How did your hard-drive fail?

[Archaea]

Typically, when I've lost a hard-drive it started "clunking" or making unusual noise before it died - thus I knew it was coming. However, I just lost an old 160GB external drive that was as silent as could be up till the last. I noticed write speeds were decreasing to it in the last couple months, but really didn't think much of it, I actually had, in the same timeframe, installed a new anti-virus program and just figured the slowdown was related to possible anti-virus realtime scans. At any rate, I was copying files to it and the copy died. I didn't know why the copy failed, but when I tied to access the drive it said it was not formated and needed to be formated before I could use it!

I tried to use some recovery utilities with out success. I guess my data's lost unfortunately. It's not that big a deal because luckily they were just home movies that I had transferred over, but not yet erased the original tapes.

I just wanted to find out how the rest of you have seen drives go bad and is it normally to just have one go out silent in the night like this one did? Makes me worried about the rest of my "aging" drives because without any noise as warning I guess they could go at anytime.

 

[leSLIe]

u might also want to point out that the failures in a Hard disk are due to mechanical, logical or electronic issues.

 

[Nenu]

I've had a few completely silent failures but by and large, most failures have given some warning, not usually noisy though.