Question: So, I got the ol faithful hard drive failure imminent error message for one of my hard drives after my PC shat itself and froze and I rebooted it.
Unlike seemingly every other person on the planet, mine didn’t have the option to ignore it and continue anyway. My only option was F2 for setup, which put me into the BIOS, and upon exiting just went back to the error screen. The only solution was to completely unplug the hard drive.
The drive itself is just a massive 3TB storage drive for games, so I don’t really care about recovering anything on it, as it’s nothing important. However, is the drive basically dead? Is there any way I could save it, even if it involved wiping it? I can’t actually test the drive, because even if I disable the SATA port in the BIOS it still throws up the error. The only way is to physically unplug it.
This is the drive in question. It’s only just under 3 years old, and I’ve got other HDDs coming up on 10 years and still going faithful, so I think it’s safe to say this wasn’t the best purchase.
Answer:
Yes I saw that too. It is better to buy disks with more guarantee. WD Blacks for example comes with 5 years of guarantee or Toshiba N300 that I bought that September has 3 years of guarantee. The guarantee periods are that longer, because they are better drives. Of course their prices are higher, but I have a WD Black 1 TB, I bought 13 years ago, still working with total working time of nearly 75000 hours. This is almost 8.5 years running time.
That’s not necessarily because it’s a WD Black though. I similarly have a 7200 RPM WD Blue from over a decade ago with nearly 8 years of power-on hours and over 4500 power cycles that’s still going strong with daily use. It did have a 3-year warranty though.
The biggest problem I see with WD Blacks now is that they’re getting a bit too close to the price of SSDs, which are substantially faster. For bulk data storage, the biggest thing hard drives still have going for them is their lower cost compared to SSDs, making it a bit hard to justify the markup of a WD Black, which doesn’t perform that much better than any other mechanical hard drive. For something like game storage, unless one really wants to keep multiple terabytes of games installed at once, it might be better to just get a 1TB SSD for $100 and leave the hard drives for bulk data and backups.