Hard Drive Failures.

What"s going on with hard drives? I got a new computer in early 2011. The first hard drive lasted until mid 2013. Now the new one failed again, but the replacement only has a 3 month warranty on it. Both were mid range Western Digital, certainly not enterprise class, but certainly not the worst either. So now I"m using a 10 year old 80GB Maxtor because after all this time, it"s still alive. Anyone else having trouble with new HDD"s? Are SSD"s more reliable?

Just guessing here, but when you can buy terrabyte-class drives for under $100, I'm wondering where they're cutting corners to meet the price point.

I've rarely experienced a true hard disk failure. More often, Windows will corrupt the boot sector so the PC won't boot, but that's not the fault of the hard drive. My Linux systems have never experienced a hard drive failure in the 18+ years I've been running Linux. My Linux PC runs 24 x 7.

In theory, SSDs should be more reliable than mechanical drives. But they do suffer failures; their primary advantage is speed rather than reliability.

Here's a study made by the online backup company Backblaze. They found Hitachi drives to be the most reliable. Take the information with a grain of salt, since they use only a small number of different drive models
Disk drive reliability

Hi Farmer Boy, if you are using a desk top pc with a relatively new mother board, it probably has the capability of running a RAID hard drive configuration. If it has the RAID feature then buy 2 identical hard drives of cheapest brand per GB and setup a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration such that either HD can fail and keep running. The only down fall with this RAID configuration that in 3 years when one of the HDs fail, you may not be able buy an identical HD for the RAID configuration and may have to replace both HDs.
But some of the newer RAID controllers allow HDs of different sizes and will RAID to the smallest HD size. If it doesn't have RAID then only buy HDs with 5 year warranty and backup regularly.

If it is a laptop and is used in an environment where it is bounced around a lot buy a SSD. My laptop that I take everywhere, I backup every 2 weeks and replaced the HD every one and half years regardless.

JimB

I have switched all mine to solid state drives. I am finding failures on most of them at 1-3 years. The solid state drives are warranted for 5 years.

My dell hard drive went bad 6 months after I bought the computer.I couldn't contact anyone at dell,never could get through.If you want to buy something they answer right away.A local shop charged me 200 to fix it.A few months later the fan quit working.I have an HP now and it seems to work fine.

If your Maxtor is 10 years old, it was built when Maxtor was
still their own company. That may speak to the quality.
They were bought by Seagate in 2006.

Hard drives are motorized, spinning devices with bearings.
They fail just like any other moving mechanical device.
I work with thousands of them daily and see them fail often.
Even with NO operating system installed. (purely storage)

Unless you have a RAID setup or a good backup plan, warranty
on a hard drive is pretty much a joke. If it fails under warranty
they give you a new one. Whoopie, they saved you $99.
Your data is still just as gone!

All of our enterprise class servers at work now run some form
of Solid State Device. (SSD) Not that they never fail, but they
have no moving parts so the mean time to failure is longer.
They are also faster for most operations.
The down side is that they are smaller and more expensive.

Be leery of drives advertised as 500GB SSD. They are most
likely SSHD. Solid State Hybrid Drives. They have a small SSD
portion for cached operations, but the main storage is the old
spinning disk technology and a slow spinning disk at that.
They are susceptible to the same failures as your WD's.

Hope you have better luck with the next one!