When should a HDD be replaced?

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by faker, Apr 8, 2008.

  1. faker

    faker Private E-2

    I recently repaired a bed sector on a hard drive. It is a Seagate and it only had one error, but it kept the computer from being able to boot up. I repaired it with the Ultimate Boot CD, and now it works fine. But should I replace the drive if it only has one bad sector or should it be alright now?

    Thanks in advance.
     
  2. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    The drive should be OK. However, keep an eye on it and any data that is considered irreplaceable or very important should be backed up, as it should even when dealing with perfectly healthy hard drives. If you have any other trouble with it or if it start to make strange sounds but still runs fine, be careful. If it's under warranty and another problem occurs, contact Seagate and tell them what's going on. Tell them the drive has had bad sectors in the past the ahev been repaired, and that it's acting up again. Seagate has a 5 year warranty on most of their desktop drives, and they are VERY good about replacing damaged/defective/crashed drives. As far as "when should a drive be replaced": well, there's no definite time limit. I have seen drives from the early 1990's still running fine, and I have seen brand new drives completely crash in under 30 days. Personally, when my hard drives in my personal PCs start approaching the end of their warranties, that is when I take them out of primary service. I had a Hitachi drive that was about 4 months away from being out of warranty; it was my C: drive. It was (and is) still running perfectly and had never given a moment of stress. But the warranty was almost up so I imaged it to my current drive (250gb SATA2 Seagate) and now use it as an external back up drive in an enclosure; I use it for temporarily storing stuff until I burn it to disc, or use it to store large files that I use both at home and at work. I try to not put anything irreplaceable on it, but it is still running fine.
     
  3. THE Bimbo

    THE Bimbo Private E-2

    there is no real way to know when a drive will fail, even SMART drives will drop off the twig without warning.

    I have an a cheap 80GB which lives on my bookcase, it has a mirror copy of my OS drive, and every month or so i update that. I also have a small drive in an external caddy that i copy all my critical data onto every friday.

    seeing you have had a trauma listen for odd noises, make a note about bad sectors and frequency, make a note of crashes,

    and the worst noise in the world is "(soft)ping.whirrrrrrrr......(soft)ping.whirrrrrr" over and over, the head is getting "lost" or the dood-dad/servo thingy that holds it steady is going...
     
  4. dlb

    dlb MajorGeek

    .... this is the correct technical term, by the way.... :roflmao LOL ;)
     

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