Hard drive crashes

[jeromephone 6]

I have had three storage harddrives crash on three seperate machnes two were from one supplier and one from another. I get an improper shudown message and end up with a bad sector on the drive. All on UPS. software 8.3 to 8.4.. anyone else seen this?

[Soundy 1]

"A" bad sector is hardly a "drive crash".

 

What brand and model were these drives?

[rory 0]

What type of UPS? Are you sure it has Automatic Voltage Regulation? Not all do.

And maybe the UPS are bad, seen plenty like that down here that I rarely even use them now, I just use a voltage regulator, but even those can get hid so hard sometimes that they fry.

[bryceb 0]

My work pc running a seagate 500gb 5400 rpm drive recently experienced a bad boot sector and after a few attempts at recovery it's still unusable.

 

The drive itself was about 4 years old, previously used by the video processing person at our office, and it hasn't been on a UPS backup ever. We think it may have also been due to electrical issues.

[jeromephone 6]

UPS are Minuteman e1000 or e750 depending on location.

 

Bad sector correctly is not a harddrive crash but it locked up the system and I feel I should replace the drive as these units are only a couple of months old. I will get drive specks and post.

[rory 0]

Hard Drives get damaged in shipping all the time also and dont always show up right away .. especially if they are not in retail packaging.

[Soundy 1]

Bad sectors happen. It's not a rarity, or necessarily a precursor to massive failure. Running a full check (click the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" box if doing it in Windows) will allow the system to remap any bad sectors as "unavailable" so it won't use them again.

 

I had a SCSI drive in my old Dell server that was showing a number of bad sectors... I ran the full sector scan from the SCSI BIOS; it removed those sectors from "active duty", and the drive continued to run fine for the next six years (and in fact, was still running fine when I took the server offline last month).

 

If you want to be extra-sure, download a manufacturer's diagnostic utility and run a "long test" against the drive. If that completes successfully, you can be reasonably certain the drive is fine (only once, in 15 years of working with PCs, have I had a drive that passed all the tests, and still had issues). Plus, if you want to RMA the drive under warranty, the manufacturer will require you to run their utility to obtain an error code.