fzabkar wrote:
It's possible for an unstable +5V supply to impact on a HDD's performance and reliability, but I suspect that the most likely reason for the increased incidence of failure is that newer HDDs are less reliable than the older ones. They spin faster, have much higher data densities, and the heads fly much closer to the platters. Laptops are also affected by heat and vibration. In any case the +5VDC supply is derived from the adapter's 19VDC output via a DC-DC converter on the laptop's motherboard, so any instability in the adapter's output would be largely mitigated by the down-converter on the motherboard.
That's doubtful, because the increased incidence of failure happened with drives of similar characteristics.
In fact, the specs of external 2'5 hard disks in particular have changed very little over the last 4 years. The most commonly used types by the regular users are drives of 500 GB and 1 TB with 5400 RPM and 8 MB buffer.
Unless when you said "newer HDD" you were contrasting them with hard disk types of 10 years ago, the bolded statement is odd.
For instances, the external drives which went bad were from a batch of four bought in the fall of 2010, Samsung G2 of 640 GB with 5400 RPM an 8 MB buffer. Over 3 years, I had just one going bad after 3 years of intense usage on my old laptop (an Asus) and desktop.
When I moved to the current laptop (a Dell), another 2 went bad in just 8 months. And it happened despite that their usage during this period had been less than 10% of what had been prior to that (basically, I just copied several big amounts of data - some tens of GB - on them on several occasions and that was it).
The Dell's internal drive (a Toshiba of 500 GB) also started to develop bad sectors after 3 months. Prior to that, I had
never had an internal hard disk go bad on me.
My old Asus' internal drive is a 320 GB with 5400 RPM and 8 MB buffer. Is still pristine clean after almost 5 years on intense usage. My desktop's 2 internal drives of 1 TB, of 7200 RPM and 32 MB buffer, are perfectly fine, despite 3 years of intense usage.
A third drive which went bad in (possible) connection with the Dell was an ADATA CH11 of 1 TB with 5400 RPM and 8 MB buffer. That drive was not used AT ALL, except for undergoing some occasional surface scan. During the last surface scan, it showed bad sectors. Some of those surface scans occurred, you guessed it, on the Dell.
I mean, come on, could this be a coincidence?. And I would rather investigate the matter
before I run out of hard disks.