Hard Drive Failures

[andrew@mytecho.com]

I am a technician in Northern California and have recently experienced mass of failed Hard Drives. Mostly in Dell machines, all machines were 2 to 3 years old. One PC was not a Dell and I have had problems with several different brands of Hard Drives.
Has anyone had similar problems in the last few months? Should I expect more of these issues?
Any info at all would be helpful.

[Carrie]

I personally have not had these problems, but I know several people who in the past have owned dells...and their hard drives fail about 2 to 3 years after the purchase.

Sounds to me as if there may be a virus that the anit-virus in use is not picking up...is there a common denomiator, meaning are these machines all running the same anti-virus?

[kittykat]

Hmmmmm not heard or seen anything recently.

But I have replaced several hard drives in Dell machines that have went bad within 2 or 3 years of purchase. I know that Dell offers a kind of "trade in if you upgrade" your machine within 2 or 3 years....which I always thought was ironic. :type:

I would definately look a little deeper into the situation your in and see if there is a common denominator with the systems your working on for them all to go bad so quickly....like all Dell's lol! j/k
Maybe then you can pinpoint the problem. Sorry I know thats not much help.

[andrew@mytecho.com]

Since not all of the failed drives were in Dell's, I was kinda leaning towards common component failure in the drives. All of the other equipment in these machines seems to be working fine.

Thanks for you input.

[taddzilla]

Andrew,

I do PC tech support, and I have seen several (5-6) drive crashes over the past 2 months. All the machines were IBM NetVistas that one company got in bulk from IBM.

Most of the machines were a few years old.

That's my 2 cents.....

[andrew@mytecho.com]

Any clues as to the origin of the failures? Were the HDD from any specific manufaturer?

Thanks for the input.

[taddzilla]

Unfortunately, I don't have anymore specifics. They would go to IBM for replacements or get a new machine all together.

We (the company I work for) are only responsible for the software they need for credit card processing, and the merchant is responsible for the hardware and OS maintenance.

[bmh67wa]

A company that I used to work for bough a ton of Dell PCs about 3 years ago. Within the first year over half of them had hard drive failures. All of them had the same 40GB Seagate drive. Dell replaced them with Western Digital drives. Even after the warranty period Dell still replaced the drives at no charge. We later discovered that around 20 of the PCs had the Western Digital drives when they got them. None of those had to be replaced. BTW, Dell usually installs a 3 to 6 month version of Norton as their AV of choice. I don't think that this was a virus or software issue at all. I'm sure that Dell got a "deal" on the Seagate drives and it is now biting them in the arse.

[FelineTech]

I have experienced this problem twice this year with 5 - 6 harddrives failing at once. It seems some my users don't like to wait for virus scans and were shutting off power to the PCs when things were running slowly.

We have rectified the cause of the slow scans, but the damage was already done on some the drives that had power cut off while in use. All were Dell units, but I suspect I would have had the issue with any machines. Most of the ones in question were about 3 years old. A couple were less and were replaced free of charge under service plans.

[NullsRevenge]

Another thing to look at with hard drives problems is heat and not enough cooling. If its running hot inside a PC it can reduce the life of the hardware especially with hard drives.

[ObiWanKenobi]

:yeahthat: you beat me to it, NR! :icon_nana