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philo [_2_]

On 12/24/2013 11:40 PM, wrote:

Only once have I gotten on my bench a standard HD that went into
instant failure mode.

I lucked out and found an SMT cap. with a cracked solder joint and
repaired it.

The next day I gave the owner of the machine a very severe lecture on
making backups!
Of the last 5 HD failures I've had come in, 2 were "hard", one had
been slow for months, and the other one had occaisionally had access
problems, which, in hindsight, were a warning. Because it would
generally boot on the second reboot other problems were suspected -
not the drive. When it quit completely, the drive could not be
accessed even as a second drive. Not sure if a new drive would have
fixed it completely as we junked the computer.

There is very little around here that I junk.

If it's a P-4 or above it's well worth keeping.
I have boxes of spare parts and can get just about anything going again.