bskuared
It's Hip To Be Square
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join:2001-12-02
San Clemente, CA
 ·Cox HSI
1 edit | [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( Pucharsed my 24" iMac in early 2008. Yesterday I had a complete hard drive failure. Things started going south Wed night so I ran the disk utility and did a repair. Said all was well. I got up the next morning and things started locking up and well.... the rest is history.
Made an appt with the Genius guys, packed up the darn iMac and lugged it to the store. (sheesh, it was HEAVY, so I had to use one of those luggage cart thingies - definitely not a pack and carry item!)
They confirmed hard drive failure. The good news is they have the part and can fix it. The bad news is I have to wait a couple of days.
So for now, using the macbook.
The real question I have here is is this normal for a disc to fail on an iMac after only 1 year of use? Seems a bit extreme to me. I'm lucky because I'm a nut for redundancy and have everything backed up on an external hard drive using Time Machine and as well as another external hard drive for critical files. BUT, the failure of such a new hard drive seems ridiculous. Thoughts?
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The Dv8or
DSLReports Forums -- The Mouse House 2.0
Premium
join:2001-08-09
Danbury, CT
clubs: | Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( It's a mechanically sensitive device. Sometimes shit happens. It's unfortunate, but that's why there's Time Machine.
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dennismurphy
Put me on hold? I'll put YOU on hold
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join:2002-11-19
Parsippany, NJ
·Optimum Online
| said by bskuared  :Pucharsed my 24" iMac in early 2008. Yesterday I had a complete hard drive failure. Things started going south Wed night so I ran the disk utility and did a repair. Said all was well. I got up the next morning and things started locking up and well.... the rest is history. Made an appt with the Genius guys, packed up the darn iMac and lugged it to the store. (sheesh, it was HEAVY, so I had to use one of those luggage cart thingies - definitely not a pack and carry item!) They confirmed hard drive failure. The good news is they have the part and can fix it. The bad news is I have to wait a couple of days. So for now, using the macbook. The real question I have here is is this normal for a disc to fail on an iMac after only 1 year of use? Seems a bit extreme to me. I'm lucky because I'm a nut for redundancy and have everything backed up on an external hard drive using Time Machine and as well as another external hard drive for critical files. BUT, the failure of such a new hard drive seems ridiculous. Thoughts? That's why they call it MTBF -- Mean Time Between Failure. Some fail long before, some fail long after.
They're mechanical - they break. Even the super-duper-expensive high-end fibre channel disks fail. | |
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Thinkdiff
Premium,MVM
join:2001-08-07
Bronx, NY
1 edit | Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by bskuared :seems like someone would want to develop a hard drive that didn't fail in a year.... hate to see this as the "norm". I will say that before I had the iMac I had several other pc type computers - mostly built at home and only one hard drive failure in the bunch. They just kept on ticking. I wonder what type of hard drive Apple uses? Could this be the issue? They use a range of brands (IBM back in the day, hitachi, samsung, WD, Seagate, Toshiba, etc). Every Hard drive will fail eventually.
To put some balance into this thread, I still have Macs from 10+ years ago that have the original, working hard drive. I have a PowerMac 9500 turned into a Server that still has it's original boot drive, working fine to this day. All of my modern Macs (Intel-based) still have their original working hard drives in use somewhere (some in external cases).
This really isn't a Mac vs PC issue.. sure you could argue that different file systems put different strains on the hard drive, but largely if a HD is going to fail early, it's going to fail no matter what you do with it.
It's really just luck of the draw.
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University of Southern California - Class of 2010. Fight On! | |
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EveryName
Wake Up
Premium
join:2001-12-05
Montreal
·Shaw
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by thender :FWIW, I have not observed it as a common problem, however, 99.99999% of the drives I take out of Macbooks that fail are Toshiba. I will never use a Toshiba drive in a machine. Interesting. As per your statistics, you've replaced 10,000,000 Macbook HDDs and all but one was a Toshiba. That's a lot to keep count of. | |
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WALL_E
Premium
join:2003-05-28
USA
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by bskuared :I'm still thinking that lasting only year just isn't satisfactory. Some fail early, some fail late, all will eventually fail. It's not a matter of the service life being "satisfactory" - hard drives die and can go at any moment with little or no warning. That's just the nature of a platter spinning 1000's of times a minute, with densely-packed data and a metal arm swinging around just above the disk's surface.
Trust me, you may find this unsatisfactory, but try working at any large organization. When you have thousands of PC's to support, hard drive failures are happening all the time. BACKUP.
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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble." | |
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WALL_E
Premium
join:2003-05-28
USA
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( I think hard drive manufacturers probably could produce a much more reliable hard drive than they do currently, but consumers would probably be unwilling to pay.
Hard drives are something of a commodity, and hard drive manufactures have found that the best way to compete is to continually push this envelope of ever-expanding drive capacity, while at the same time operating at the cusp of what would be considered "acceptable" reliability.
I mean, think about it: we can buy 1 TB hard drives for less than $80! If a manufacturer were to come out with a 500 GB reliability-focused hard drive for 3 times as much, I don't think any consumer would buy it.
As it is, most people are happy enough with the current state of drive reliability, and their need for storage is ever-increasing. Hard drive manufacturers have responded by creating cheap, high capacity drives to meet that demand. Why spend more for an ultra-reliable hard drive when you can buy two huge, cheap drives and use redundancy as a means of reliability?
Even as someone who has been "bitten" by a hard drive failure in the past, I still appreciate that I'm able to buy a huge capacity drive for practically nothing.
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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble." | |
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joako
Premium
join:2000-09-07
/dev/null | Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( They do make them they are called SAS and SCSI.
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PRescott7-2097 | |
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thender
crackberry storms
join:2009-01-01
Brooklyn, NY
clubs: | Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( I agree. SCSI drives seem to fail less than SATA or IDE ones. I worked someplace for a year where there was a high read/write rate 12 hours a day and no drives ever failed, all SCSI. | |
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Steve
I'm a PC, so shut up
Consultant
join:2001-03-10
Yorba Linda, CA
| said by WALL_E :I think hard drive manufacturers probably could produce a much more reliable hard drive than they do currently, but consumers would probably be unwilling to pay. It's not even close to "probably" - price is the sole driver in almost every commodity market, and (sadly) reliability has become a by-the-way bullet point that only comes into play once price is out of the way.
Steve — who remembers paying $1800 for a 383 megabyte built-like-a-tank Control Data hard drive in 1989 | |
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| daveinpoway
Premium
join:2006-07-03
Poway, CA | Others are welcome to correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the iMac uses a laptop (2.5") hard drive. Historically, these have not lasted as long as desktop (3.5") drives. | |
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Otto
Premium
join:2001-03-12
Hollywood, FL
·Comcast
 ·AT&T Southeast
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by daveinpoway :Others are welcome to correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the iMac uses a laptop (2.5") hard drive. Historically, these have not lasted as long as desktop (3.5") drives. iMacs use 3.5" hard drives, the current ones being 7200RPM models from a variety of manufacturers, typically WD, Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc. | |
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thender
crackberry storms
join:2009-01-01
Brooklyn, NY
clubs:
·Optimum Online
 ·Verizon FIOS
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by Otto :said by daveinpoway :Others are welcome to correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the iMac uses a laptop (2.5") hard drive. Historically, these have not lasted as long as desktop (3.5") drives. iMacs use 3.5" hard drives, the current ones being 7200RPM models from a variety of manufacturers, typically WD, Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu, etc. That's weird.
Desktop drives and laptop memory. | |
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Premium
join:2006-07-03
Poway, CA | OK, I stand corrected. | |
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HappyBunny
Hi. Cram It.
Premium
join:2001-06-23
Long Beach, CA
·Charter Pipeline
| I had the hard drive fail in my G5 iMac. It ran very very hot--it was around 190 degrees. Not too surprising it would fail. Part of the issue with an iMac--at least the one I have--is that there is a lot of heat trapped behind that monitor. I have also had a power supply and the temperature sensor go. I've never had so many problems with a Mac--and others have had similar issues. I have to think this design--which I do love--is part of the issue. It was a Maxtor drive.
My G4 Dual processor Mac also had a hard drive die--it was one of the infamous IBM DeskStar drives. They were notorious. Apple did replace it for free. I think I had one go on a Mac Quadra back in the day, but I do think that drives were either made better then, or else we placed less demand on them--or maybe it is both. | |
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WALL_E
Premium
join:2003-05-28
USA
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by HappyBunny :I had the hard drive fail in my G5 iMac. It ran very very hot--it was around 190 degrees. Not too surprising it would fail. Part of the issue with an iMac--at least the one I have--is that there is a lot of heat trapped behind that monitor. I have also had a power supply and the temperature sensor go. I've never had so many problems with a Mac--and others have had similar issues. I have to think this design--which I do love--is part of the issue. It was a Maxtor drive. My G4 Dual processor Mac also had a hard drive die--it was one of the infamous IBM DeskStar drives. They were notorious. Apple did replace it for free. I think I had one go on a Mac Quadra back in the day, but I do think that drives were either made better then, or else we placed less demand on them--or maybe it is both. Your hard drive was running at 87 degrees Celsius?!
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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble." | |
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RR Conductor
RailRoadDude
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join:2002-04-02
Redwood Valley, CA
·Comcast
1 edit | Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by WALL_E :said by HappyBunny :I had the hard drive fail in my G5 iMac. It ran very very hot--it was around 190 degrees. Not too surprising it would fail. Part of the issue with an iMac--at least the one I have--is that there is a lot of heat trapped behind that monitor. I have also had a power supply and the temperature sensor go. I've never had so many problems with a Mac--and others have had similar issues. I have to think this design--which I do love--is part of the issue. It was a Maxtor drive. My G4 Dual processor Mac also had a hard drive die--it was one of the infamous IBM DeskStar drives. They were notorious. Apple did replace it for free. I think I had one go on a Mac Quadra back in the day, but I do think that drives were either made better then, or else we placed less demand on them--or maybe it is both. Your hard drive was running at 87 degrees Celsius?! OUCH! That would definitely kill it prematurely. Heat=Unhappy Electronics, Cool=Very happy and joyous electronics 
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HappyBunny
Hi. Cram It.
Premium
join:2001-06-23
Long Beach, CA | I dont know what it was running at celsius, I dont speak that language  It was so hot you couldnt touch it. | |
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RR Conductor
RailRoadDude
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join:2002-04-02
Redwood Valley, CA
·Comcast
1 edit | Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by HappyBunny :I dont know what it was running at celsius, I dont speak that language It was so hot you couldnt touch it. I don't either Bun, except for computer temps. When it comes to outside temps, humidity and length/width, etc. I'm a died in the wool Imperial System Guy
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Otto
Premium
join:2001-03-12
Hollywood, FL
·Comcast
·AT&T Southeast
| I think drives are a bit less reliable now, there's a lot less quality control out there when most consumer-level drives are under $100. Back in the day, when a 1 Gigabyte drive was over $400 and all the storage one could want, I do think quality was better... then again, the technology was a lot less demanding on the disk perhaps.
Basically, hard drives being the mechanical monsters they are, do fail eventually. Even the really expensive solid state ones can become irreparably damaged, though not as often in a mechanical sense obviously. Same advice applies to data regardless... back up early, back up often, be a happier camper. | |
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a101
@cox.net
| said by Otto : Even the really expensive solid state ones can become irreparably damaged, though not as often in a mechanical sense obviously. A common myth believed by those without direct experience with solid-state disk drives. Presently solid-state drives enjoy a 10x higher failure rate than conventional rotating magnetic storage drives. This data is from warranty returns for same model computers shipped with solid-state disks Vs. conventional disk drives.
O.O. | |
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| | hgratt
join:2003-12-09
Plano, TX
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by a101 :said by Otto : Even the really expensive solid state ones can become irreparably damaged, though not as often in a mechanical sense obviously. A common myth believed by those without direct experience with solid-state disk drives. Presently solid-state drives enjoy a 10x higher failure rate than conventional rotating magnetic storage drives. This data is from warranty returns for same model computers shipped with solid-state disks Vs. conventional disk drives. O.O. The reliability issues for SSD's may not be true. See the link below:
»www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/03/20···ounded/1 | |
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a101
@cox.net
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by hgratt :said by a101 :said by Otto : Even the really expensive solid state ones can become irreparably damaged, though not as often in a mechanical sense obviously. A common myth believed by those without direct experience with solid-state disk drives. Presently solid-state drives enjoy a 10x higher failure rate than conventional rotating magnetic storage drives. This data is from warranty returns for same model computers shipped with solid-state disks Vs. conventional disk drives. O.O. The reliability issues for SSD's may not be true. See the link below: » www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/03/20···ounded/1 The 1 in 3 failure rate cited in the link, is many orders of magnitude larger than anything conventional rotating magnetic disk drives experience and clearly not the case. I can't see that any mfgr would continue shipping computers with that high of a failure rate. Still, think about this; flash memory wears out despite the best wear leveling algorithms available. As a matter of fact, the better the wear leveling algorithm, the more likely you are to experience massive failure of many different blocks at about the same time, though it should take somewhat longer than a less sophisticated wear leveling algorithm. Magnetic domains on a disk do not wear out. There is no theoretical limit to the number of times you can reverse the magnetic field polarity of a bit on a disk. SSDs wear out in some 100K writes. In high-end server SSD applications, they're considered "consumables" that are discarded as soon as they start showing signs of wear.
O.O. | |
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Tzale
Proud Libertarian Conservative
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join:2004-01-06
Sweden
·Verizon FIOS
·Optimum Online
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by TearAbite :Lets not forget the fact that today the average HD size is near 1 Tearabite.. 10 years ago, the average HD size was 1 or 2 Gigabytes if that.. As manufacturers jam more and more bits into smaller amounts of space, minor defects on the platter that may have gone un noticed 10 years ago could wipe out megs of data on today's HDD.. Combine that with lower prices and lower profit margins, you end up with "disposable" drives. Ten years ago the average was around 10-20 gigs.
-Tzale
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estover
join:2004-03-16
Valencia, PA
clubs:
| I have replaced the drive in my Imac 20" 3 times in the last 1.5 years. I gave up on it. It just takes to much time to replace the drive. It is now doing duty as my sons i-stop motion machine.
When this drive fails I am going to mount the power and SATA port on the back of the drive and use an external drive. Much easier to replace. | |
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gigahurtz
Premium
join:2001-10-20
Palm Coast, FL
clubs: | I also went through this a few weeks back. My iMac was about a year and a half old and it failed on me. I was able to get it replaced with no problem but was definitely frustrating.
The wonderful world of computers... | |
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bskuared
It's Hip To Be Square
Premium
join:2001-12-02
San Clemente, CA
·Cox HSI
| Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( said by gigahurtz :said by bskuared :Well, hopefully I will get it back from the genius folks today. Keep your fingers crossed. Typing on this little 13 inch screen is wearing out my old eyes Make sure to check the status online. I saw it was done and they hadn't called and wouldn't have called for another day. Thanks... good to know. I have been checking online.
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2b or not 2b
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Thinkdiff
Premium,MVM
join:2001-08-07
Bronx, NY
1 edit | Re: [OS X] iMac hard drive failure :( It is a holiday weekend. I'm sure the combination of people having off (more time to bring in problem computers) and geniuses getting time off or taking time off ("sick" days) has them a bit backed up.
I'd cut them a little slack. If it's not done by Tuesday morning, then you've got something to be pissed about.
Just my opinion though. Let us know if there are any updates.
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University of Southern California - Class of 2010. Fight On! | |
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