Hard Drive Failures…

I purchased two Seagate 500 gig drives for a new server of mine - set them up as a striped RAID, installed Ubuntu. Within two weeks, in the middle of the night, it sounded like a bandsaw coming from the server. One of the drives died. I had to take it out of that machine and try to check it out. The drive just clunked… I went online with Seagate Tech support to ask a few questions in the live chat. I asked about 4 questions and the tech support guy disconnected me - rude!… Long story short, I had to do the RMA and now I have a refurbished drive for the price of a new one.

I immediately formatted it and put a folder on the root level of the drive ‘REFURB DRIVE - NO IMPORTANT DATA’

I’d like to say I would add it to the 6 other refurbished drives I have - SIX. But I can’t… because EVERY single refurb drive I have has died on me. So I’m not holding my breath on this one.

Are hard drives getting worse? They are getting cheaper. But I feel as though I really need to have regular backups… Are drives made as well as they used to be? My old 40 gig drives show FEWER errors in the SMART status than many of my 250, and 500 gig drives… is this simply because there is more data or information on these drives?

Read this article on the failure of external hard drives..