Hi Ztcoracat


I'm looking at the label on the hard drive. It is a Western Digital Caviar SE 320GB

1 members found this post helpful.

Wow!

I've never heard of a WD to last that long. Thanks for looking.
That's cool:-

My WD that came with this box I'm on tonight lasted 5 years. The neat thing is it died just before the warranty was up so the company (ZT Systems) that built my pc sent me a new 1 TB HDD.

I was surprised too. The WD drive also came pre-install when I bought vista desktop back in 2007.

I have another question about boot sectors but I will create another thread for that. I don't want to confuse readers with two topics on one thread. Thanks again Ztcoracat for the conversations.

You're Welcome-

Hi,

Even though this thread is marked [Solved], I want to chime in here with my $.02

Over the years I have used many different manufacture drives from Seagate, WD, Toshiba just to name a few. I have failures from each of those. Environment will play a large contribution to the life of any spinning hardware. For a while Seagate was a leading drive that would have failures in my systems. I moved to WD & Toshiba with quality PSU and a good controlled environment. Temperatures and mechanical shock are the factors that must be addressed.

I started mounting with shock absorb mounts and adding a HDD fans for the bays. If you do not dress your cables properly then air flow across the drives can be limited/restricted. Placing screws in all the drive mounts helps heat transfer to the bay frames but using mechanical vibration absorb mounts materials can limit so one reason to use drive fans in the bays.

All my Laptops use a Lap Desk with cooling fans to help move the heat. Now that I am using SSD in most of my systems then HDD cooling and mechanical mounts are less. Most large HDD are external now so no more heat issues.

My advice for everyone is that every manufacture has potential for failure. For a while I would not buy Seagate because of personal history with HDD failures but when one does not address the problem areas like a quality PSU, heat transfer and proper handling of the HDD then any drive has the chance of failure.

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

Another important thing to consider is the stability of line voltage. A laptop computer has a battery-based power circuit, but any desktop machine necessarily depends on the absolute stability of the current, particularly when driving the DC motors of the disk drives. A UPS (uninterruptible power supply) box should be used on all devices.

Furthermore, the circuits themselves should be "clean." Early on, I had a client whose computers would crash when he used his photocopier. I persuaded him to hire an electrician to examine the circuits in his office (a trailer) and to rewire them as necessary. A few days later, somewhat white-faced, he told me that the electrician had just finished re-wiring the whole damned place and had told him he was very lucky that the whole place had not burned down already.

Hire someone from a company that specializes in network diagnostics. They can examine your network wiring and power wiring and maybe discover the root cause of a lot of "mysterious" problems you've been having.

I appreciate the new info. Thanks onebuck and sundialsvcs.