Hard Drive Discussion: Most Durable?

All drives fail. I've had Seagate and Western Digital drives fail on me. My Maxtor drive is still doing fine, but I've heard plenty of stories. In other words, do regular backups if you value your data, regardless of which hard drive manufacturer you go with.

And Hitachi Deskstars definitely suck. Mine just starting failing, had to clone it before it completely died.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by xiaowei

On that note, how do you tell that a drive is failing? Is it a noise or just the general activity of the drive that tells you that it's about to die?

What Roph said, SMART indicated some deteriorating attributes. The most obvious symptoms were the slow access times and whirring -> click noise patterns that happened repeatedly during bootup, which left the computer hanging. I managed boot into Windows after a few tries, and didn't dare to shut down until I had cloned the drive.

If you hear any sort of periodic clicking coming from your drive, it's time to panic.

There's nowhere I can't reach.