Strange problem with my PC lately... Bad luck, coincidence, or just faulty hardware?

So i have had multiple HDD's fail in the past couple months. The first one was a Seagate 500GB, it failed about 2 weeks ago and i bought a new one, a 1TB Seagate. That one worked great until last night, when it also failed. I exchanged it back at the store, as it was still in the 14 day return policy. The new drive is running fine so far.

Am i just unlucky and keep getting shit hard drives, or should i be concerned that something else is causing them to fail? I have read up and seen that seagate has had issues with their drives, and they have had like a 15-20% failure rate recently, but am i really THAT unlucky? If this one fails im gonna take it back and exchange it for another brand.

 

I think it's both bad luck and that Seagate currently has high failure rate as reported by Backblaze, the online backup company. They use consumer grade hard drives because they offer low price backup service. While I use mix of different brand of hard drives on my computer builds, I had no hard drive failure for the pass 2 years. I think main reason is that my boot/system drives are now SSD. While my hard drives are large size 2 to 4TB that storage files that don't get access that much.

 

Shit happens.

I'd also check the power connector. A shit power supply might not be giving clean voltage (excess ripple) or proper voltage. If you have an oscilloscope, use that to check the quality of the line ripple. A DC meter can only check for excess or low voltage.

EDIT: i use quality power supply and I average 5 new hard drives every 2 years. One hard drive gets blown up every year, almost always the older 4-5 year old drives. The last one was a Toshiba from my laptop, it had shit load of bad sector, throwing SMART error, and it was slow as heck to reformat so I threw it out. Before that it was a WD 320GB, it just quit out of the blue without SMART warning. Before that it was a 2GB Seagate that blew up (black mark on PCB) from an older iMac I keep around for old files. OTOH I still have old hard drive that should have been well past theoretical life such as the 80MB Quantum in my even older Macintosh, estimated 100k hours of use (about 9 years non stop power on basically) and still going like that pink bunny.

Quality do vary from time to time, modern hard drive are often built cheaper and may have shorter usable life than older hard drive but for most users it's usually non issue as we often replace them with larger capacity before it can go bad. Aside from firmware fiasco a few years ago and glass disk deathstar a decade ago, most hard drive usually won't show consistent failure. One company's claim of high Seagate failure may have to do with the fact more people have Seagate than other brands.

 

Yeah I honestly think it's also just bad luck.

But Seagate drives have the most reported consumer level drive failures so I think I would suggest not buying Seagate hard drives.

 

If you're having constant hardware issues, i suggest checking your power supply.

I changed the DVD drive on my previous computer 3 or 4 times before realising the powersupply was the one to blame.

 

I just submitted an RMA for my power supply, its a thermaltake tr2-600 so it had a 5-year warranty on it. Im hoping once i get the new one and drop it into my pc, it will be the end of my computer problems.... for a while at least, lol

EDIT: On a side note, i have never had hard drives crash on me until the past few years. I have a Maxtor 60GB from 2000-ish that still works like a champ.

 

I've checked for info on that power supply and it seems there's 2 series of that particular model.

The one with code W0388RU isn't 80 plus certified, efficiency is below 75%, no Active PFC and it's manufactured by HEC. From those specs and what i read it's a crap power supply.

The one with code TR-600P, was certified on the 80 plus program with a bronze, has Active PFC and it's manufactured by FSP. It's a decent power supply, but there are better options out there.

Honestly for power supplies i always recomend looking for these brands: Antec, Corsair, Seasonic or XFX. There are some others but they are expensive and too much for a home gaming pc. Still before buying anything, always check for reviews. That's what i did before buying the power supply of my current PC, a Corsair TX650V2.

JonnyGuru is one good place to start for reviews.

 

Yeah, I was planning on putting a Corsair PSU in my next build. Only reason i bought the Thermaltake was because PSU that was in my PC (an Antec) crapped out, and I just ran to Best Buy real quick before they closed and picked one up. The Thermaltake ones were the only ones they had

 

Many many years ago, a buddy of mine had a defective Abit motherboard that kept killing hard drives. He went through 5 before he said "enough" and RMA'ed the board. Abit changed it and he never had a drive on him die after that.

 

This is insane. I have had ZERO hard drives die on me in around 20 years. Hell, I still have a Vertex 1 30GB ssd thats written several terabytes thats still going strong.