Hard drives suck!
Nov 20 '05 (Updated Nov 22 '05)
The Bottom Line Backup your data, buy a hard drive with a good warranty or an excellent price, and check your hard drive frequently for defects.
Why is it that you hate such an integral part of your computer, Mister Puter?
Okay, so there I am, just typing something on my computer when suddenly the computer reboots. No warning, error, blue screen of death--nothing. Guess it must have been that new hardware driver I installed a couple days ago. Or maybe it's because I was running 10 or 20 different programs each on two separate user accounts (using Windows XP's Fast User Switching) while I was compiling Java code, committing files to the versioning system at the office, encrypting and decrypting files on the fly (using WinXP Pro's Encrypted File System, or EFS), chatting with one coworker over MSN, talking to another coworker over Skype, typing an e-mail, and playing some light instrumental music in the background all at once.
The computer just couldn't handle all that stuff, plus who-knows-what-else going on in the background, all at the same time. After it reboots, I fire up all my programs again, putz around while everything finishes loading, apologize to my coworkers who think I'm trying to avoid them, and finally get back to work. The computer probably just got tired of all that work and needed a little 10-minute break, right? WRONG. Perhaps if the moons of Jupiter were aligned a little differently that would have been the case, but on this particular day, my hard drive was dying. Problem is, I don't find out for another month or two that the hard drive has bad blocks and will need to be replaced.
That does suck. But my hard drive is fine.
Uh-huh...either that or you just don't know it's dying yet. For me, a 50% failure rate sounds about right for pretty much any brand of drive, although some brands seem to be even worse. Either I'm just unlucky or something strange happens to the hard drives in my home.
So far all but one IBM/Hitachi drive I have known about, including 7 DeskStars (aka DeathStars) and 4 TravelStars, has failed. My brother went through 2 TravelStars in his laptop, each one lasting less than one year. My own laptop's original TravelStar lasted at most 8 months, and I'm dreading the day I have to replace the one that's currently in my laptop.
I've also had at least 5 Maxtor drives go bad and another 2 Maxtors that were defective right out of the box, out of 10 or 15 Maxtor drives I've bought in the past 7 years. An additional Maxtor drive was as loud as a Shop-Vac but otherwise seemed to check out okay. Add to that some Seagate (so far only 1/5 failed at my office), Micropolis (2/3 failed, only 1 of the dead ones was mine), and Western Digital (2/3 of friends' failed) drives; and you've got a screw-up rate that would even get a McDonald's employee fired on the spot.
If you think I'm just hard on my hardware, take another look at the warranty on any consumer desktop hard drive you can find in a store or online. Unless it's a Seagate drive or a Western Digital Raptor, you'll only get a 1-year warranty on a drive that probably would have had a 3-year warranty just a couple of years ago. Why? Because--plain and simple--hard drives suck!
Why are hard drive manufacturers evil?
Within the past two years, hard drive drive manufacturers started cutting back the warranties on most of their consumer drives, supposedly because of the competitive market constantly driving prices to record lows, slicing margins razor-thin. By cutting the warranty period for most drives from 3 years to 1 year, drive manufacturers not only decrease the time period during which you are eligible to receive a "free" replacement drive under warranty (you still have to pay $5-$10 shipping), but they also virtually eliminate any possibility that you will ever get a warranty replacement in the first place.
Most people will tolerate a computer problem until it gets so bad that the computer is literally unusable. I think the hard drive manufacturers know this, and that's why they cut back the warranty periods. When a hard drive fails, it very rarely just completely stops working. Sometimes the computer might just spontaneously reboot or crash, or it might take forever to boot up out of hibernation mode. My first IBM DeathStar would have problems reading or writing files, but at first the problem only surfaced randomly and I couldn't reproduce it myself. Several bad block scans using chkdsk and other diagnostic tools turned up no problems whatsoever, and it wasn't until several months later that chkdsk was actually able to detect bad blocks on the drive. The way drives fail, there's a good chance most people won't even notice their drive is dying until long after their 1-year warranty has expired!
Ooookay, you lost me. What the heck is a bad block?
Simply put, a bad block is a spot in the hard drive to which data cannot be reliably read and/or written. Hard drives actually have platters inside, somewhat like little records or CDs. However, instead of recording information in the form of grooves (on records) or microscopic light and dark spots (on CDs), hard drives record their information by creating little magnetic fields on the platters. If, for whatever reason, the hard drive is suddenly unable to create a magnetic field or detect the magnetic field on part of the platter, that essentially translates into a bad block on the hard drive.
Now, that I understood. But how does a block go bad in the first place?
There are several ways in which the platter itself can become damaged, such as a head crash, uneven expansion, or contamination. If you open up a drive with a crashed head, you'll see that the head either flipped over or fell off of the springy arm that normally holds it over the platter. But that'll be the last thing you notice. The first thing you'll notice is that the arm itself gouged into the platter and ground deep grooves into the platter. You might also notice a lot of fine dust inside--yeah, that dust use to be the stuff that stored your data.
Uneven thermal expansion is more or less self-explanatory, but it can lead to data corruption and perhaps eventually to physical damage (like water repeatedly freezing in the cracks in your sidewalk).
Contamination is another problem. Cigarette smoke and other contaminants can get into the drive and coat surfaces. This can accumulate and gunk up all kinds of parts inside, including the platters. There is a myth that hard drives are sealed air-tight. Like I just said, it's a myth.
Perhaps the most common failure has to do with the imperfect manufacturing process that is used to create all hard drives. Many moons ago, when you bought a new drive, it was marked with a list of defective regions. No drive was perfect. Fast-forward to today, and you won't see those defective regions listed anywhere on the box or the drive. You might think that manufacturing quality has just gotten that much better, but you would be wrong. Because hard drives are so huge now, the list of defective regions would be enormous and people would just stop buying drives to save themselves the hassle. So what happened to the defective regions? Rather than making us type in hundreds, thousands, or maybe millions of defective regions every time we buy a new drive, the hard drive manufacturers use a combination of "spare" regions and electronics to automatically hide the defective regions.
Think of it as a city map. You try to go to the ATM on the corner of 1st St and Grand Ave, but it's broken. So you go to ATM near 4th and Broad instead. Later the same day, your friend asks you to show her on the map where she can withdraw some money. Before giving her the map, you cross out the one on 1st and Grand, and instead tell her to go to 4th and Broad. It's the same thing in hard drives, only everything is a lot smaller and there are quite a few more ATMs.
Before continuing, I should note that it's perfectly normal for some regions (i.e., blocks) to be remapped periodically as more regions are found to be defective, and the process is completely transparent to you. Why, then, would a bad block scan ever find any bad blocks? Because eventually, you run out of spares. It's the equivalent of having one of your car's tires go flat when you're already using the spare: a bad thing has happened, and if you just keep driving, things are only going to get worse.
So what can I do about it?
There's really nothing you can do to prevent your hard drive from failing. However, you can try to at least get your money's worth out of the drive by buying it super-cheap (watch http://www.techbargains.com for some amazing deals) or by sticking to a brand or model that still has a 3- or 5-year warranty. On top of that, you can try harder to take advantage of your warranty by checking the drive for bad blocks at least once a month until your warranty period expires. Some manufacturers also include diagnostic tools with their hard drives which can perform read/write tests and read information from the drive's built-in S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics to determine if the drive is starting to fail.
On Windows XP, do the following to do a bad block scan (note this may take 1 hr or so per 100 GB, and even longer if your drive is failing):
1. Click Start, then select Run.
2. Type "cmd" (without the quotes) and click OK.
3. Type "chkdsk /r c:" and press Enter.
4. When asked if you want to schedule the volume to be checked when the system restarts, type "y" and press Enter.
5. Repeat step 3 for all other hard drives, replacing "c:" with the appropriate drive. If prompted to force a dismount, you may enter "y" to check the drive immediately, or enter "n" and continue onto step 4.
Once you're finished, reboot the computer at a convenient time and let chkdsk perform its scheduled checks of your c: drive and any other drives that were scheduled for later checking. After your computer boots up again, you can see whether there were any bad blocks by doing the following:
1. Click Start, then select Run.
2. Type "cmd" (without the quotes) and click OK.
3. Type "chkdsk c:" and press Enter. (note there is no "/r" this time)
4. If there is a line in the chkdsk results screen that says "bad blocks," it means the hard drive is failing and needs to be replaced very soon.
5. Repeat steps 3-4 for each additional drive (if any).
If you're really concerned about the well-being of your hard drives, go to http://www.grc.com, buy a copy of the diagnostic program SpinRite for $80, and use SpinRite to exercise and diagnose your drive once a month.
Conclusion
I suppose when you think about trillions of microscopic magnetic spots of data (120 GB or more) zipping past a read/write head 1/10,000 of an inch away at speeds anywhere from roughly 20 to 140 MPH (in a 3.5" 7200 RPM drive), it's amazing the darn thing works at all! I've come to accept the hard drive as a necessary evil in a computer. I figure I might get two years' use out of a drive, and after that I expect that I will have to replace it because there is a very good chance it will fail anyway.
If you back up your data frequently, run hard drive diagnostics (such as chkdsk or SpinRite) once a month or so, and only buy hard drives that have long warranties or that cost very little, you will be doing everything in your power to lessen the headaches that will follow when one of your hard drives fails.
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Epinions.com ID:
puter
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Member: Rob
Reviews written: 18
Trusted by: 5 members
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