Computer Related > Hard drive failures Miscellaneous
Thread Author: RattleandSmoke Replies: 13
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 01:28 
 Hard drive failures - RattleandSmoke
I have noticed lately I am getting a lot more machines in with a failed hard drive. I've never known anything quite like it. My parents drive is failing (bad sectors) and got another two systems in full of bad sectors to the point where the operating system is no longer booting.

My thoughs are the bigger the hard drives have become in capacity the much less reliable they have come. What are other peoples thoughts?

At this rate I will be spending a lot of time trying to upsell online backup solutions!
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 06:53 
 Hard drive failures - Falkirk Bairn
Meantime between failures might be 50 years - if you have a handful of customers you will have few disk failures. large number of customers you will see failures every week.

It is a Sales opportunity - stock 6 x popular drive sizes in the car and you can fix with one visit rather than pick up, repair and drop-off. Better service , more cash....everbody wins.
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 07:33 
 Hard drive failures - smokie
Not seen any evidence of a pattern myself, either at home or in business.
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 09:03 
 Hard drive failures - RattleandSmoke
It is not a job I can really do onsite because it involves trying to recover data of the old drive, fitting the new driving, reinstalling everything etc. Sometimes you can clone drive but if there is any bad sectors you can't do it as you just copy the corrupt operating system files over.

I can also tend to do a surface scan as part of the diagnostics which can take a few hours.

I realise I would see more than most people because people are coming to me because their PC is faulty but I have seen a big increase in the past few months.
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 09:17 
 Hard drive failures - Zero
Rattle, you never lived through the days of IBM Deathstars, or Seagate Stiction, or Maxtor Manglers.

If hard disk failures didn't exist, backup companies would go out of business. It has always been thus ever since they were the size of lorry wheels.
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 09:45 
 Hard drive failures - RattleandSmoke
I started in early 2006 and I think by then a lot of the Deathstars have been replaced. I know drives have always failed but it just seems to be more common now than it was.

I am starting to wonder if offering enterprise grade hard drives would be worth while.
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 09:51 
 Hard drive failures - Zero
No such thing rattle.

Large storage systems migrated to arrays of hundreds of desktop drives years ago. The only diffrence is that they are Raid.

Raid 6 allows you to loose two drives in an array at once, and you can hot plug new ones in and recover the array on the fly. Add the fact that most are mirrored (sometimes in backup location) then a single drive failure is nothing. It needs to be because it happens a lot.

Some large data centres have engineers on site with a stash of disks and are in daily demand.

Edit, now of course some are moving into arrays of SSD's
Last edited by: Zero on Sat 26 Feb 11 at 09:52
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 11:02 
 Hard drive failures - Tooslow
Or IBM 3370 / 3375. :-(

John
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 11:44 
 Hard drive failures - smokie
That 3370 is an eye opener to how spec and costs have changed.

A set of massive cabinets giving access to a bit over 2 Tb of data for about $130,000 (1Tb drive which fits inside your PC seen below £40)

Seek times are now approx half those of the 3370 - not as big an advance as I would have imagined.

But the data rate is about 150 times faster now, if I'm reading it right.
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 11:52 
 Hard drive failures - Zero
>> But the data rate is about 150 times faster now, if I'm reading it right.
>>

Yes, it had to go to a head of string controller, then via a big thick copper channel cable to the CPU. Cache was minute, but employed prefetch routines the idea being to get it into main store before you needed it. Also storage admins would spend hours pouring over what head and track to place the data to make it all as fast as possible.

Edit

Also what people who never worked in a Data Centre have never appreciated, is the sheer amount of electrical power required to make it all work. Some large centres had spurs from the grid or their own substation.
Last edited by: Zero on Sat 26 Feb 11 at 11:55
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 11:58 
 Hard drive failures - Zero

>> Seek times are now approx half those of the 3370 - not as big an
>> advance as I would have imagined.

A by product of capacity.



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New Sat 26 Feb 11 13:01 
 Hard drive failures - RattleandSmoke
Raid controllers are not really practicle in the home environment due to cost. I know most motherboards have this built it but they are not always reliable and there is no point on havign RAID if the controller currupts all the data on al the disks.

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New Sat 26 Feb 11 13:29 
 Hard drive failures - Bellboy
i never knew you could hold data and recover it from flys
are these standard bluebottles or super flies zero?
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New Sat 26 Feb 11 13:58 
 Hard drive failures - Zero
the biggest buzziest flies you have ever seen BB.
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