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Western Digital Hard disk drive Failures?
I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 the laptop is only in use 3 or 4 hrs a week, I believe last summer around August The HDD failed i ran a diag. on it and had bad sectors and the diag. suggested to replace the disks. I purchased a brand new western digital HDD from Dell i believe. Everything was good till a month ago. I am having the same problem again and have bad sectors. I guess my question is; Is it possible i just got a bad HDD? I used the recommended HDD by Dell and the service tag and like i said the OS booted fine and the system ran great. the reason i ask is I also have a HP and the HDD in that has also failed but it went out different, at a slow pace over time and one day it just went put. I am in computer support and my instinct tells me the HDD failed prematurelly, but i do not have very much experience in troubleshooting.
ejn63
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July 24th, 2014 15:00
Hard drives in mobile systems seem to run 3-5 years, but since they're subject to constant movement, they can be damaged easily and fail much sooner than that. Usually a bad sector the result of a bump or drop while the drive is spinning - all hard drives eventually fail. WD generally has a good reputation for reliability, but these are complex devices - far more complex than anything else inside your system, electromechanically-speaking. In some senses, it's a wonder they work as well as they do.
That said, did you run the WD Data Lifeguard utility on the drive? Don't rely on the Dell PC Checkup/PC Doctor -- use either the Data LIfeguard utility or the full Dell diagnostics.
Philip_Yip
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July 24th, 2014 16:00
See here:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/f12-preboot-diagnostics/
Tyrandis
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July 24th, 2014 23:00
Next time don't buy a western digital hdd and switch to a seagate hdd trust me big difference. not that you can see in speed but how long they survive. assuming that your western digital hdd is a average 7200 rpm one.
ejn63
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July 25th, 2014 04:00
Your experience and advice doesn't mirror mine. Seagate has had quite a few issues not only with firmware but also with production at its Chinese plants of late - if anything, WD (or Toshiba) would be a much safer choice right now in hard drives both for notebooks AND desktops.
zonetrek
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July 25th, 2014 19:00
Tyrandis
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July 25th, 2014 20:00
Wait so how is ejn63 right? this was our little talk about internal hhd's between western digital and seagate and not portable hhd's.
ejn63
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July 30th, 2014 05:00
Every hard drive manufacturer has hit points in time when its products trail the competition in reliability. Overall right now I'd put WD or Toshiba ahead of Seagate for mobile drives and desktop drives. That will probably eventually even out, but in general, hard drives are overall of about the same level of reliability. The problem is that "overall" means average and may or may not apply to single units.
The best defense against hard drive failure is called BACKUP. It's not a matter of if you'll need it - but when.