bskuared
It's Hip To Be Square
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San Clemente, CA
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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
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clubs: | 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
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| reply to bskuared
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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TearAbite
join:2001-07-25
Rancho Cucamonga, CA
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i recall something about a study that Google did (they spend a few $ a year on HDDs) that the 1st-year mortality rate on drives was relatively high (still a small percentage).. BUT, if a drive made it past that first year, it tended to live for years..
so yah, shit happens, things break.. THAT is why we have TimeMachine.. |
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C0deZer0
Oc'D To Rhythm And Police
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Per my experience, a single hard drive by itself in my usage for a "main" computer, rarely lasts more than a year. Actually, my average in my history for systems with a single hard drive is one year, precisely. Some last longer; many, much less. 
It was only when I got a UPS and started buying pairs of drives to mount in a RAID that I actually started having hard drives last past their warranty time.
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bskuared
It's Hip To Be Square
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San Clemente, CA
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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?
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Thinkdiff
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join:2001-08-07
Bronx, NY
1 edit | 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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thender
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1 edit | reply to bskuared
I agree with everyone saying this isn't a PC vs. Mac issue. There are no "Apple" drives.
However, things like surrounding environment do have a say in the lifespan. A well cooled PC is probably going to have a drive that lives longer than in a machine like the iMac. I believe the same for shuttle PCs.
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.
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bskuared
It's Hip To Be Square
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Didn't mean to point this thread into a mac v pc issue. I love my mac
I just was curious what kind of hard drives they use. I'm still thinking that lasting only year just isn't satisfactory.
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WALL_E
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USA
| 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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bskuared
It's Hip To Be Square
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LOL. Yes, and we will all eventually die too  It's just the nature of things. What I am saying and will continue to say is that this lackadaisical nature of a hard disk to lack an expected life span is somewhat surprising. It's even more surprising that y'all think this acceptable. I'd think the technical gurus would have mastered this one by now.
And no need to lecture me about backing up... I'm covered in that arena.
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WALL_E
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USA
| 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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joako
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/dev/null | They do make them they are called SAS and SCSI.
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thender
crackberry storms
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clubs: | 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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HappyBunny
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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
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| 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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jdong
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My servers are all PC's and none of them have a hard drive that lasted for more than 1.5 years or so; most of them die in the first 6 months.
I do run virtual machine scratch building servers for Ubuntu packaging though which more or less puts 24/7 constant create-and-delete strain on the filesystem, but bottom line is backups are very important and Time Machine makes them braindead simple.
Now, I do have one 36GB SCSI 10000RPM main drive that has a 10 year history and is still going strong... but considering that it costs 10x+ the price of an equivalent sized consumer grade drive? is THAT really worth it? Nah. The 5 minutes of downtime to swap out a new hard drive is not worth putting in a $150 36GB hard drive
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Otto
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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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jdong
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clubs:
| Not only that, an improper shutdown still carries the risk of the filesystem being damaged, or certainly data being lost (i.e. if you're saving a Word document and it's only half-written, there's no guarantee that any of that data is even partially recoverable, not even the old copy); all good reasons to keep periodic and regular backups.
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TearAbite
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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. |
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