Dead hard drive? and what caused it?

[G.H.]

Yesterday while I was playing game, the loading took unusually long. I quit the game, open new windows, run some files, open web browser, and realize the hard drive runs extremely slow. I thought it might be the clog with old paging files, so I restart my computer. It starts with memory checking/hard drive checking, and next screen with white bars on the button of black screen, indicating it is loading, took maybe 30 seconds, and next screen is windows loading screen. It took about another 30 seconds and it restarts itself and repeat the same thing over and over again. I restart my computer under DOS, my hard drive is not accessible.

I turned my computer off for few minutes, and restart it. Luckly, it had same white bars loading screen and windows loading screen, but it loads all the way to desktop(usually takes about 20 seconds from pressing the power to desktop, now it takes about 1 min). I check my hard drive condition under "my computer" "manage" "manage hard drives", all of the petitions are healthy. I backup some important files, and restart my computer. This time. it went from bad to worse. Now my computer cannt even pass the hard drive checking. Whenever I start my computer, my Samsung hard drive starts to make clicking noise, like an old car trying to start up again and again. Now I cann't even start my computer, not even under DOS.

Before this happens, I did run a defragement tool for one of my partition. Is this the cause of my hard drive failure? Also, I have 512MB memory, will the lake of memory puts more load on hard drive for the constantly paging file swaps.

Is my hard drive completely dead? Purchased about 18 months ago, and what caused it?

Also, anyone has experience with Samsung RMA service? It seems I need to sent them my Bill of purchase, I don't know if they will exchange a working drive for me if my hard drive is 18 months old. Hard drive is Samsung SP1203N OEM purchased from NCIX.

Also, the current Samsung hard drive is the exchanged one from NCIX. My original Samsung hard drive was dead in about 8 months, got it exchanged from NCIX, now it is dead again after 10 months of use. I begin to lose my faith to Samsung products. Both hard drives stop working within less than a year.

[Gee]

Everyone complains about Maxtor. I complain about Samsung. Their stuff is crap and they have the worse RMA procedure.

First you need to submit the original receipt and they take forever to return it. To make things worse. I live 10 minutes away from them and they still can't get me a new drive. So I don't buy Samsung hard drives any more. I purchased 5 120 Gigs 3 years ago and all of them FAILED.

They are bad with disks. They make a great LCD, DLP TV (Remote could be better) and decent Memory.

However, they don't know crap about Hard Drives. That is why it should be called SamDung.

[cjpark]

That sucks, sounds like its completely dead. Guess you've had some bad luck with your drives. I use samsung drives exclusively in all systems I build now and haven't had one go bad yet. At work we get tons of dead drives coming in but none of them samsung.

[x86asm]

Everyone complains about Maxtor. I complain about Samsung. Their stuff is crap and they have the worse RMA procedure.

First you need to submit the original receipt and they take forever to return it. To make things worse. I live 10 minutes away from them and they still can't get me a new drive. So I don't buy Samsung hard drives any more. I purchased 5 120 Gigs 3 years ago and all of them FAILED.

They are bad with disks. They make a great LCD, DLP TV (Remote could be better) and decent Memory.

However, they don't know crap about Hard Drives. That is why it should be called SamDung.

The one and only drive that completely died on me was a Samsung.

[G.H.]

Anyone has comments on what may caused it? and any chance I may save my hard drive?

[spider]

It's not will my hard drive fail...it's when . Have you backed up whats important ?

model and brand are the smaller factors. They ALL will fail at some point.

Be prepared !

[Aske001]

Drives usually go one of 4 ways:

1 Sudden total failure to respond.

Caused by dead electronics, probably due to overheating. No hope of rescue unless you are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for professional surgery to recover critical data (they pull out the platters and mate them up with new electronics).

2. Drive suddenly slow responding, lots of head-seeking reset noises, frequent errors.

Surface failure, access to contents deteriorating rapidly. Stop what you're doing immediately and start a last-ditch backup. Often happens immediately after an intensive disk operation like a defrag that accelerates pending failure.

3. Same as above following a sharp shock to the drive.

Head crash, surface damaged, possibly head damaged as well. Rescue what you can with an emergency backup. Disk may be reusable after a thorough surface check if it was a light shock that didn't damage the head and caused only localized surface damage.

4. Horrible noises getting louder

Bearing failure. Usually not immediately critical, but do a backup ASAP because it will fail eventually.

[dirkpitt]

I have had bad luck with Maxtor drives a long time ago, but since they've acquired Quantum, I find that their reliability and performance has improved greatly. I now prefer Maxtor above Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung.

If you're really in a pinch to retrieve some of the data from the drive, here's a trick:
-put the HD in an ESD (silver) bag
-put the HD and ESD bag in a ziploc bag and seal it
-put the whole thing in the freezer for a half hour or so.

After that, quickly replace it in your PC, and see if it will boot. If it does, quickly copy your data via network or to a USB thumb drive.

I hope it helps.

Ya, avoid Samsung.

[matkun]

Maxtor/Samsung are sort of budget/lower end drives at the moment.. Highest quality right now are Seagate, followed by Western Digital for the fastest drives with good quality..

As for hard drive failure, it happens. That's why the reliability figures are quoted as "Mean-Time-Between-Faliures". It will fail, sooner or later, 99% of the time it will last for more then 5 years... You got the lucky 1%.

Anyways, for comparison I still have a Fujitsu 15GB drive in my system that's just used as a secondary backup. (I make a DVD backup, and store it on the drive as well, that way both the drive and the DVD have to fail/be destroyed for data loss) That drive is atleast 5-6 years old, and still working fine, though then again it only gets used once every few weeks for a single big write operation, and the occasional read.

Best way to preserve the life of your drive (other then not mistreating it due to movement/overheating/dust/etc.) is to have plenty of Ram. Windows Page File writes/reads are the most intensive thing you can do to a drive, since it's just continously reading/writing non-stop. Having plenty of RAM minimizes that.

[sleepwalker]

Anyone has comments on what may caused it? and any chance I may save my hard drive?

yea man, ya mite want to delete all that porn ya got first, it's problaly the reason, too wet and too greasy, that's why the HD died..

[KorruptioN]

You increase your chances of drive failure (with any brand) with cheap power supplies and poor airflow around the drive. More often than not, it is because of these two factors that cause a drive to fail, and not because of the brand alone.

[Jucius Maximus]

For X brand of hard drive, there will always be a group of people who claim that X is incredibly unreliable, they fail left and right, half of brand X at work failed, and they will never use X again because brand Y is far more reliable and has never failed on them once.

And the same is true about brand Y.

As to myself, I've mainly used Maxtor and Quantum (who was acquired by Maxtor) over the past 10 years and only ONE time had a client's Fujitsu drive fail. No other failures ever. My current machine has 1 Maxtor, 1 Samsung and 1 Seagate. Though I am going to swap the Maxtor for a WD because the Maxtor is old and slow.

[ShadowVlican]

zero hdd here as well. i got six hdds in my main computer (computer is on 24/7 BTing and i set O&O defrag to automatic)

active cooling... good power supply... ups and filtered power... that's the trick

try what dirkpitt suggested, believe it or not, it works

[G.H.]

You increase your chances of drive failure (with any brand) with cheap power supplies and poor airflow around the drive. More often than not, it is because of these two factors that cause a drive to fail, and not because of the brand alone.

I have a 8G WD hard drive that is older than my previous power supply and it still works. I have to disagree with your statement.

[Riflem@n]

Maxtor and WD user, working fine.
Seems to me a lot of people don't have sufficient cooling.