On Wed, 25 Dec 2013 08:22:46 -0600, philo* wrote:

On 12/25/2013 07:44 AM, The Daring Dufas 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.

I'm getting into solid state drives but the only mechanical hard drives
I buy are enterprise class drives designed to run 24/7. The drives cost
a little more and I haven't had any of them gronk on me. ^_^

TDD



Nothing like those enterprise drives.

Standard drives, even if put in sleep mode don't seem to hold up too
well for 24/7 use.
And they stand up even worse when started and stopped every dat or
more.