 

[Yaka]

1. seagate are crap going the way maxtor are going, i my self had all bar one seagate hdd die within 12 months
2. was yer crucial an m4? dunno whats happened but there are reports LOT of em going (curcial have great customer service tho)
3. when ever i look at external hdds i always think about cooling, the bigger 3.5 hdds most of em have extractions fans, all most all of the smaller 2.5 just rely and aluminum casing to extract heat. i just use a e-sata hdd dock and normal 3.5 hdds for backups http://www.amazon.co.uk/Freecom-35296-Hard-Drive-Quattro/dp/B004BHADPA/ref=pd_sxp_grid_i_1_1


other things to note, for back there not much that is 100% reliable hdds will fail at some point, dvds (prolly bds as well) willnot last long no matter how well you store em, backing up to some cloud service aint 100% either. we are all screwed not matter what

 

[Scouse]

Used to leave teh WD connected most of the time tbfh. But you expect these things to run for at least 3 years.

Perversely I've got a 200Gb HDD that I've been running every day, practically non-stop, since 2001...

 

[Yaka]

removed a 20gb wd hdd from xbox purchased around 1998 or 99 was heavily used for a few years as my os/game drive then it got shifted to an xbox when XBMP ( latter renamed XBMC) came out. was still being used as jukebox till the psu conked out hdd is still fine tho