30 years never an HDD failure -- now TWO in a week !!!!!

If you went 30 years with no HDD failures, I'd say you were very fortunate and were really bucking the odds. I've had a number of HDD failures in the past 30 years (my experience is that HDDs are more robust now than they were in the past). I've had them last for years but I've also had them fail in just a few weeks of use.

I worked in IBM's disk drive business for 20 years and we always said that it wasn't a question of "IF" a drive would fail but "WHEN".

As you said, backup, backup, backup!

jimbo45 said:

Hi folks

Is it because Manufacturing is poorer these days or perhaps is it I'm using HDD's more intensively ( in Servers for example 24 hrs a day).

In over 30 years of using Windows and Linux I've never experienced an HDD failure -- now I've had TWO in a single week - WD Red 3 TB drives -- funny though both part of the same RAID 0 config I had on the server. I've 2 X 5 TB Green drives also on the server running in RAID 0 - not a single problem.

Ensure you take decent backups --even if you are using a server to backup clients / laptops --shows even on servers HDD's can fail.

I tested these individually again -- both definitely U/S -Bust -- Broken etc -- nothing to do with RAID 0 Array failure. Definitely unrecoverable hardware defects. I have backup so I can re-build the array with another set of HDD's.

I think I'll look at Toshiba drives before they sell that piece of their business to WD. I've always had good experiences with Toshiba stuff in the past.

So whatever hardware you install --especially HDD's --ALWAYS TAKE BACKUPS !!!!!! especially those of you using NAS type devices as servers. These DO fail - even if very rarely.

Cheers
jimbo

UK never had a Scottish Prime Minister for 200 years, then two came along at once (Blair and Brown) - LOL.

You have been lucky really but have fallen foul of classic "crap happens" I'm afraid.

You may find this an interesting read from Backblaze
2017 Hard Drive Failure Rates - What the Numbers Tell Us

Our Hard Drive Data Set
Backblaze has now recorded and saved daily hard drive statistics from the drives in our data centers for over 4 years. This data includes the SMART attributes reported by each drive, along with related information such a the drive serial number and failure status. As of March 31, 2017 we had 84,469 operational hard drives. Of that there were 1,800 boot drives and 82,669 data drives. For our review, we remove drive models of which we have less than 45 drives, leaving us to analyze 82,516 hard drives for this report. There are currently 17 different hard drives models, ranging in size from 3 to 8 TB in size. All of these models are 3½” drives

And last years results
2016 Hard Drive Reliabilty Benchmark Stats

I think you're a lucky guy, Jimbo. I've been in the game since the mid-1980s and I've seen dozens of drive failures, going all the way back to the giant removable disk packs for a Dec PDP 11!
Now that you've lost your perfect record, don't hold your breath for the next one.
Happy holidays, too.
--Ed--