4 ms·

That's just unbelievable. To even survive the Deskstar era blows my mind. Not a single drive?

drbawb 8y ago
That's not all that surprising to me, I've had supremely good fortune with drives. I have a Maxtor Fireball that still "works" (though its SMART has failed.) My current workstation still has drives in it from the three prior workstations; spanning back 7 or 8 years now[1], humming along well outside their warrantied operation. The first disk failure(s) I witnessed came while I worked at a computer repair shop, which would be "a huge N" compared to the number of PCs I've personally owned. My first disk failure on my own personal equipment didn't happen until I built out a home storage array - again a rather large multiplier of number of disks compared to a traditional PC. Even then that failure was because a disk controller got fried, the drive was mechanically sound and the data was completely recoverable. Admittedly my own experience is probably a bit skewed since I don't have a personal laptop. By the time I got a job that provided me w/ a laptop solid state drives were already quite mature. In my experience doing repair work: laptops were a huge source of our failed drive & data recovery operations. [1]: I should note these drives all operate nearly 24/7, no five-nines on my personal equipment though ;-P
HankB99 8y ago
Up until a couple years ago I could have said the same. I even have a couple deathstars on the shelf that were operational when retired. In the last couple years I've had several HDDs fail starting with a 2TB Seagate (one of the "stars" in the Backblaze stats.) I've had others fail since, mostly multi-TB drives. I had one nearly ten year old 200GB drive begin to report remapped sectors. I've even had an SSD develop an unrecoverable error.
- Declanomous 8y ago
  My dad managed to kill a 2 year old Samsung SSD; it wouldn't even show up on the bios. Tech support was so incredulous they actually had an Electrical Engineer on their staff call him. I didn't believe him either. I was like "Dad, SSDs are designed to fail in a way you can recover data. What SATA cable are you using? Is the port dead?" Turns out it was literally the drive.
  - ta3456347347 8y ago
    Much like a poster above, I've got a walking graveyard of previous platter drives in my workstation from various old workstations and they're all fine, but (and I think mine was a Samsung too), my first experiment with an SSD ended in tears. It was fine for similarly about two years, then I had some weird troubles booting about 3 or 4 times, then it just disappeared completely. I've been very wary of SSDs since then.
  - HankB99 8y ago
    I recall hearing of similar failures early on. I don't recall the brand. Apparently the controller goes bad and it just stops responding to SATA commands. Intel had a strategy that caused them to go into read only mode once they reached their rated lifetime write capacity. All data remained available until they were power cycled whereupon they would intentionally brick themselves. In my case it is was a Crucial M4. It still tries to operate but will fail the long SMART self test.
sundvor 8y ago
Argh trigger alert, I bought four of those in a raid 10. They even had the audacity to reject my warranty claim.
- overcast 8y ago
  They sent me back refurbs that didn't work, I just gave up.

That's not all that surprising to me, I've had supremely good fortune with drives. I have a Maxtor Fireball that still "works" (though its SMART has failed.) My current workstation still has drives in it from the three prior workstations; spanning back 7 or 8 years now[1], humming along well outside their warrantied operation. The first disk failure(s) I witnessed came while I worked at a computer repair shop, which would be "a huge N" compared to the number of PCs I've personally owned. My first disk failure on my own personal equipment didn't happen until I built out a home storage array - again a rather large multiplier of number of disks compared to a traditional PC. Even then that failure was because a disk controller got fried, the drive was mechanically sound and the data was completely recoverable. Admittedly my own experience is probably a bit skewed since I don't have a personal laptop. By the time I got a job that provided me w/ a laptop solid state drives were already quite mature. In my experience doing repair work: laptops were a huge source of our failed drive & data recovery operations. [1]: I should note these drives all operate nearly 24/7, no five-nines on my personal equipment though ;-P

HankB99 8y ago

Up until a couple years ago I could have said the same. I even have a couple deathstars on the shelf that were operational when retired. In the last couple years I've had several HDDs fail starting with a 2TB Seagate (one of the "stars" in the Backblaze stats.) I've had others fail since, mostly multi-TB drives. I had one nearly ten year old 200GB drive begin to report remapped sectors. I've even had an SSD develop an unrecoverable error.

Declanomous 8y ago
My dad managed to kill a 2 year old Samsung SSD; it wouldn't even show up on the bios. Tech support was so incredulous they actually had an Electrical Engineer on their staff call him. I didn't believe him either. I was like "Dad, SSDs are designed to fail in a way you can recover data. What SATA cable are you using? Is the port dead?" Turns out it was literally the drive.
- ta3456347347 8y ago
  Much like a poster above, I've got a walking graveyard of previous platter drives in my workstation from various old workstations and they're all fine, but (and I think mine was a Samsung too), my first experiment with an SSD ended in tears. It was fine for similarly about two years, then I had some weird troubles booting about 3 or 4 times, then it just disappeared completely. I've been very wary of SSDs since then.
- HankB99 8y ago
  I recall hearing of similar failures early on. I don't recall the brand. Apparently the controller goes bad and it just stops responding to SATA commands. Intel had a strategy that caused them to go into read only mode once they reached their rated lifetime write capacity. All data remained available until they were power cycled whereupon they would intentionally brick themselves. In my case it is was a Crucial M4. It still tries to operate but will fail the long SMART self test.

sundvor 8y ago

Argh trigger alert, I bought four of those in a raid 10. They even had the audacity to reject my warranty claim.

overcast 8y ago
They sent me back refurbs that didn't work, I just gave up.