hard drive dying - recommend a replacement

kaimera

*sighs*

seems like my hd is dying..slowly but surely.

for the last 2 months or so...it's been acting up.

I booted up back then to ge a msg telling me there is possible physical damage to my drive [possibly caused by lightning] and to run scan disk.

ran a full system scan w/scan disk and it found bad sectors on my c drive and supposedly fixed them.

this week now, I've been getting a Ddhelp erro msg when I try to view my graphics card props in display properties, when I try and run any game, or try to acess to web via IE.

scan disk also found errors on my d partition which it couldn't fix this week also.

points towards a borked hd?

how do i know which type o hd to get?

looking at komplette...2.5" ide, 3.5" ide, 3.5" serial ata...I'm assuming it's a 3.5" ide hd I should get.

so this: http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?action=info&sku=118867&p=&t=715&l=2&AvdID=1&CatID=9&GrpID=1&cks=PRL

or this:http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?action=info&sku=116436&p=&t=715&l=2&AvdID=1&CatID=9&GrpID=1&cks=PRL

any ideas?

Giblet

DDHelp, sounds like a DX problem, have you installed DX9b recently?

It's not the best at the moment.

kaimera

nope...dx9a is what I'm running on the pc.

specs:
p4 1.8
512 SDRAM
GF4 ti4200 [cant check what drivers :-/]

ddhelp error just came up when i ran dxdiag...

oh...in dxdiag..under the display tab...the box to check Direct3D is grayed out

CombatCow

3.5'' ide is what you want.

western digital - v.fast,quiet,reliable
seagate- v.quiet,fast,reliable
samsung - never had 1 before ??
Maxtor- ( hell on earth ) not as fast as above hdd's, loud, get v.hot, bad reliability problems.Stay away.


My 2cents.

Thx lotas, i forgot to add iv got 2x WD 120Gig hdd's with 8MB cache - highly recommended.

CombatCow

lotas

a special edition western digital would be what i would recomend. 3 year warrenty, when most others are offering 1, 8mb cache, when most are offering 2, and there are qutie cheap, about 5eur more on the 2mb cache 1 year warrenty model. im getting a 120gb in the next few weeks. my 30gb ibm is messing with my head! wont run linux properly

Ryo Hazuki

I have 3 seagate drives, and none of them have ever given me any trouble. No bad sectors on any of them.

And these drives are reqularly removed from my rig and transported on foot/car to other computers up to 1km away.

buy seagate, for fast and reliable drives.

Capt'n Midnight

Maxtor - not called Fireball for nothing

I've three dead Maxtors where a chip has visibly burnt out.
(and more that are dead but no visible damage)

gobby

wow! cant believe ye are all slating maxtors. ive been running a 60 gig, 7200 rpm, 133 ata for over a year and no probs whatsoever. i do have it positioned just above the intake case fan though.

is heat the only problem ye guys have had with maxtors??

dazberry

I've had 3 drives fail in the last roughly 8 years...

1x 120gb seagate (2 weeks)
1x 1gb Samsung (10 months)
1x 1gb Maxtor (6 years)

I've a lot of (7) Maxtor drives here, and they all work perfectly tip wood. One of the 40gb (7200) has been running 24x7 since August. Now if I was going out to buy another drive from my experience I'd buy Maxtor, I'm still a bit shakey about the Seagate. But bare in mind I don't have a Maxtor over 40gb, so if there are performance/heat/reliability probs outside that I'm not in a position to discuss.

D.

unkel

Originally posted by lotas
a special edition western digital would be what i would recomend

Me too. Fastest, albeit not the most silent, of the IDE (non SATA) drives available. Have a 160GB and a 80GB

Does that mean I have almost a quarter of a Terabyte diskspace :cool:

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/27049.html

Today, the hard drive maker announces the Maxtor MaXLine,. ...
ultra-reliable - Maxtor claims a MTBF (meantime before failure rate) of more than one million hours usage.

one million hours = 114 years
or just under 1% of drive failures per year...

http://www.xtremepccentral.com/forums/archive/19/2001/12/4/461
Seagate site - can't find the ref so here is the hearsay - They stipulate in some documentation they expect their drives to have a 5 year service life and a 3 year warranty.
Their MTBF documentation indicates that some 7 percent of their drives fail in the first year or two, but the rest of the drives past that point can be expected to function for some 26 years after that barring unusual problems

7% - scary..
And a bad batch would be worse - my own horror story is a batch of Maxtors where over half died within a short space of time around the three year old mark - similar failures - other brands of drives and replacements had no problems - I am treating it as a design flaw.

Problem is that most of the HDD manu's have either been taken over (quantum / hitachi) and/or have had bad batch problems - none of them shine and the impression that I am getting is they are less reliable and less recoverable than they were a decade ago..

byte

Originally posted by lotas
a special edition western digital would be what i would recomend. 3 year warrenty, when most others are offering 1, 8mb cache, when most are offering 2, and there are qutie cheap, about 5eur more on the 2mb cache 1 year warrenty model. im getting a 120gb in the next few weeks. my 30gb ibm is messing with my head! wont run linux properly

Yup, I'd also recommend WD. I have an 80GB version and it works great and much quieter than my slave Quantum! Only problem now is that it's nearly full so need to get another one soon! I didn't realise it had 3 year warranty that's nice to know!

jonhate

I'd recommend WD Caviar Drives with 8mb Cache, They are extremely qucik and reliable!

Civilian_Target

I've been giving my pair of IBMs some pretty heavy usage, with no problems yet, so I recommend, blisteringly fast but not exactly quiet.

I've only had 20 (built after 1996) drives fail on me, a Western Digital at 3.5 years and a Fujitsu after 18 months, and over the last 4 years I've used IBM, Maxtor, Seagate and WD.

Civilian_Target

lotas

20 is a lot of drives failing on you since 1996. i have only had about that (maybe 30) and about 6 have failed. 2 WDs, which where 4gb and 4 years old when they died, one died 5 months after the other, then i had some really old small ones die. but 20! how many hdds have you had?

tonky

WD/Seagates - Never had a problem with 'em.
Fireballs - several failures where the little Phillips chip blew with the white smoke etc, well named these.
Oh and a couple of IBM deskstars developed the death rattle (ching - ching-ching), turning into deathstars :-).

lotas

i have a deathstar. wont run linux are the new ibms good? i know my one was FAST when i got it first, but now its slow. it is 3 years old though!

tonky

Older Deskstars/Linux: Play around with the jumpers, several options. Also I heard that the on board cache can fail on these, with resulting speed loss. This is going back a while.