Forum :: Lounge :: Sweet Dreams and Storage Machines

I'm coming to EOSERV from my other computer tonight. This afternoon, my second Seagate hard drive within a week has failed.

The first drive, a Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 malfunctioned on Monday. When the drive spins up, the head arm and armature rapidly bounces off the limiter resulting in the telltale "clicking death" sound. The drive otherwise reads the data, making it recoverable, but the speed is significantly reduced and the drive is only going to degrade from here. It was purchased a year ago, brand new, however it's not covered by Seagate's limited warranty.

The second drive, a Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200 malfunctioned on Friday, today. The drive spins up, however the computer is unable to mount the partitions automatically. FSCK (File System Check) returns a significant amount of Catalog B-Tree corruption. Alsoft DiskWarrior in unable to complete the directory rebuild due to "Disk Hardware Malfunction". This drive was purchased about a year ago, brand new, and is covered by Seagate's limited warranty.

Now here's the troublesome thing about the entire situation.

The first drive was my Backup drive. The second drive was my Primary drive. This means years and years of my personal data have been lost to a catastrophic failure of multiple hard drives all within a short span of each other, quite literally short enough that I was unable to purchase a replacement backup drive in time. So now i'm required to leave all my data in the hards of Prosoft Engineering's Data Rescue 3.

So now i've replaced the hard drive in my Apple iMac with a Western Digital GreenPower 1TB. We'll see how this one goes, I guess.

*sigh*

Which hard drives (if you know) do you all have installed in your machines and trust your data to each day?

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)

Well it seems like a very unusual case of bad luck...Though it is good that you have something worth the warranty from the company that manufactured the equipment. It is also good that you were able to gain access to another vessel until having your first fixed. I hope all goes well for yourcomputer in the present and the future.

Also I know that the main discussion was to be about what hard drives us users entrust our data with, but sadly I have a laptop and not a full-on Desktop PC. I saw that and had to give you some regards and 'thumbs up' on having another PC on the standby.

Sorry for crashing the entirety of the discussion with the random post, haha.

EDIT: I also do not know of which hard drive is installed in my laptop, which furthers the demise of my post.

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The place to be is home.

Well, I attached the hard drive to a SATA bridge unit and let some drive utilities at it. After some disk reconstruction, slow linear reads and tedious file copies, the data was salvaged from the failing Barracuda 7200.

Thankfully i've had an unbelievable amount of practice in recovering data from failing drives, so I was able to recover everything. All my movies, music, photos, documents, sites, applications, project files... it's extremely fortunate.

It looks like the only solution is to either have multiple backup drives, or to only allow an incredibly short downtime between backup drive failures. Hopefully this doesn't happen again.

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)