Hard drive failure

Night Hawk · 16 Mar 2016

The difference with SSDs having initially seen problems as far as limited writes to disk is due to that technology only having been around for some 6-7yrs. while mechanical drives have been in use on desktop machines since the early 80s when first being introduced in very small sizes! It then took 20yrs. to see the first 1tb size drives coming out. Lately the 5tb size has appeared.

Longevity will also depend on how well cooled a system as temps are the worst enemy for any drive! Good ventilation, additional fans if needed will be a plus factor not only to drives but all hardwares. As far as Mushkin while not being as popular brand wise they are one of the better memory manufacturers producing gaming and other memory. Kingston is another one with their Hyper X memory rated high as well as Corsair. Dump Memorex, PNY, and a few others! A good SSD depends on which memory company sees a high rating as far as how good their drives will be overall.

OCZ is an excellent high ranking company as well as Crucial. For a look at the top rated for 2016, Best SSDs of 2016 - CNET

When looking at the average $300+ tag on the larger models note that the two 2tb WD Server class drives here were picked up for only $70 a pop! Compare that to $600+ for a 1tb SSD!

Sven1458 · 16 Mar 2016

Thanks, I check it out

whs · 16 Mar 2016

Temps are actually not the enemy of disks, it is humidity.

Night Hawk · 16 Mar 2016

You still have some time at least. Many will opt for a mix having the SSD strictly for the OS while still wanting large capacity for local storage and backup purposes. Here working on video and other recording projects nothing smaller then a 1tb OS drive will work since I need that extra drive space available to work with.

Another thing not mentioned here so far I should add in would be the UEFI factor(Unified Extensionable Firmware Interface) seen with the more recent as well as new boards compared to what I still hve going here using the Legacy type Bios I/O situation. Sometimes getting things set up properly with UEFI and need to disable the UEFI type of Secure boot option is necessary since SSDs are still much like flash drives and SD cards, memory cards in general as far as the technology side of things goes. Booting from a flash drive for example to put on a fresh copy of Windows or perform a repair may require someone to see a change in settings.

Sven1458 · 17 Mar 2016

I guess my HD is toast. it will not boot. so I popped in my Macrium cd and booted with that. I wanted to see if I could make a back up of my drive. I can not. it tells me: MFT corrupt - Error code 6. Please run chkdsk C: /r.
it is running it now. hopefully that will fix my boot problem and then I can make a backup.
Crossing fingers I don't really want to start over if I can avoid it.
Sven

Clintlgm · 17 Mar 2016

My 2 cents Samsung 850 Pro 1 TB 10 year warranty. 850 evo 3 year warranty. I think Samsung is confident that at least the technology of he 850 Pro will last 10 years. when actually, they are already obsolete the M2. PCIe NVM2 951 OEM and 3 year warranty and 950 Pro Retail Version 5 year warranty are being sold now and are more than 4 times as fast however they only have 5 year warranty. It appears to me that technology has gotten to a point where storage will become obsolete before warring out. I'm very happy with a 256 GB 850 Pro for my OS and a 1 TB Pro as second drive. My best experience with spinners in desktop has been with WD Blacks. Some times it takes a few tries to get a good on. WD Warranty is very good and a few that have been going error free since 2009. I have move all my Desktops and Notebooks to SSD for OS Drives I think there more reliable than spinners but can't prove this with only 3 years experience. I can tell you that the user experience is far better with boot times at 20 seconds some shorter and some longer but all very quickly having you with full control of desktop or notebook. MHO is Samsung is hands down on top of the technology and producing the best products currently. However not the cheapest.

Night Hawk · 17 Mar 2016

No not the cheapest! But then you don't want too "cheap" either on the other hand! You also have to remember that most everything Samsung besides tv sets but cell and smart phones, cameras, and now hard drives is a familiar static memory technology at work somewhere. Plus the fast turn over of models is much like what was seen 10yrs. ago with drives only mechanical as well as for other pc hardwares. With the desktop market having slumped however the lean on hand helds which do use static memory is familiar turf to invest in.

As for temps many a drive has failed from high temps in contrast to humidity only seen as a factor once the factory seal on any drive has been warped over time from higher temps. Why do you think most gaming cases see large drive fans as well as side and top fans? Keeping those TBs cooled down is another essential.

whs · 18 Mar 2016

After studying five years worth of monitoring statistics from Google's massive data centers, researchers say they could find no consistent pattern linking failure rates to high temperatures or high utilization levels. Temperature, they write, is often called the most important environmental factor affecting disk drive reliability.

Google engineers Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso. "We can conclude that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there are other effects which affect failure rates much more strongly than temperatures do."

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/129420/article.html

Night Hawk · 18 Mar 2016

All mechanical drives have one thing in common. They all have sealed air and moisture tight chambers for the platters, main spindle, armature, heads while the motor may or may not be inside that sealed up portion of the drive. Moisture can only get in once the seal has either been borked in some fashion or has hardened up and split over time from constant heat up and cool off and heat up and cool down times. Besides a PC World blog you may want to dig a little deeper into things like seeing what manufacturers themselves advise. One site that covers a wider range of things can be looked over at Safe HDD Temperature Range to Avoid Hard Disk Failure

And the temps can not only effect mechanical drives but SSDs as well as since overheating things can see memory ruined as an other note. SSDs have to have a higher threshold put into effect compared to what you see for desktop memory. Flash drives and other removable depends on quality there since flash drives can take a bit more abuse! being tossed around dropped on hard surfaces, etc. Another older reference on drive temps and cooling seen at Temperature Limits and Drive Cooling indicates:

Temperature Limits and Drive Cooling
Hard disks can only be counted upon to perform reliably if they are kept within their specified temperature ranges. Cooling has become one of the most important considerations for reliability, particularly for newer drives running at high spindle speeds.

Sven1458 · 18 Mar 2016

I just got me a Crucial 240GB ssd and will install it later today. Hopefully it will solve my problems and will not brake down after 2 years.
After that, I will try to get my data of the old drive. As I mentioned before, the MFT is corrupt but I thing the data is there.

Sven