Hey all wanted to share my HDD experience and maybe hear from your experiences lately with HDDs.

In the past 10 years I have accumulated a lot of HDDs, all ranging from 2.5" and 3.5", internal and external. This is from either fixing, upgrading my PC's and others or just buying HDD's because I wanted more storage.

Within these years I have had a series of HDD failures, probably 90% of these failures are from external HDD enclosures or 3.5" drives sitting in HDD Docking Stations and approx. 2 2.5" HDD failures in enclosures. But within these 10 years I had one HDD failure that was running inside any of my PC's or Laptops, I have 3 PCs with 2 or more HDDs and 4 Laptops throughout my household and garage. These PCs and laptops receive various amounts of usage, from daily to maybe being turned on once a month, and a couple of these PCs have HDDs installed dating more than 10 years old. But they all turn on and operate without any issues at all barring the one internal HDD failure I had recently.

List of my HDD failures that I can remember.

2TB Seagate 3.5" External X 3 (this drive failed 3 separate times, original failure and then, 2 RMA drives, all same failure. These drives were plugged into my PC all the time and powered on all the time)

2TB WD 3.5" External (plugged in all the time)

2TB Seagate 3.5" X 2 (used in HDD Dock and only turned on when needed and always use the Windows Safely Remove Drive option)

3TB Seagate 3.5" (used in HDD Dock and only turned on when needed and always use the Windows Safely Remove Drive option)

1TB WD Black Internal (used all the time in one of my Office PCs, this HDD is my most recent failure)

500GB Fujitsu 2.5" External (only plugged in whenever needed)

So is it just me, or is it the size or brand of HDDs? Enclosures or the Docking Stations?

Btw, I always Safely Remove the HDDs before turning power off or unplugging them. Whether they are in enclosures or in a dock, continuous use or used from time to time, it doesn't seem to matter. Also none of these HDDs have been shocked via static discharge from touching, nobody touches these drives but me. There seems to be a trend here because I have 150GB and 250GB drives over 10 years old still running fine in my PC's.

I know nothing beats the size and price of a HDD compared to SSDs nothing comes close, up to 12TB now. So it makes me wary of buying anything bigger like a 8-10TB and just waiting them to fail.

Anyways, that's my experience with HDDs which are mixed in the last 10 years, however over 5 years using SSDs and I absolutely love them, they just aren't big enough yet, and no failures yet.

What have you experienced, positive or negative?

Most enclosures and all docking stations are not ventilated, so the HDDs connected through them operate at higher temperatures ; and they may be more prone to electrical instabilities as well (because of a poor quality power supply, or because the contacts can become faulty after some time, since there are more “moving parts” as opposed to a HDD connected directly to the motherboard with two cables that are never tinkered with). Now I tend to use internal hot-swap cages [*] more than external devices ; I've build my current computer with that purpose in mind : the enclosure is a Xigmatek Pantheon, which has all its HDD bays accessible from the front panel, including two hot-swappable ones (there's a 12cm fan blowing on them from the left side), and I added a Xigmatek 3-in-3 cage (which includes a 12cm fan, while the drives aren't too close as with some other models which allow to place 4 or even 5 drives in 3 bays but must run them hotter for that reason, plus it was cheap at 30 Euros, is compatible with 2.5" drives and does not require screws for 3.5" drives).
If you are in an area with high temperatures, adding fans could improve the HDD's longevity (regularly checking the HDDs' temperatures is a good practice, HD Sentinel is excellent for that purpose).
If you are in an area with electrical instabilities, using a UPS could improve the HDD's longevity (I have a Nitram PB 850 LCD).

[*] If that is not an incentive, I don't know what is !





From what I know, this protects from logical failures, not physical ones.


DR pros deal with failing drives on a daily basis, they must see pretty much everything with regards to brands and models.
But the consensus here is that recent Seagate drives tend to fail more often and more badly than average (meaning that their job is harder with these ones).

Failures I've had :
– 1 WD 1.5TB (bad sectors after a few months)
– 1 Toshiba 2TB (bad sectors after a few months, became very unstable, sometimes shutting down all of a sudden when trying to read a bad area, I had a hard time backing up the data, some files I hadn't backed up ended up corrupted ; then this brand has a poor customer support for retail 3.5" drives in Europe : the replacement unit has to be sent by the seller, I was lucky it didn't happen a few months later because the seller disappeared soon thereafter ; I won't buy another Toshiba HDD for that reason only)
– 2 Seagate 2TB (one ST2000DL003 I had bought new, bad sectors, I could transfer everything safely ; one ST2000DM001 I had bought used, bad sectors, I could transfer everything safely)
– 1 Seagate 3TB (ST3000DM001, bad sectors, I could transfer everything safely except 6 files which ended up corrupted and for which I had no backup)
– 1 WD 640GB (started clicking after it was shut down following a long and quite intensive work session, connected through the controller board of an eSATA enclosure but without the actual enclosure, during a hot summer day)
– 1 WD 3TB (a “recertified” WD30EZRX, still operating but started developping bad sectors, 22 pending so far)
The only one which stopped working all of a sudden with no prior warning is the WD 640GB, which was 8 years old, and failed most likely because of overheating.
(Well, I also had a 2.5 40GB HDD inside a set-top box which failed, but I don't remember the brand, and overheating was the most likely cause of failure for this one as well.)

If you're someone who's always experiencing hard drive failures, there's a few things you should know.

1. All hard drives can and will eventually fail. It's just a fact of life and it's why backups exist.
2. If you seem to always be having more than your fair share of failures, then you're either buying Seagate (they are crap by the way) or you may have an electrical problem in your house, building, street, etc.

Try running your computer equipment off of a UPS battery, even a small one that lasts just 5 minutes, and see what a difference it makes to your HDD longevity. People wast a lot of time/effort worrying about heat causing failures. I've got news for you, it's not about the heat in most cases. Enterprise SAS/SCSI drives will reach a temperature near boiling point while running in wide-open air and they can run steadily at that temperature for years on end. Far more often failures are caused by unsteady power. Anytime you see your lights flicker, there's a good chance it just damaged a hard drive if it wasn't on a UPS. Surge protectors do very little to protect hard drives since they only protect against high voltage. It's the low voltage that you've got to worry about. At least a UPS will just give you a single clean shut off without the up and down spikes.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Yet I was told just that in this thread. (And in this particular case it would seem like the most likely cause, apart from the fact that the drive had been operating quite intensively for several days.)


But they are precisely “enterprise” level drives, designed to withstand more taxing operating conditions than mainstream models. They must be much more expensive also. By default HD Sentinel issues a “yellow” warning once the temperature of a drive reaches 40°C and a “red” warning once it reaches 50°C. (For my laptop computer i set it a little higher, 50° and 57°, since in the hottest days of summer it can briefly reach 55-56°C, but higher than that would definitely start to feel unsafe.)


Regarding UPS, does it matter – for the safety of hard disk drives specifically – if it's an “off-line”, “line-in”, or “on-line” model ? Mine is a “line-in”, which is the mid-range design. From what I remember, the “on-line” models continuously filter the current, and provide a perfectly stable power supply (but are the most expensive) ; the “off-line” models are the cheapest, but they don't offer a full protection, when the power is cut there's a small delay before the battery takes over ; the “in-line” models intervene almost instantaneously, but I don't remember how they operate exactly.


I'm in a large town, in an apartement, I don't think that there are specific problems with the electrical wiring in the building, but it still happens once in a while. I think that a UPS is something everyone using a computer half seriously should have. (But most users don't even bother to chose a good quality PSU to begin with...)

Hi and thanks for the reply.

After all the views finally someone replied. It couldn't just be me having these problems.

"abolibibelot" I agree with you there that drives need to be properly ventilated, however for my cases some were in enclosures and some were not, the ones that weren't were in docking stations and were cool to the touch, even the ones in enclosures some were not running any more than an hour or so just to get files transferred to them and then they were turned off and disconnected.

Still either way they still failed. But drives running in my laptop and PC's have been running for years and running times were a lot longer than the external HDDs, and for the most part are still running without issues, except for the one that failed on me recently.

Leading to your statement about the power supplies and circuit boards in the enclosures and docking stations may not be the same standard as ones in Motherboards.

Because even after proper shutdown through windows they still seem to fail after awhile.

The only thing I don't seem o be doing is actually shutting down my systems first PC or laptop and then disconnecting/turning off the Ext HDDs. Not sure if this makes a difference.

"data-medics" I like your idea of the UPS, that seems to make sense to me, since the HDDs in my PCs and Laptops seem to never fail, probably because they have better and proper power to them all the time. Unlike my Ext drives which rely on their own PS but maybe prone to failure.