HDD Failures
Scott Duch
Status: New User - Welcome
Joined: 08 Apr 2007
Posts: 1
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Hi, i have a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P computer and its perfect for what i use it for. I bought it at the end on 2005 and 3 months in my HDD failed. I got one free under the warrenty and then 9 months it failed again. I had to buy a new one this time and then 3 months it failed again! I'm currently on my 4th HDD and the clicking noise all the others did before they packed in is occuring with this HDD and i have on had it 3 weeks! I took the PC to my local computer shop and they did tests on the CPU and PSU etc and they said everything passed and that it was a faulty HDD. I cant believe this could be the 4th HDD i'm about to have. Is there any idea what can sove this problem and anything that is causing it? my temperatures around the mainboard and HDD are in the high 30s low 40s which isn't too bad. Any ideas?
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jeffd
Status: Assistant
Joined: 04 Oct 2003
Posts: 594
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You're definitely right, there's no way 3 or 4 drives will fail like this statistically.

You didn't mention what hard drive they are using. You need to have that information. In windows you can get it from system information.

Once you have the drive name and series identification you can check online easily to see if there are known issues with that drive.

There's no way this would happen though in normal operation. If something unusual is happening it might occur though.

Possible causes: no ventilation or clogged ventilation causing overheating routinely.

Bad power is breaking the hard disk but not the motherboard, which is possible but not likely. Bad power can be helped by using a decent UPS, like by APM. That's a battery backup unit that is, which kicks in and handles voltage drops, aka brownouts etc. These can be murder on hardware.

Bad power connectors from power supply: HIGHLY LIKELY

Bad connector cables: HIGHLY LIKELY

Drive set to turn off for power saving: POSSIBLE

You also didn't mention if it's sata or pata.

In cases like this, from my experience, it's almost always a bad connector causing it to fail. Or a bad hard drive manufactoring run.

I never buy anything but name brand top end hard disks, seagate preferably, maxtor as second option. I don't look at any other drive brands currently, especially not hitachi/ibm, who have had known issues for years now, one reason why ibm sold their hard disk division to hitachi if I remember right.
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