Poll: Reliability of Various Storage Drives

I have had a hard drive fail on me

  • Yes

    Votes: 976 85.1%

  • No

    Votes: 171 14.9%
  • Total voters
    1,147
I am conducting a poll to use as data in a speech I am giving. Please answer the following questions. Only answer a question if it applies to you.

1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?
Yes (25+ including 13 Deathstars /shudder)

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)
No. I have personally used 3 extensively. First was a 256M Lexar. Next was a 2G Corsair. Very happy with both. I also have a 128M Crucial custom logo'd promo that has worked well.

I have also used and suported over 300 crucial logo'd 128M drives with 0 DOA's or failures over a years time of hard use.

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)
Never used. will soon though

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?
O yeah. cheap media - tha debil.

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?
yes.

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?
Yes
CD's, Flash drives, and data stored on multiple PCs.
Main file server at home has mirrored mirrored array.
2 pairs of SCSI RAID 0 set in RAID 0. Yay 1/4th usage! I can have 3 drives and a controler go south and keep chugging away.

Not likely? Had a Win2K server loose 2 disks in a Raid5 array within 10 min of each other. Physical plate damage in both cases. no recovery. I was standing in the room when it happened. (no, the server was not "bumped")

2003 server had a Controller go haywire and scramble a raid 0 set. could not recover from the drives.

Good tape backup routines saved both of those situations.


Can I put in a special mention for Zip Drives? The external 100Meg particularly. O how I hate those. I still hear Click of Death when I have nightmares.
 
1. Yes - Maxtor and WD

2. Yes - Sandisk

3. Not yet :p

4. More times then i can remember

5. All of my freaking pictures

6. Yep! WD external 160gb
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?

Yes

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)

Yes

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)

No

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?

Yes

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?

No

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?

No
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you? Yes, a Maxtor, WD, and IBM

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these) NA

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these) NA

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you? Yes, mostly el cheapo media tho

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable? Yes

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen? Only Windows System Restore
 
I've only bought Western Digitals, but i've had 2 120 gig hd die, and currently have one 250gig wd drive that will lose all its information if more then 50% of the drive is used which will be rma'ed soon.

When i worked at a .com we had a large amount of ibm, maxtor drives come back, rarely seen were seagate and wd's..
 
1 nope
2 never used
3 never used
4 never had too many bad cdrs, but of the dvd-rs I get bad ones every now and then
5 no
6 no
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?
Yes
2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)
No
3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)
No
4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?
Yes
5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?
No (never deleted an important file that I didn't have a copy of)
6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?
Yes (of sorts, source code is mirrored to a fiends machine and visa versa)
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?




1.) Yes

2.) No

3.) -

4.) Yes

5.) Yes

6.) Yes
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?

1: yes
2: no
3: yes
4: yes
5: no
6: yes
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you? YES

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these) NO, USE THEM DAILY. THEY DO GET CORRUPTED AND HAVE TO BE FORMATED NOW AND AGAIN

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these) YES

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you? ONLY DUE TO PHYSICAL DAMAGE

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable? YES

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen? YES
 
Asgorath said:
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?
Click to expand...

YES, I've lost two IBM Desktar 60 GXPs (don't remember the size, they were identical, this was after the Deathstar fiasco) and one WD Caviar SE (100GB) that was in a RAID (I still have the second drive from the RAID and it works fine).
 
Yes on HD's had one CD-drive take a dump on me. It was funny it wouldnt stop spinning and, burned the motor out. As far as, disc's, I bought some bargain priced ones once. Never again the only up side was I got some CD cases at about the same price.
 
1. No (by fail i'm assuming you mean a mechanical failuer not a file corruption due to whatever)
2. No
3. No
4. Yes
5. Yes
6. Yes
 
1. no, I still have and still use my old 6gig fireball :)
2. yes... but only 64mb
3. yes... my friend accidentally pulled my 200GB external off the table...
4. probably lots... especially burned stuff
5. yes
6. I tend to save my files in many places (flash drive, external hdd, desktop, laptop) so there's bound to be a copy of something important somewhere.
 
1. Yes many times 150Mb ESDI, 250Mb SCSI died. Thank goodness my 20meg RLL never died.

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? YES! Two so far. Worked great then one day poof. At one time we fixed it by blasting the partition and then reformat. WinXP chokes on it until we fixed the partition.

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? Yes click of death.

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you? Yes, went back and when I put it in the drive came back as unreadable. Some were directCD format, other regular burns. Not happening with my newer disk, perhaps to young?

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable? Yes, went back with data recovery software and found previous owners files, but not my stuff, windows wrote over that spot right away.

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen? Use to use tape, now I try to burn stuff to DVD. Wish I had money for Big drive for my server, have 60Gig of family photo's. Wife is from Thailand, we take lots of pictures when we travel.

Wish they had more reliable way to save stuff. I use to 8mm drive; tapes went bad aver a long time, and hard to find a compatible drive when it goes bad. Once had magneto optical drive. Before that 9track. Both times my media was lost by the storage librarian.
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you? Yeah, Maxtor and WD

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these) No

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these) No, barely use it.

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you? No

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable? No

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen? The external hard drive i barely use.
 
Replies are in green
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?
Yes, multiple times. 2.5". 3.5" and the elusive half-heights

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)
Yes. The drive would show the files, but you could not read them.

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)
Yes, the drive overheated and failed prematurely but it was a very early model

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?
Had a CD-R that was unreadable due to a small part of the reflective layer seperated from the plastic

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?
FAT32 sucks. I was all too happy to migrate to NTFS

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?
I will perform a complete wipe and load of the OS, updates and the latest drivers, install antivirus, browser, Trillian, Office and buring software, and make a Ghost image of the entire drive. Files in My Documents, music files, etc. are duplicated across my PC, Mac, and laptop and also periodically burned to DVDRW discs (always added or updated, never erased and redone except after 20 burns)
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?
A: Yes. I have had about 4 catastrophic failures on my personal computer over the many years I have been using computers. One was a Maxtor 6Y series, two were IBM Deskstars (120GXP) and one was an old Western Digital (80MB drive on my 386). I have also had drives get bad sector creep, but I swapped those out before they died. At work I have seen many hard-drives fail. I have seen a great deal of drives fail because of partially-filled fluid dynamic bearings, but this problem has been apparently resolved by fully-filled fluid dynamic bearings. My personal favorite drives are Seagates because I have had the best luck with them for performance and reliability.

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)
A: Not personally because I usually lose them before they have a chance to. But, I have had coworkers that had troubles with them. They usually get corrupted but then you can reformat them, but I have seen a few that had damage that caused them not to be detected at all, and I have seen a few that corrupted the data but could not be successfully used again.

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)
A: Yes. I had two Maxtor Onetouch drives fail at work, but it may have been due to a powersurge because they both failed at the same time. Personally I haven’t had any of mine fail, but only turn them on when I use them so they don’t have time to wear out.

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?
A: Yes. There were cheap CD-R disks that had their metallic layer eaten by bacteria. And generally I find they are just scratched through use. Even the CD players often leave circular marks that ruin the disk given enough time. I don’t like optical media technology very much.

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?
A: Most likely, but nothing important.

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?
A: At home I duplicate my important data to other hard-drives. And at work I use IBM’s Tivoli backup software to store important data in a tape silo.
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you? -Yes, a WD80gb, Deathstar, and a 200bg Maxtor u133

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these) - yes after extensive use and abuse, and a few trips thru the wash.

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these) -yes and no, the HDD inside failed

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you? -NO

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable? - no

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen? - Yes, all gets backed up to a extra HDD in my Case, and the most importian stuff gose to DVD as well.. Monthly... that 3 copies of the stuff.. and the piuctures of my kid have a 4th copy on my work server witch goes to tape backup every day...
 
I feel like the only person who avoided the bad runs of deskstars.

I had 4 75GXPs with no issues and 2 180GXPs with no issues. All of them are still working fine, although the 75s don't get spun up/down that often anymore.

Only have had one drive fail at home, and that was a Quantum. I won't use Quantum or Maxtor drives, even if somebody gives them to me for free.

At work, I've been at sites that saw one or more drives fail just about every day. Course, when you've got racks and racks of spindles, that is what happens.
 
1. yes, so far have had about 2-3 disks fail.
6. Yes, I now run a RAID 5 array, and mirror + backup my critical stuff
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?

YES

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)

NO

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)

NO

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?

YES

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?

YES

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?

YES
 
1. Yes. Several - mainly those by WD and IBM (the unlamented Deathstar)

2. Yes.

3. N/A

4. Yes. Corruption was due to bad media - over-rated for its actual burnspeed capability.

5. Yes.

6. Yes (DVD-burning; multiple hard disk drives)
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you? YES

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these) N/A

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these) N/A

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you? YES

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable? YES (Entire Paritions :p

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?[/QUOTE] (DVD-RW's, maybe someday RAID)
 
1. More than 7 if my memory serves me well. Seagates, Maxtors and Quantums most of them after 3-5 years. Although a recent DiamondMax10 was DOA.

4. Many times, the the drives seem to fail after 6-8 years which isn't bad. Although i've about 40 cd's burnt on bad media which are nearly impossible to read now. Recently used 100 Ritek with only 1 coaster from a manufacturing defect.

6. Nightly backup of poject files (not video) to seperate server with raid, nightly backup to dvd. Archiving of finished projects to DVD. Archiving of final video files to server for quick access use for dvd authoring.

OT:I'm looking forward to Blu-ray as it will make it possible to do in progress backups of all my project files on a few discs.
 
1. Yes two cases. Overheat & Headcrash-laptop
2. Yes more than once
3. No.
4. Yes. Internal ribbon connection worked its way looose
5. Yes
6. CDR / DVDR backups
 
2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)
No

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)
No, but I also dont use it all that often.

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?
Yes, both.

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?
Yes

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?
Yes. I have a 200gb hd that I keep only important backups on there i.e My music collection.
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?
Yes
2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)
No
3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)
No
4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?
No
5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?
Yes
6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?
Yes
 
1. Yes
2. No, never used
3. no, never used
4. yes
5. yes
6. yes

We had 1 hard drive go down in an Raid 0+1 array at our office. One goes was fine, but 2 days later the a second one went; once the other went down we were looking for the backup tape. :( Had a loss of 4 days data. Still looking for files months later as well.

WE had 2 Dell Dimension 8200's with WD harddrives go down within 2 weeks of eachother and they were only 1 year old. The boss decided to replace all the HD in the rest of the Dells around that age. It seemed like planned obscolosity to me... Thanks Dell. :mad:
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you? Yes

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these) N/A

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these) N/A

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you? Yes

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable? No

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?[/QUOTE] No, that's not counted. ;)
 
1. Have you ever had a hard drive fail on you?
Yes, dozens.

2. Have you ever had a USB Pen fail on you? (if you've used these)
No, but haven't used many.

3. Have you ever had an external Hard Drive Fail on you? (if you've used these)
Yes.

4. Have you ever had a CD-R, DVD-R, or other optical media fail/corrupt on you?
Yes.

5. Have you ever deleted a file by accident and had it be unrecoverable?
Yes.

6. Do you have any sort of backup regimen?
Yes.
Personal: network
Business: offsite tape storage.
 
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