I'm a system builder and provide IT support for a couple of companies, I check all PCs weekly including the HDD health keeping backups up and so on, in February I had 7 HDDs failing on me, 5 from Samsung, 1 from Seagate and the other one an older 80GB WD which is kinda old and pretty acceptable for it's age.
These computers were built mostly in 2009 to 2011 and had light to moderate use but it's surprising the short lifespan of these mechanical HDDs, most of them were acquired from different stores, suffered no impacts or whatever.
I've been usually replacing these HDDs before they die, mostly with 40GB SSDs but a workstation with a Seagate ST3500418AS suddenly stopped working, the drive was unformatted without partitions and NO SMART! Yes, that's what I said, the HDD's SMART is empty, there are absolutely no attributes in it's SMART, the files were healthy and I pulled em off with Easeus software just fine, I reformatted the drive and tested it for many hours, "works fine" but I wouldn't trust this drive again. Virtually impossible to be a virus case, the workstation was well locked down by AD policies and software restrictions.
What's going on with all these HDDs? In december I had to replace about 4 or 5, I got over 70 computers working in temperature controlled environment and most of these HDDs were running at high 30s to 40º Celsius.
Most common failure are related to excessive number of bad blocks and critical pending sectors.
These computers were built mostly in 2009 to 2011 and had light to moderate use but it's surprising the short lifespan of these mechanical HDDs, most of them were acquired from different stores, suffered no impacts or whatever.
I've been usually replacing these HDDs before they die, mostly with 40GB SSDs but a workstation with a Seagate ST3500418AS suddenly stopped working, the drive was unformatted without partitions and NO SMART! Yes, that's what I said, the HDD's SMART is empty, there are absolutely no attributes in it's SMART, the files were healthy and I pulled em off with Easeus software just fine, I reformatted the drive and tested it for many hours, "works fine" but I wouldn't trust this drive again. Virtually impossible to be a virus case, the workstation was well locked down by AD policies and software restrictions.
What's going on with all these HDDs? In december I had to replace about 4 or 5, I got over 70 computers working in temperature controlled environment and most of these HDDs were running at high 30s to 40º Celsius.
Most common failure are related to excessive number of bad blocks and critical pending sectors.
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