# Hard disk horror stories



## ArielMT (May 12, 2010)

I dug out the old IBM Deskstar that went from working beautifully to going kaput in less than three hours, thus earning its nickname "Deathstar," and I popped off the cover just to see what caused it to fail on me.  [Warning: Don't ever pop the cover off a hard disk unless you intend to destroy it.]  It was manufactured in March of 1999, and I was afraid I'd see something like this when I opened it up.

I didn't.  I saw five platters shiny as a mirror and a stack of six heads midway into the disks.

I grabbed a USB hard disk carriage, plugged the drive in, and turned it on.  The spindle didn't turn.  It didn't even budge.  Also, the USB host never sensed that a USB device was connected.  After unplugging the drive, I tried to turn the platters manually.  Stiff resistance.  Not good for something that's supposed to spin with very little power.  I'm debating whether to remove the arm and magnets; I probably won't.

So now I have an IBM Deskstar standing on display next to an IBM Travelstar that died just as quickly, both with covers removed.

Also, holy crap, shattering hard disk!

Anyone got hard disk horror stories involving drives, support, or both?


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## Lobar (May 12, 2010)

inb4Maxtor


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## Apollo (May 12, 2010)

I had a *Maxtor* OneTouch II drive with a ton of backups on it, I neglected it for a few years, then I tried plugging it into my Mac and it wouldn't mount, then I plugged it into a PC and it mounted but I couldn't access it. I tried a bit more and it doesn't even show up now.


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## CyberFoxx (May 12, 2010)

Personally, I've never had problems with Maxtor drives. (Got three 40GBs still working, a 10GB still working, even a 850MB that still works.) Now, the old WD Caviar drives, oh man have I burnt through those.

Anyway, several years ago, friend comes over to my house one day, complaining he can't get his HD working. I toss together a pizza-box setup, hook the drive up, nothing, not even the POST clicks. Toss another HD to make sure I didn't screw up the pizza-box, works fine. Toss his on, nothing. Kid is a good friend of mine, so I toss the drive in a known working PC, still nothing. Poor kid is crying because apparently his family just spent the last several days transferring their digitized family photos off the photo CDs to the HD.

The HD? A WD Caviar.

Told him to stick with either Seagate or Maxtor from then on.


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## Slyck (May 12, 2010)

One time, I bought a Seagate 7200.12 -- That is all.
Other than that I've had great luck with hard drives. Even got a Seagate ST225 5.25" 20mb drive that still works.


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## Aden (May 12, 2010)

Ohoho, the stories I could tell. But I won't because it makes me too angry to think about them again.


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## AshleyAshes (May 12, 2010)

I had twin Seagate 80GB drives once upon a time and once tilted my PC over when it was running to fish some coins out that had slipped under.  It was a gentle 15 degree rotation, I'd done it before to fish things from under the computer but this one did it.  While one drive was fine, the other made a sound similar to that of a cat going through an angle grinder and the PC locked up.  That drive was DOA from that point on.


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## RailRide (May 13, 2010)

I had an external HDD, a IBM/Hitachi Travelstar that I had my art archive on, when one day I went to it to retrieve an old art project to make some modifications. I plugged the drive in, and Windows didn't even acknowledge it. That drive was toast-ski. I don't think it even spun up.

I shrugged, because I had _two_ other HDD's with the exact same data on it. I retrieved the art project from one of those, and made a mental note to pick up a similar-size drive at the next computer show.

Some time ago, an artist on my watchlist posted a journal stating that he lost all his art in a hard drive failure. I drew this pic in response.  (Well, I didn't tell _him_ about it--it's not my style to rub people's noses in their misfortune), but hopefully some of the people watching me were inspired to duplicate their collections/archives somewhere outside their computer's hard drive.

Thanks to a failed Maxtor (the data recovery specialists confirmed that the controller board died) back in the Win 98/2000 era, I now keep my finished art projects archived on two separate external HD's in different places in the house, a third one kept in my locker at work, and the thumb drives that the projects lived on while they're WIP (they're cheap enough now that when one fills up with project files, I just buy another one). My NAS drive has a backup in another room, video projects are on two separate drives that also hold images of my MP3 collection (also backed up on retired MP3 players), and my DVR recordings are also backed up on a second external HD that lives next to the TV.

---PCJ


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## Flatline (May 13, 2010)

I've never experienced a HDD crash, but my dad has a few dead drives scattered around. 

However, about 5 years ago (I didn't have my own comp back then), my dad was working on his PC, and I was watching TV in the same room.
Suddenly, we heard loud cracking and shattering noises from the DVD drive. 
It lasted for a few seconds, then the drive stopped and never started again. 
We opened the DVD tray, and tiny bits of an original Windows XP Professional disc fell out of the drive. The disc was completely destroyed. The drive worked perfectly before that happened, and never behaved strangely. 

We spent 2 hours on getting out the bits of the disc from the drive.

One year later, when we decided to get rid of it, we opened it up to find out what has caused it to fail. We didn't find anything, except even more parts of the disc deep inside the drive.


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## AshleyAshes (May 13, 2010)

Really, when you have truely important stuff on yoru HDD, like creative stuff that you made as opposed to all your downloaded movies.  Make backups, even just some DVDRs with your writing, art, photography or whatever and hiding it in your underwear drawer or somewhere else where it won't get 'mixed with the computer crap' is an easy solution.


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## ToeClaws (May 13, 2010)

I've never had a catastrophic failure myself, but I once saw a roommate have a pretty nasty one.  It was years ago back when drives were measured in megs.   The drive was a Seagate, and something failed on the circuit board attached to the drive.  I don't know if it was a power surge or what, but it blew the one of the integrated chips clean off the board, leaving a big char spot.  It was the only drive I've ever seen fail like that.


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## ArielMT (May 15, 2010)

No customer support stories involving hard disks?


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## Runefox (May 15, 2010)

Well it's not as spectacular or as scary, but there was this one time early on in my job with a local computer repair shop where a hard drive that absolutely had to be recovered ended up dying altogether. I can't remember the specifics, but one of the guys recalled that refrigerating the drive in a sealed bag could potentially enable the drive to work for a while longer. Long story short, it actually worked - We got the data back from a drive that had already more or less passed away.

I recall another instance where a high-profile customer came in with a rather beastly machine (complete with separate Zalman water cooling tower). The RAID had failed altogether, and it was pretty uncertain whether or not we'd get the data back. After fiddling with some recovery software, eventually we managed to figure out the exact block size settings and so on for the RAID and pull a complete backup from the drives so we could safely rebuild it. RAID is really more trouble than it's worth. RAID0's pretty much suicidal, RAID1 isn't an excuse not to back up, and RAID5 is pretty intense if a single drive fails. The nested RAID levels are even more overkill. I can't really imagine any situation where that'd be necessary, but all the same, we set them up for high-profile clients anyway. I have to admit though, twin velociRaptors in RAID0 on a HighPoint RocketRaid as a scratch/temp data disk for Premiere and so on really is still pretty impressive, especially when you're looking at a twin quad core Xeon machine with 8GB of RAM and a high-end FireGL.


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## Takun (May 15, 2010)

My Toshiba Satellite had dual harddrives.  I had my main completely backed up on the second.  They both failed within 3 days of each other.


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## Lobar (May 16, 2010)

Well I kinda have one now.  The Spinpoint in my new system I just put together was DOA.  So disappointing.


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## AshleyAshes (May 17, 2010)

In 2006 I killed a pair of 200GB HDDs in external enclosures and they wern't even mine.  To this day, I have no idea how it happened.  I was working on converting a bunch of anime fansubs into playlist organized DVDs for an anime convention.  Then one drive stopped working and the other stopped working.

I think I mixed up the AC adaptors for each enclosure.  Both had the same PS/2 style pinout but the adaptors and enclosures had slightly different amperage listings.  Actually that's a lie.  The one enclosure listed it's amperage and the others didn't but the adaptors didn't list their output wattage but not their amperage.  So I really had no reliable means to tell which went to which.  I evidently not only burned out the drives but the control boards in the enclosures too.  Visually burnt out, there was blackening and the left over smell of ozone.

The thing is, the owner of said enclosures assured me that he mixed and matched the adaptors all the time and there was never an issue.  He doesn't see how I managed to simultaniously blow out both.

I think I must have mixed them up because no other hardware took damage that day and I didn't see anything 'electrically weird' happen that day either.  Still, bizarre.


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## Adelio Altomar (May 17, 2010)

It was January 3rd, 2009. No sooner had the New Year came in than the original hard drive for this very with which I type this message had given me it's last in a series of Blue Screens of Death  followed by some clicking where the harddrive resides (which started occurring at an alarmingly frequent rate of about 1-2 times almost every night in early December). 

Possibly aware subconsciously of the inevitable, I made the smart move of backing up my stuff into disks and flash drives, and, sure enough, when I rebooted the computer that night, nothing showed but a blank screen. I tried what little I knew by popping in the recovery disk and it showed a chain of question marks. Luckily Takun helped me with posting a thread about what to do and get for a replacement asap since I was then severely limited about what I could do and I had yet to go back to school.

I've had this 500Gb harddrive for over a year now and it still seems to be working fine. Though I've had some recent Blue Screens in the past couple of months, I still don't think it's a sign of anything serious to happen like last time. And if it is, then I'll just sell this laptop for some and buy a new one. One that ain't a Gateway (seriously, Gateway and their service sucks).


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## Jaxinc (May 17, 2010)

My Falcon DRX came with two Hitachi Deathstars in it, after two years of constant use they both started to fail, I was losing speed, stability and sectors by the day. I lost several gigs worth of data before I could back up the drives and replace them, quite honestly I was pissed. The drives had worked fine, and then suddenly one week my computer bogged down, then on the last three days my raid software told me there was a problem with the hdds... I immediately tried to backup data, but was already too late.

Thing is, the month prior, I had JUST run Seatools to check the drives for problems and it found zilch, ran it again and damn computer froze mid scan after returning nearly two dozen sector errors to one drive alone.

I ripped them out and ordered three WD Caviar Black 320gb drives, replaced them and have been running since. These drives are quieter, cooler running and faster than when I got my computer.

Funny thing is, I got a first gen WD 250gb external drive, it's nearly 8 years old now, been dropped multiple, multiple times and the case is busted up, the damn thing STILL works perfectly. The hitachis didn't even last two years under better care :\

Hitachi might make good power tools, but I'm never buying another hard drive from them, some of that data I could NOT replace.... -_-


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