What Happened?..

[TheBrass556]

Soooo a pretty basic question for you guys today. I finally tackled building my first PC for gaming, which i was very excited about. Little nervous at first but long story short i get the thing up and running no problem! 😀 well all is well for about 3 days. I wake up to a frozen computer after leaving it on to download a game overnight. I was very worried. I get home that same day and attempt to boot it up, but of course i was greeted with "Bad hard disk". I cant even boot the system up in safe mode. As i go on reading, i came across something about the tick of death. Which pretty much confirmed my fears that my HD was dead..I had noticed from day 1 there was this faint taping/ticking that i never payed much attention to. So needless to say im ordering a new HD

But my questions really are:

What could have happened? i was doing a lot of downloads those few days. Could that have anything to do with it?

Is there anything i could do to try to prevent this from happening to me a second time??

And should you really not hear anything other then the fans running?


Any help at all is greatly appreciated. Wish me luck with this new one please.

 

[popatim]

you'll hear the harddrive running and maybe even chattering when its actually in use but the tick of death that your referring to is quite different. hard drives tend to fail in the first month or so if they are going to and if they make it past that then usually live for years.

 

[smorizio]

the issue with hard drives is not who made the drive but how it was shipped to the seller and you. most vendor when they sell oem(bulk drives) ship them in 15/30 packs where the drive is inclosed in an anti static and anti shock plastic claim shell with foam around it. if the seller like new egg was smart they whip the oem drive still in the plastic claim shell. most times they put it in a box with a few wraps of foam and peanuts. most times the drive gets to you fine. but if the box was dropped the drive can be shock drop or heads bent. if the drive is under 30 days rma back to the seller for credit.

 

[TheBrass556]

the issue with hard drives is not who made the drive but how it was shipped to the seller and you. most vendor when they sell oem(bulk drives) ship them in 15/30 packs where the drive is inclosed in an anti static and anti shock plastic claim shell with foam around it. if the seller like new egg was smart they whip the oem drive still in the plastic claim shell. most times they put it in a box with a few wraps of foam and peanuts. most times the drive gets to you fine. but if the box was dropped the drive can be shock drop or heads bent. if the drive is under 30 days rma back to the seller for credit.

Thank you. That is what im doing. I didnt know if heavy downloading or anything for that matter could damage them. It was out of nowhere. The hard drive was a WD Black and i hadn't heard much about them failing.

 

[smorizio]

all hard drive can fail. if the drive is fine at first boot up and install..run hd tunes and read the drive smart info to see if there any warnings or flags. after that you could buy another drive and a hot swap tray and use some back up software to make a back up image of your drive. or sign up for some free cloud storage to save your personal stuff. i dont like usb back up drives..if they fall over or if the i\o card/power board fails inside you could lose all of your data.

 

[spawnkiller]

Yeah generally SMART alert will pop when a tick appears (maybe not the 1st time but it'll habitually pop before the drive fails) and when a drive start doing that, backup everything and scrap it as it'll die soon anyway...

 

[TheBrass556]

Yeah generally SMART alert will pop when a tick appears (maybe not the 1st time but it'll habitually pop before the drive fails) and when a drive start doing that, backup everything and scrap it as it'll die soon anyway...

Yes. The SMART warning came up and said "SMART status bad" or something along those lines. But it was already to late by then. Thank you guys. I just hope this next one wont do the same thing.

 

[smorizio]

have new egg pack the next hd between two boxes of evil peep marshmallows.