|
Member Advice Summary
|
Hard drives suck!
by puter | Nov 20 '05
Backup your data, buy a hard drive with a good warranty or an excellent price, and check your hard drive frequently for defects.Return to opinion
|
|
|
|
|
Comment |
Sorted by
Date Written |
Re: Interesting article... (Reply to this comment)
by puter
Hi Ahab,
Thanks for the comments; I'm glad you enjoyed the article.
You're exactly right that it's a bad idea to move hard drives around when they're running. Typically some type of vibration dampening is either built into the drive or into the laptop which helps against damage due to movement in a laptop drive. Some laptops also have sensors inside which can detect when the laptop is falling and can spin down the drive so the chances of damage are lessened. (Of course, if you've dropped your laptop, you've got other issues to worry about anyway.)
I have a friend with an Apple iBook who bangs his laptop around a lot. Every time he does it, it horrifies me, but somehow he's never had a problem with his hard drive. And then there's me, who treats my Dell laptop as though the slightest jostle could trigger an explosion that levels 20 city blocks. I'm thinking either my friend is very lucky or Apple has some pretty good vibration dampening.
Yes, those platters are physically pretty tough. Some of them are made out of aluminum and others are made of ceramic, but they all have some magnetic coatings that become brittle when you bend the platter. ;)
I've added another section that you might find interesting. The new section is located after the explanation of what a bad block is, and the heading is as follows: "Now, that I understood. But how does a block go bad in the first place?"
Thanks for reading,
Rob
|
Nov 22 '05
11:32 pm PST
|
|
Interesting article... (Reply to this comment)
by Ahab1973
Although I've never (in five years) actually had a hard drive fail on me. Granted, I've never kept the same one in service longer than about three years. After that point, I just figure I got my money's worth out of it and replace it - avoiding any potential problems.
I probably should run checkdisk more often but it seems that I always have soomething going on in the background on my computer (even when I'm sleeping) and it takes ages for the damn thing to scan. I've probably just been lucky. Just bought a new Seagate and am hoping that it holds up.
If there's one thing in your computer (other than the power supply or the processor, I suppose) that you need to be able to count on, it's your hard drive. It DOES suck to think that drive reliability may be slipping amongst all manufacturers. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I get burned.
You did mention that your drives are used in a laptop and I can't help but wonder if that has something to do with the failure rate of modern hard drives. Way back in the day (early 90s) I took some computer repair classes and the worst thing you could do was move a computer when the heads weren't parked.
Anyway, it's amazing to me that hard drives fail at all. I took one of my old ones that I retired apart just to see what made it tick. Those platters are practically indestructable! I don't know what they make 'em out of but I wish more things were made out of it! At any rate, good reading.
|
Nov 21 '05
5:39 am PST
|
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.