I’ve had 4 hard drives fail in the last month at a particular campus. They were installed at different times, and are different makes, models, and sizes (physically and storage). It may just be coincidence, but I’m starting to wonder if the quality of drives in general has taken a dive. These drives were all installed in the past 4 years.
Back in the late 1990s, I had a few Western Digital drives with glass plates fail with the beep of death, and that soured me on them for a few years. But since then, I’ve rarely seen drives that completely failed to spin up, until now.
Two of the recent drives that failed were in NVRs and two were primary drives in desktop PCs. I’ll be troubleshooting a couple of them tomorrow to see if I can salvage the data. I’m hoping that I made a drive image of the primary drives. If not, I will be once I get them working again.
I find that the best way to handle critical computers is to have a spare drive ready to install, already imaged as a duplicate. Drives are fairly cheap these days, especially smaller boot drives. Windows may still have a hissy fit over changed hardware (really MS? It’s 2023), but at least we can get things going again.
Computer Geekery 