SA Footy

A rather important computer at my place of employment decided to shite itself today (by being important it is the machine that issues my pay packet ). The techie that came out to look at it said that the hard drive is on the way out and the machine is only 18 months old. he told us that these are very sensitive and are a common issue????

Can this be prevented if at all or is it pot luck.

having said that my current notebook PC had a similar issue when only weeks old. Never had an issue since

It used to be a common problem in the 1980s and 1990s, but in recent years hard drives have not tended to fall over all that easily. I have a couple that have been in daily operation for 3 years without missing a beat, and some older ones as back up drives that have been transferred from machine to machine. One "failure" I thought I'd had was just an SATA cable that had come loose after the computer had been moved from my office to my home.

Nevertheless, as a partner in an IT company, I am careful about using new products for anything we sell. I got a pair of the first WD Raptors released for my own use, and they both failed in the first 12 months. Their replacements have been fine. It goes in cycles. Seagates are currently popular and being touted around the industry as the standard, but about 10 years ago they were giving problems. WD had a bad patch in the early 1990s. Currently I'm using Samsung HDDs a lot and have had no problems.

It is easy to blame the HDD. I had one recently that kept going back to the OEM manufacturer under warranty because the HDD seemed to fail, but they kept blaming the software installation, and it would come good after a reinstall. In the end it turned out to be the mother board that was causing errors to accumulate, and they had to replace it under warranty.

I've also known a dodgy power supply to cause strange things to happen - it doesn't have to fail - just be inconsistent in the voltage it delivers.

The best test is to swap the HDDs between that and another computer, and see if the problem goes with the HDD, or recurs in the original machine despite the HDD changeover. In the meantime keep good back ups!

Ive had PCs for well over a decade and to this day have not had one hard drive problem.

I have trouble about every 3 years.

Dayly usage.

I have never had a hard drive die either.

I should add that despite not having any hard drive issues I do back everything up, externals are cheap as chips now, people would be mad not to get one if they're too lazy like me to burn everything.