Vista Trashed my HDD

I got SMART since it tells me may in advance of pending drive faliures - well today the drive that holds the vista partition dies and also brings down all the other drives in the unit :( - No warning, nothing.

Now this got me thinking... Is this that same MS feature that causes Xbox360 HDD units to fail just out of warranty? And what will happen to the new drive I'm just about to install, will that also expire within a month?

I've complained a lot about militant HD activity in Vista.

My system still suffers from this. Whatever Vista is doing is going to kill my HD.

I've had Vista cock up my MBR, but I doubt it could cause a physical failure.

if anything the more active indexing may hilight a pre-existent problem?

According to google's massive study of hard drive failures intense activity does not make the drive fail any sooner.

That sounds implausible, but they have the data to back up their claim.

Indeed, as that implies that the electronics or the integrity of the platters themselves is more likely to fail, rather than the mechanical components. Seems odd.

Probably the components are more than capable of a constant stress test. I believe HD manufacturers stress test the components a very great deal more than vista ever does.

I believe you had a failure just waiting to happen, and a little stress tipped it over the edge.

Do you guys reckon I should go on a full Drive backup Just in case? I backup every 2 weeks or anytime I make a new purchase.

I think I'll do a full backup. I can't afford to lose any work.

Heh, I usually begin to back up stuff whenever its already too late. Matter of fact, I havent backed up anything since my last HD crash...better get running...you cant trust those lightning storms..

Just rebuilt the Vista Partition, took all of about 20 mins (nice one MS). I also took the liberty of making another backup partition so I've got complete system backups mirrored across three partitions on three different physical disks. Now all I need is offsite just incase some bugger nicks this machine :O

... I've never lost a hard drive... I don't know what you people are doing/buying.
I bought a 60 Gig when that was the biggest you could get... I have quite noobishly moved it from one pc to the next and then less noobishly a few more times. It survived 2 PCs that otherwise died. I've found it reliable and I use it to store backups and things I don't want to lose (on both HDs)

it has also shredded a hd of a friend.

Partition failuer is not so common. more common is specefik files gets corrupted. and then u have 1 file corrupted all other files pending on that one is no use anymore..

Iam thinking of installing a Novell 5.1 server just to have the salvage function :)

Oh this drive is dead, very dead - total failure.

didn't the google tests also show that the SMART function was infact DUMB as it didn't spot 50% or so of the failures in advance?

How the hell is an OS supposed to kill a hard drive? It's all just standard IDE signals, geez.


A HD dies faster from being turned on and off than it does from being used.


Same. Well at least not since the Amiga days.

I'll had lots of harddrives fail, almost exlusively Seagate drives that fail on the molex power connector. Since I switched to IBM/Hitachi I've only had one (which was kind of my fault) but Hitachi replaced it under warranty just the same, no questions asked.

See that's even weirder, cuz I've never had a hd fail on me and I ONLY buy Seagate. I've seen plenty of other people's non-Seagate drives fail.

Maybe Aus gets the good stuff.

I re-ask WHAT are you people doing that kills hard drives?

The physical layer of a hard drive is a spinning disc and a pivoting head, as long as the head doesn't collide with the disc I have no problem believing the life expectancy of an HD is based on the magnetic fields, an area where I think human knowledge is perhaps a little primitive compared to the mechanical spinning of discs, invention of the wheel etc.

IBM shipped harddisks that looped back to the beginning of the media for months before someone nailed the bug in their bios, would be kind of funny if vista had the same overrun, only apparent on nearly full partitions, around the 2^n gig marker...

ALL harddrives fail eventually. It's just that in most cases the economical lifespan is less than the physical one. (meaning that you replace your 20Gb drive with a biggeer one before it dies on you)

that said:

In my personal experience, I have the absolute worst-bar-none experience with the older 80GB IBM Deathstar drives. As in a dozen drives at the office, none of which survived for more than a couple of months. replacement warranty isn't worth crap either, if your replacement dies a month later, as does its replacement. You simply don't dare entrust any more data to em, but would rather just cut the financial loss and throw 'em out altogether.

At a much smaller scale, I've also had a Maxtor die on me, a Western Digital, and a Seagate. (That's over a 14 year timespan, and I normally have multiple HD's in my personal computer. It's not like they are dieing left and right)

Currently I have three Samsung's and a Western Digital -- samsung is the only brand HD I've used that hasn't seen any casualties yet (running for a couple of years now)

so... For now, I'm sticking to Samsung myself. (Maybe not the fastest drives, but they are extremely quiet)

You guys won't belive this, but my OS is installed on a 9
year old, 8GB Seagate. This HD used to be filled with mp3s
and it was a sort of communal HD that was shared amongst friends.
Over the years, it had been put into well over 10 machines
before it came to rest in mine.

A couple years ago, I brought my PC in for a wipe at FutureShop.
They wiped my 80Gig(Which originally had my Windows XP on it)
like they were supposed to, but they also wiped the poor lil'
Seagate. And THEN they proceeded to install Windows XP on
the poor thing!

I got my computer back, the 80Gig wasn't even working AND
they had installed Windows on a 9 year old drive.

I had no confidence left in these fellas(This was NOT the
first time they had screwed up tremendously), and I didn't
want them to touch my machine anymore, so I took it home,
and it's been that way ever since.

I'm waiting for the year this old thing finally gives out.
I might even give it a proper burial, it's been like family.

It's funny, really.
Geforce 6800GT, 1 Gig of Corsair Ram, 19 inch LCD ... OS installed on an 8GB Seagate. lol.

I had a 500MB hard drive die on me in 2001. It started locking and you'd have to lift the drive and drop it a CM or so to unlodge the head. Eventually that stopped working.

Anyone remember that major fujitsu recall quite a few years ago of 10-20GB Drives? We had quite a few clients who had them and some of them went down before we heard about the recall.

I've seen plenty of duff drives over the years. You can normally tell that one is on the way out by the noise it makes - it's horrible.

Fujitsu drives are notorious. My dad worked for them until last January. Fujitsu PC's normally use Samsung drives because even the techs themselves have no trust in their drives! (I'm talking about the techs who piece the actual IC's together, too...)

I can tell you quite a lot about how Fujitsu drives are manufactured.


Fujitsu drives sounded horrible from day one- there we go!

I have had 2 Maxtor diamond drives die on me. I remember the last one being very hot to touch. It started making 'clonking' noises. The O/S would take an age to load. Eventually it ground to a complete halt.
Both of the drives were always hot and unbearably noisy.

All the Samsung drives I have bought have always been good though. Quiet, cool, and reliable.

I would have lost my confidence in them after screwing up tremendously the first time.


Uh, yeh. Stop letting them fiddle with your machine when the damage has already been done anyway.

I doubt very much that the OS KILLED YOUR Hard Drive... Hard Drives can fail under any OS.

Imagine the talk at MicroSoft, "Damm VISTA kills Hard Drives, Oh well never mind"

SMART only detects gradual failure -- e.g. increasing error counts, unusually high temperatures, delays locating the proper tracks, etc. It will have no advance warning of other types of failure such as a ballbearing going out, a head-crash, a short-out component, etc...

In other words: Don't rely on smart to keep you safe, but DO run out and get a replacement drive as soon as it warns you about a drive.