.

[chuyler1]

.

 

[NoRotorNoMotor]

The IBM "Deathstars" back from the early 90's are the worst ever. I had 2 120gb ones die on me and both were full of data

I haven't had any problems with Seagate or WD, I have a 320gb WD as my main drive and a 400gb Seagate as my storage drive. I have all my mp3's and pictures backed up on an mp3 player just in case

Get an external backup drive. Every week or so plug it in and use a backup program such as Cobian to backup whatever has changed on your main drive that week or buy one of those one touch backup drives

Good luck getting the the stuff back, maybe try the drive in another pc, in an external case or just switch ide channels. Maybe the bios will recognize it and it will work long enough to backup the info

 

[ChopstickHero]

I have two WD drives, no problems yet. I did have two Maxtor drives die on me in the past. not fun.

 

[peepsalot]

you ever heard of the freezer trick?

Remove your HD, and put it in a ziplock baggie in the freezer overnight.

Place it back in your computer and copy everything you can before it warms up again.

This actually works quite often.

 

[aftershock63]

just put your HD in the freezer get another HD re setup your PC and then take the HD out of the freezer and copy over the data you want. Its not a big deal I do it all the time at work. BTW it shoudl never ever ever cost you a g to get yout data back.

 

[NoRotorNoMotor]

if you need a new drive let me know, i will give you the "i lost all my info and that sucks" discount

if you want another 60gb WD i can get you one for about $25 shipped

 

[chuyler1]

if you need a new drive let me know, i will give you the "i lost all my info and that sucks" discount

if you want another 60gb WD i can get you one for about $25 shipped

Bwahahah no way am I buying another WD. I'm sure mine may be a fluke...but out of principal I never buy the same thing after it sucks once. It's the only power I have as a consumer.

Anyway, I just bought two Seagate 250GB drives from BestBuy for $80/each. I'm going to configure them as a RAID I so if one goes, I will have time to replace it hopefully before the other goes.

I haven't opened them yet though...can you match or beat that deal on decent drives?

 

[NoRotorNoMotor]

only other drive i have is a 160gb maxtor diamondmax for about $50

 

[Kansei]

I had a western digital 160gb die on me a couple weeks ago.. I had only used it for a week or two in my home theatre computer (ok, so that's sorta an intensive task but come on.. two weeks??). Before that drive died, I had a Maxtor 250GB in the computer serving the same task.. it lasted a healthy 9 months lol.

*crosses fingers that the 3 160GB samsung SATA drives in my primary computer don't fail*.

Sucks that it takes a situation like the one you are in right now to establish a good back up plan. I don't do any sort of regular backing up of my data.. but I also have a lot of duplicates.. I keep important documents (ones that I really do need to keep around, can't live without, etc) on my usb flash drive, but I frequently manually back up the drive onto whatever computer I have it plugged into. Yes, the documents are in an encrypted archive so that they stay safe. Once I get a new hard drive in my enclosure (yay hard drive failure) I'm going to set up an automated backup agent.

Hard drive companies that I haven't had a problem with include Samsung, Seagate, and Fujitsu.

Hitachi, Western Digital (at least 3), and Maxtor (a half dozen or more) are on my bad side. It sucks though that there doesn't really seem to be any rhyme or reason with hard drive companies though. Some people have no problem with WD and Maxtor, while others like me need to learn to stop buying them when they are on sale. Like the recent Fiasco's with Sony and their batteries, it seems like some hard drives just suffer from manufacturing defects and die.

I had heard of the freezer trick years ago but had never tried it. None of the data on the hard drives that I had fail recently was important.. just hundreds of gigabytes of MPEG... would still be fun to give it a try.

 

[peepsalot]

Wow, now that kinda makes sense.

FYI, I've had several Maxtor drives die on me (well my g/f and friends I knew) so I don't buy them anymore.
...
Anyway, I just bought two Seagate 250GB drives from BestBuy for $80/each.

Seagate acquired Maxtor in May, so they're the same company now.

 

[Kansei]

well at least seagate acquired maxtor, not the other way around.

 

[yashart@work]

I only buy seagate. I have seen too many maxtor's fail. Western Digitals fail less often than maxtor, but still too much for me. I have never had a Seagate die on me, not once.

I work for a large graphics manufacturer Seagate is our prefered choice of Hard Drives as well.

 

[altspace]

Sorry to hear bro. I've been there and was able to get back a ton of files. Here is the company I used. http://www.ecodatarecovery.com

 

[910MSPRacer]

seagate is the way to go man. got two 250gbs in mine for over 3 yrs and not one problem at all

 

[yashooa]

The IBM "Deathstars" back from the early 90's are the worst ever. I had 2 120gb ones die on me and both were full of data

I haven't had any problems with Seagate or WD, I have a 320gb WD as my main drive and a 400gb Seagate as my storage drive. I have all my mp3's and pictures backed up on an mp3 player just in case

Get an external backup drive. Every week or so plug it in and use a backup program such as Cobian to backup whatever has changed on your main drive that week or buy one of those one touch backup drives

Good luck getting the the stuff back, maybe try the drive in another pc, in an external case or just switch ide channels. Maybe the bios will recognize it and it will work long enough to backup the info

Um, early 90's? Most of those drives were 10GB-75GB 60GXP-75GXP and they were made after 2001. By the time the 120GB came out IBM had sold its hard drive division to Hitachi (who "fixed" the design) largely due to the class action law suit regarding the earlier models
In the early 90's a 40MB (yes megabyte) hard drive the size of a small toaster was what you would get with an IBM 16MHz 386 Micro channel PC.
Allthough the DX2 66MHz 486 was in the lab (since 89) it was not yet available.
Heck I remember socketed math co-processors lol.

 

[slayer4u]

Um, early 90's? Most of those drives were 10GB-75GB 60GXP-75GXP and they were made after 2001. By the time the 120GB came out IBM had sold its hard drive division to Hitachi (who "fixed" the design) largely due to the class action law suit regarding the earlier models
In the early 90's a 40MB (yes megabyte) hard drive the size of a small toaster was what you would get with an IBM 16MHz 386 Micro channel PC.
Allthought the DX2 66MHz 486 was in the lab (since 89) it was not yet available.
Heck I remember socketed math co-processors lol.

Socketed math co-processors?lol those went out with the rumble seats.lol


Live and learn then get seagate. I strarted with a 1gb seagate in my old apple performa 630cd 66MHz Motorola made with surplus silicone (I added the SCSI seagate beacuse the 280mb apple drive was a piece of s*** and died in the first week.) That harddrive and computer still run like new.(aka bad)

I started with a 500gb western digital in my current computer but that got ****** due to my inability to properly operate a PC. used the freezer trick and recovered the data to my current 1tb seagate. havnt had a problem yet.

 

[FrigginGLI]

Every brand of hd has failed me at one point or another. None of them last forever. My maxtor crashed with 200gigs of music on it, I had stuff from 1996 on it. I curse them to this day.

 

[Kansei]

Yeah it sucks.. as a consumer basically all we can do is try and do routine backups and just keep hopping from brand to brand as they all fail on us haha.

 

[girth]

I've had 6 Western Dig drives of various sizes and only 1 has failed me so far - a 200GB version that was only about 1 year old. Out of the 4 Maxtor drives I have over 3 years old, all are good so far. 1 300GB 2 or 3 year old Seagate drive is running strong yet too. So all in all not too bad of luck yet.

 

[Kansei]

some people advocate buying two different brand drives (same capacity) .. but I think that's really not doing too much for you.. what's the likelihood of losing both drives at the same time.

Hell with drive prices I should buy 3 more 160GB Samsung drives and do a Raid 5