Ever Lose A Hard Drive? (if so please read)

[hellodon]

I'm starting to wonder (and worry) about Macs & Hard Drives. I think there is something going on with the way Apples run that is making these things completely crash and die.


I have been using macs for about 5 years now. I personally owned a titanium powerbook for 3 of those years and had the hard drive die twice. Once was 8 days after my applecare was up and they basically raised the middle finger at me.

I have worked in an office where 2 drives died on computers that were less than a year old and 1 die shortly after a year.

The owner of the business (mac user) had his powerbook drive die and my only other coworker at that time had it happen on his old powerbook (the black ones) and on his 12" model more recently as well.

I currently run a business with a friend of mine and we bought a 20" iMac this past summer. the 1.8 model. For no apparent reason last month, hard drive completely died.

I just saw another post on here from a person that seems to have the same problem with his 20" iMac that we just had at the office...

A designer at one of the companies we deal with had his 15" powerbook drive die on him during it's 12th month of ownership.

These are about 90% of the mac owners i know...all have had this problem at one time or another.

Something is not right....


If you've had a hard drive die on you that was reletively new please leave a response whether it's telling the story or leaving a note that it's happened to you. I am starting to think that there is some kind of problem that happens with all macs and hard drives eventually....it just doesnt seem right to see and hear of this happening so often. This could be grounds for some sort of class action suit.

 

[grizzlybrice]

Both my roommate, his girlfriend, and I have had our hard drives crash in our powerbooks. Mine was a 12", my roommate, a 15", and his girlfriend an older 15" (with the sweet black keyboard).

I am not sure if that is coincidence, but come on. What's the chances? They all died within a year of each-other too. But then again, I also had a compaq laptop which just blew it's second hard drive, and my baby 12" powerbook also had a bad motherboard upon purchasing it which had to be replaced.

It's a drag, but when everything is working I'm happy. When it's not, I'm sad (I just bought a PowerMac G5... It helps with the sadness. It helps a lot).

Brice

 

[strydr]

Well, I have a 3 year old PowerBook, a 9 month old iMac, a 1 year old mini, a 2 week old intel mini, and a 5+ year old PowerMac, and a 5+ year old PowerBook. None of these machines have ever had a HDD failure. The iMac and both mini's stay of 24/7(working %50 or more CPU), the newer PB is on 24/7 also, but sleeps while not in use. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I have several other PC's, and they are less reliable as far as HDD issues (among others) than any of my Mac's.

This is why we all backup our important stuff, right?
DVD burners and tape drives are your friend
I have data that's been with me over 15 years now. All saved on one form or another, sneaker net'd around in shoeboxes..
It's a fact of life that any electronic device will eventually fail. If it's really important, make a copy.

 

[andiwm2003]

i had a "lucky" streak at work a year ago. one apple HD died after 5 years. But 5 PC HD's died after 2-4 years of use. all within 2 month.

i guess HD's have a halflife of 4 years. If you are "lucky" then your HD's are failing around that time. I don't think apple is better or worse than any other company. It just happens.

 

[jimsowden]

I have owned about 10 apple computer and have never had a drive fail on any of them. I do dump my computers every few years for upgrades, but have yet to have anything happen to a single one.

 

[emaja]

I have never had any hard drive - either PC or Mac - fail on me yet.

On the class action suit, you can't be serious. What do you expect to gain? Only lawyers ever see anything from those anyway.

Since Apple doesn't make the hard drives, if they fail out of warrantee, then there is no responsibility on their part. All you can do is back things up.

 

[mlrproducts]

I've owned several Powerbooks, mostly 12", a few 15"s, a few iBooks, and a Powermac. The only hard drive that died was a 12" Powerbook, ironically it was only about 2 months old.

I've had several hard drives last for nearly 10 years. I think our hard drives are on more now, and get used harder due to more demand. Hard drive tech hasn't increased with processor tech and others.

Also, most manufacturers are probably user cheaper parts (and perhaps cheaper processes to manufacture)? It is just the nature of the business. Notice how hard drive warranties have decreased in time span? It is a shame, lets home perpidicular tech in hard drives is more promising. Either that or optical discs come along fast so you can backup your entire hard drive on one disc!

 

[motulist]

Mac or Windows, the hard drive is by far the component that fails most frequently.

 

[killuminati]

Last month the hard drive on my 15" Powerbook died. It was about 18 months old.

I was surprised because I still have 3 working PCs from over 3 years ago, one of them is even from 7 years ago. I don't use that one that often though so that's probably why it's still fine.

 

[generik]

My guess is Apple probably uses cheap parts.

Manufacturers have their ways of grading parts into varying bands, and perhaps Apple bought the lower quality lots

 

[slick316]

My PB is over a year old, and no issues here. I have only, ever, had one hard drive fail on me, and it was that crappy IBM Deathstar drive (and it was in a PC).
Hard drives fail, its hard to find electronics with moving parts that don't.
If the 80GB in my PB goes out, a 120GB is going to find its place in there

 

[dejo]

These are about 90% of the mac owners i know...all have had this problem at one time or another.

I'm glad you don't know me.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

Not counting the 'obscenely old' hard drives in my collection of Classic Macs, I have had four hard drives die in the past 8 years. One was the shipping drive in my eMac, one was an external drive attached to my eMac (although that drive had been an internal hard drive part of a RAID in a PC for about 4 years before it got moved to the eMac, and its twin is still going just fine, externally on the eMac.) I've had a hard drive die in a Sony laptop and a Compaq laptop.

In my job as on-site computer technician, I see dying/dead hardware on a regular basis. I've seen a rash of hard drive failures in Dells and Gateways recently, including both the original HD, AND two replacements in a Gateway in the course of one month (yes, three dead drives in one computer in one month!) But none in Macs (other than my own.)

 

[Kingsly]

I have never had a HDD die on me.
I know someone who has, and I had an ATA controller die... but the HDD was fine and lives happily in a FW enclosure.

 

[strydr]

Notice how hard drive warranties have decreased in time span?

Actually, Seagate recently (last year, I think) bumped all warranties to 5 years. Not that Apple uses Seagate, but it set a standard all vendors should adopt.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I always keep close track of my hard drives. Losing one -- now, that would be carelessness.

Seriously, I've never had a failed hard drive in over 20 years of Mac ownership. I've had directory damage on a few of them, but it was always repairable. Maybe some of the people who've had their drives "fail" just don't know any basic diagnostic and repair techniques.

 

[sreedy]

I'm a sys admin in a medium sized software company in the UK. In the last year we have lost 1 apple hard-drive (in an old G3), four PC drives and a couple of Linux drives.

In the past two weeks I have taken delivery of two Dell servers running RedHat with 6 250GB drives in. In 1 we lost a data disk [1-5] after a day, in the other when I first booted it drive 0 was screwed which meant I couldn't even boot the OS.

[But I have to say on both occasions Dell sorted it very fast, but then you'd hope so on Business Support Rates!]

Basically, as someone has mentioned already, hard drives fail all the time. Not just an Apple issue.

 

[After G]

Always wondered about "Bad magic number"...
That's what Disk Utility said about the one drive that has failed on me so far.

 

[dejo]

Always wondered about "Bad magic number"...
That's what Disk Utility said about the one drive that has failed on me so far.

Silly Muggle.

 

[joeconvert]

Hard drives fail. Backup up your data. Move on.


Happens to Macs, Dells, HPs, Suns, etc...

Since you brought it up, I have had good experiences with my Macs. MDD Power Mac, that I have moved (Read: Boxed up and carted off to another physical location.) and my Powerbook, when I had it were both solid.

In fact, my MDD actually convinced me that Seagate hard drives had come close again to the higher end reputation they enjoyed in the late 80s and early 90s.

 

[ITASOR]

I've had Macs since the IIe and have never lost a HD.

 

[tjwett]

every Western Digital hard drive i've ever had has died. every single one. which also means every LaCie drive i've ever had as died as well, 4 in total. i still have working Seagate Barracuda drives from years ago and so far i'm having great luck with Maxtor stuff. it doesn't have anything to do with the OS. some stuff is just made like crap.

 

[zami]

Only one failure the famous IBM "Deathstar" in an old iMac G3 400. It had lasted about three years.

 

[After G]

Actually, I like WD and I don't like Maxtor.
Seen too many Maxtors fail, about a 4/10 ratio.
And out of the 5 WD drives I've seen, none yet.

But that's just personal experience, which means nothing.
PCs seem to treat drives worse in my experience as well.

And to cover myself, these are non-Mac situations.
I've only had one drive in a Mac fail me, mentioned previously.

And that Muggle thing made me laugh.

 

[Dane D.]

Failures happen, backup often and do routine maintenance. In my experience (I currently maintain 10 Macs at work), it is the users fault for failures. They are not computer savvy, they are unorganized, they don't know how to use a Mac properly, they are the ones always calling me for help. Ironically these people are the ones that destroy hardware, not my artists. I also notice that the majority of posters in this thread are using mobile computers not desktops, IMO, PowerBooks and iBooks experience more hardware failures ie. HDs. These devices may be useful but be aware that there is a cost to using them that desktop users rarely experience. It isn't Apple's fault.