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MallyMal · Nov 16, 2005, 06:29 PM

Damn, I have killed another HDD. This is the second HDD that has gone on me in the 2 years that I have had my Rev. A 12" PB. My HDDs only seem to last me 13 months. The first drive was the stock Toshiba 40GB 4200 RPM. I didn't have Applecare so I replaced the Toshiba myself with a Seagate 40GB 5400 RPM. As I said both drives only lasted me 13 months. I haven't dropped or gotten anything wet. This is kinda crazy. What else could be causing my HDDs to break so quickly?

The good thing is that I have a cloned copy of my startup disk on an external HDD which I am using as I type this. Also, I'm glad that I replaced the original drive with a Seagate because I'm covered under their 5 year warranty. So, I haven't lost data or money which is good

Chris Grande · Nov 16, 2005, 07:35 PM

A friend of mines 12" PB went through 2 HDs as well.

MallyMal · Nov 16, 2005, 07:50 PM

Could it be because the 12" gets hotter than the 15" and 17"?

jamil5454 · Nov 16, 2005, 07:56 PM

I think all laptops go through HDs pretty fast.

ibook_steve · Nov 16, 2005, 08:01 PM

Can you describe the circumstances around the death of your drives? I mean, if you drop your Powerbook in the 13th month, there's a pretty good chance your drive will only last 13 months!

;-)

Are you just having hard crashes or errors that Disk Utility or another program can't fix? I have laptop hard drives that have lasted almost 3 or 4 years with no problems. The ETFs of hard drives are rated in the thousands of hours, so this is very unusual.

Steve

MallyMal · Nov 17, 2005, 09:00 AM

Originally Posted by ibook_steve

Can you describe the circumstances around the death of your drives? I mean, if you drop your Powerbook in the 13th month, there's a pretty good chance your drive will only last 13 months!

;-)

Are you just having hard crashes or errors that Disk Utility or another program can't fix? I have laptop hard drives that have lasted almost 3 or 4 years with no problems. The ETFs of hard drives are rated in the thousands of hours, so this is very unusual.

Steve

Nope, I haven't ever dropped or banged up my PB. The first HDD had a mechanical failure that resulted in it making loud grinding sounds and being unable to boot. The second one started crashing a lot and now doesn't even show up in Disk Utility.

DrunkenTech · Nov 17, 2005, 10:29 AM

Occasionally, bad logic board or ATA cables can cause drives to fail. I've seen several cases where replacing one or both of those components stops repeated hard disk failure. The only issue I see is that the repeated failure usually happens faster than 13 months if it is something like the board or the cable. I think you have bad luck with drives.

jamil5454 · Nov 17, 2005, 10:38 AM

One way to help prevent this is to always put your machine to sleep before you move it. You may not drop it, but even little bumps and shakes add up over time.

WSKCONDOR · Nov 19, 2005, 02:48 AM

OK, I am not sure why, maybe bad luck or maybe there is a common thread. Burt I have just killed another HDD. THis one is in my PB 12" 1.33GHz. It is about a year and a half old. I have the 80 GB "fast" drive that was available. It seems like ordering any "special" options is a bad idea with APPLE.
ANYWAY, I was in on travel and two nights ago it started to sound funny (I thought it was the fan) a grinding noise. Then it was VERY slow to do anything, and I thought it was the wireless network or lack thereof. Now I can't even boot it. I can't even use Disk utility on it. I was hoping it would survive long enough to get home where my main backup is on an external firewire drive, but I can't do anything with it now.
My next step is to try to erase it. Then I guess rip it out and replace it, because it isn't covered by Applecare. I guess that's why they charge so much for Applecare for powerbooks. Because statistically they die a lot more frequently than say, an iMAC G5 that is about the same price.

I ALWAYS put it to sleep or even shot it down completely before moving it. I did tend to leave it on a lot overnight (when backing up or just so it can do it's sudo periodic stuff). But no dropping or bumping.

I did have the disk utility mount it at first, and started to "repair" the drive, and it came back with a "B-Tree error" that it tried to fix, but couldn't, and now it just says it can't fix the volume.

G. I. · Nov 19, 2005, 06:07 AM

Originally Posted by jamil5454

I think all laptops go through HDs pretty fast.

The 6GB Toshiba in my Pismo works flawlessly 14hrs/day since 2000.

WSKCONDOR · Nov 19, 2005, 07:39 AM

I think the 6GB is going to be more reliable than the 60GB. It's just physics. And the capacities have grown FAST. I never had a problem with the older, smaller drives, but have had several problems in the 30GB and larger region.

phoenix78 · Nov 19, 2005, 08:13 PM

I was lucky enough to have dealt with the manager of the apple store where i bought my pb 17". She knows alot more than the ordinary sales staff and was alot more liberal and informative in talking about the pbs. One of the things that she told me was that the HD are the most common thing to fail and that it usually happens right after the 12mth warranty expires. So getting the applecare is essential since it wil pay for itself in the end.

In my experience if a hard drive is in use for long periods of time (i.e. left on overnight and not sleeping; doing intense/large amounts of i/o) it will get REALLY hot. I have seen this with all laptops and their HDs no matter what the brand. It is just logical that it will go broke in no time at all. Nothing can endure that mch heat over such a long time.

Problem with laptops is that they suffer from poor cooling. So intense processes shouldnt really be done on laptops in my opinion. They should be done on a desktop where the cooling is significantly better. So if you do gaming; rendering of graphics and video etc... do the processor intense stff on a desktop and leave the design stages for your laptop.

If a laptop is the only pc that someone has, then getting all those fancy tablets that have fans on them to rest on would be the way to go just because it will do alot to keep your hardware reasonably cool. that may help extend the life of it.

But yeah... in any case i am always backing up my contents because these bad things do happen and it is important to be able to recover from it.

I guess we can only wait and look forward to having flash drives for HD in the near future where the cooling wil be improved (hence improved life time) since there is no moving parts. But until then we gotta put up with it.

cheers,
robM

8minute · Nov 23, 2005, 08:39 PM

I've got the same problem with my 1.5yr old 12" 1.33Ghz PB. It's been making weird buzzing noises whenever I move it for a few months now.

Ran disk utility couple days ago and it found that the hdd needed to be repaired (something about bitmap and incorrect sector count? Can't remember what it was exactly). Ran disk utility off the install cd and it repaired these problems.

Then just last night it started making loud grinding noises and everything would run really slow and lock up temporarily. Rebooted and it was fine for a few minutes.

About to order a new 7200rpm drive cos I think the hdd is on it's last legs now.

All this when I just managed to find someone who wanted to buy it (so I can upgrade to a new 15").

WSKCONDOR · Nov 27, 2005, 12:41 PM

Your drive is about to DIE. That's exactly how mine sounded and how it acted prior to giving up completely. If you can image your entire drive, I would do that asap.

8minute · Nov 27, 2005, 09:00 PM

Originally Posted by WSKCONDOR

Your drive is about to DIE. That's exactly how mine sounded and how it acted prior to giving up completely. If you can image your entire drive, I would do that asap.

Thanks for the tip ... I figured as much!!!

BranMuffins · Nov 28, 2005, 08:55 PM

Exact same thing happened to my 15" G4 with the 80GB drive. The wierdest part was I was having the problems for a while (noise when I moved it, etc) but it seemed it would run for the same amount of time as I had it shut down. Then it failed and I couldnt do a disk utility or even wipe and install and so I got a recall through applecare. The box took a while to come, then the weekend, so I couldnt send it out. On a whim since I was bored I fired it up on monday before I was sending it in and was able to do an archive install.

This fixed the problem for about a month. Then the grinding began again, and it was basically unrecoverable. Sent it back, the drive had finally failed.

So yeah, wierd noises when you move it is a bad thing, backup and pray.

Dog Like Nature · Nov 28, 2005, 10:52 PM

The Toshiba 80GB 5400rpm HD in my PB lasted 1yr & 8mo.
I just finished installing a new drive a few minutes ago!

What's the brand of drive that's been failing the most? I know of three people with the same drive (MK8026GAX) that have experienced failure after a similar time.

real · Dec 28, 2005, 12:20 PM

I just ordered a new drive as well, I have the same problem 13 months or and I need a new drive. Very Frustating.

scottiB · Dec 28, 2005, 12:32 PM

The same happenend with my nephew's 12" 1GHz PowerBook. The original drive failed within the first 12 months, then Apple's replacement died (S.M.A.R.T failing via Disk Utility) about 12 months later.

Same with another nephew's 12" iBook G4. Roughly the same age, but it's gone through two drives in the same amount of time.

yakkiebah · Dec 28, 2005, 06:46 PM

Same happend to me and my brother. We both bought the 12" 1.33 PB. My HD died after about a year and my brother's after only a few weeks.

I wonder how long my current HD will hold out...

JoshuaZ · Dec 28, 2005, 09:55 PM

I had the HD on my rev C go out this past summer.

Maybe its due to all the torrenting.... Seriously, constant spinning of the HD. Think about it.