Hard Drive

[gotcha]

Hi to all. Have discussed saving special files etc. on your hard drive lately and it came up, how secure are your files! So I said well surely your hard drive is just a mechanical object and could quit anytime and then you would lose everything including your special saved files!
Well am I right and if so how many thing can go wrong with a hard drive?
Thank you.

[reignking]

hard drives fail quite often... especially older ones. it's always good to have a backup method.

personally i've gone through at least 5 hard drives in my years of using a pc. i've had one last years and i've had one last only a few weeks. it varies. the only thing to remember is sooner or later it will fail on you too.

[gotcha]

Thank you very much!
Cheerio

[zapjb]

Just by happenstance I got 2 of the worst made HDD ever. One type has had over 10 million RMA'd. And the other has sold their HDD to someone else. Oh well. One has been RMA'd 3x & the other once.

[lightshow]

If you want to send back a RMA hard drive, and you threw away the old packing materials, where can I get replacement packaging?


Maxtor.com - Proper Shipping Of Individual Drives


The drive must be placed in an anti-static bag, similar to the silver bag provided in the original drive packaging.
The drive must be packed with the original drive inserts that came with the retail package (Figure 1) OR surrounded on all sides with solid foam cushioning which is a minimum of two inches thick (Figure 2). Do NOT use Styrofoam® peanuts or bubble wrap.
The drive must be sealed in a sturdy cardboard shipping container. The original retail box the drive came in would be an ideal shipping container.

They have a number I can call, but is there anywhere else I can get the packaging (not the box) from?

[ZaZu]

HDD Health v2.1 (http://www.panterasoft.com/)

HDD Health is a full-featured failure-prediction agent for machines using Windows 95, 98, NT, Me, 2000 and XP. Sitting in the system tray, it monitors hard disks and alerts you to impending failure. The program uses Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) built into all new hard disks, and can predict failures on your hard drives. A host of alerting features include email, local pop-up messages, net messages, and event logging, while using no system resources.B)

B)

[camille]

Depends in your usage, specially when often format or erase the footprints those were deleted in you hard drive.

[camille]

Base to my experienced, Maxtor is inferior.

[MadDog-2000]

The data is saved on the platters, which are quite durable and usually made out of aluminum. However, if the spindle motor fails you can’t use the HD anymore because it won’t spin up but no data is really lost! Special data recovery centers simply put a new motor in the old casing and everything is back to normal. Doing that yourself is impossible, except if you have your own clean room and having a company do it for you is expensive!

Even when you buy a brand new HD it already as several bad sectors on it but the internal firmware of the HD does a good job keeping that information from you! In the old days when the firmware was not as advanced as it is today, there was a large sticker on the HD with all the bad sectors printed on it! You had to manually enter those into your OS, so it knows which bad sectors to skip and not use!

Many times your lost data can be recovered (for a high price) but this does not make up for the lack of durability of a HD. Keeping back-ups is the best solution to this problem!

[peat moss]

You know any thing with moving parts is going to fail sometime. So I use cdrw disks best way to back up,I think maxtor sucks too

[camille]

That's the best back up your data in CD as much as possible compress it by using True Image software.