What's killing my hard drives?

[koopaGG]

First off, here are some specs:

AMD II X4 955
MSI 790x-g45
16gb of Crucial Ballistix @ 1333
2x WDC 1501FASS 1.5tb
1x Kingston HyperX SH100S3-120gb SSD
Ultra X3 800w PSU

I previously had two WD 750gb hard drives that I ultimately replaced due to bad sectors. Well, here we go again. Both my WD's are proving to be on the way out with quite a few bad sectors. The SSD is fine, but I've had issues copying data to my WD's (data is backed up).

Normally I would think I'm simply unlucky, but 4 hard drives in 3 years seems to be a bit absurd. I never had an issue with WD hard drives before and I find it hard to believe that regardless of the manufacturer that I would string together 4 bad drives in a row (even though the first 2 were a couple years ago).

The previous hard drives were in this same computer, which is why I have a feeling something here could be causing an issue. These hard drives aren't new by any means (20,000+ hours), but I don't believe that's grounds for failure.

Crystal Disk Info has both drives labeled as caution with an alarming amount of uncorrectable sectors and I was unable to perform a SMART test with WD LifeGuard.

Any input would be appreciated while I look for what my next storage drives will be.

 

[ep0x73]

Flaky SATA ports on your MB? Flaky SATA cables? Have you updated your drivers?
How well are they cooled? Bad sectors means the media is breaking down.

Heat and vibration accelerate this.

 

[Liger88]

Could also be PSU which also kind of goes hand-in-hand with SATA ports/cables. I think the bigger issue is are these newer drives or old drives? By new I mean 1-2 years and old 3+. If you bought them at the same time they often ship from the same batch so there is a higher failure rate when one goes out the others purchased a the same time are on there way out.

[EDIT] It looks like they were a couple years ago. I would definitely check your heat in that case. As ep0x73 mentioned, both take a heavy toll on spinning rust. It isn't absurd to me that those hard drives are only lasting 2-3 years. Quality has been steadily going down since we got near the 1TB barrier way back when. Consider yourself lucky if you don't have one fail after 5 years these days.

 

[Dangman]

Betting that it's your PSU.

 

[viscountalpha]

I'd have to agree with PSU. Sounds like some bad voltage causing premature failures. It could be a bad sata controller but that's a bit more unlikely since the SSD drive is fine.

 

[Nenu]

Bad sectors means the media is breaking down.

Heat and vibration accelerate this.

Partially true.
Bad sectors can be caused by the media being bad but there are other causes.
Intermittent power connection or faulty power supply for instance.
Powering down during a write. ie a crash, power failure, accidental power off.

I have repaired drives that have fallen foul of the above and got a full life out of them. They had corrupted sectors/data that were recoverable and not caused by bad media.
I have also encountered quite a few drives with bad media, they tend to surface earlier.


You mentioned vibration, this doesnt cause media breakdown unless the head hits the surface or something breaks off internally that damages the platters.
Unlikely unless you already know of a severe issue.
Do you have evidence non severe vibration can make bad sectors spread more rapidly?
I've been running my satellite PVR on top of my subwoofer for at least 4 years (it is now close to 5 years old and hasnt suffered any ill)

Heat can harm drives if they are used at extreme temps but those extremes arent usually enough to degrade magnetic data enough to cause a problem.
Bits can flip due to many effects, heat raises the chance of this, but a single bit flip is easily detected and repaired by error detection/correction.
The average time a bit flip will happen is engineered to be 10 years, from when that bit is written and assumes it is never rewritten, otherwise the time count starts again.
Power cycling between extremes can also cause mechanical and electrical problems.

 

[scharfshutze009]

You could be over filling it. Make sure you prepare for larger drives if your using beyond 80% of the drive capacity. Also any kind of extra vibration of shock from anyone hitting or bumping your computer especially while it's on can cause this as well, but that may not apply in your case. If you have it in RAID 0 or JBOD neither one of those is fault taulerant as well, so avoid using those if fault taulerance is desired and use RAID 1 or better. If you need to recover your files I recommend R-Studio here: http://www.r-studio.com/ , which I used to recover my friends data from his hard drive for his security system. Otherwise if you want to recover the data it could take many hours of Forensics using data carving by making an image and converting from binary to hex with hexedit, which if your going to do I recommend you use LInux and at least scripting the recover process because it's definitely going to take you a while considering my friend hard drive was 1TB and I only ever carved a 1 MB image manually.