Bad sectors

[Bozo]

I seem to be experiancing a lot of hard drives with bad sectors lately. Some of the drives are only a few months old. All are under a year old.
I'm seeing this on all makes of drives: Seagate, WD, & Maxtor. Could it be a side affect of the high densities that the drives are using on each platter?
Usually a drive with run for years without problems, but these newer drives don't seem to be very reliable.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[jtr1962]

Your power supply might be on the way out. About a year and a half ago I was getting similar problems with one drive (not bad sectors, but SMART told me I had more and more reallocated sectors). I had problems with UDF CD-RWs. I would get bad sectors even on new, freshly formatted disks. My worst problem was that one of my drives would drop out entirely, and the system would freeze up. I was all set to RMA the drive. Once I changed my power supply to a Tornado Super Silencer all these problems went away, and the system is much quieter to boot.

As an aside, I tend to think the newer, more densely packed drives will turn out to be less reliable in the long term. I still have drives from c. 1990 which are working fine. I doubt most of today's drives will still work 15 years from now. I wonder if they will even retain the low-level format data that long.

 

[Vlad The Impaler]

I have been having a lot of trouble with Maxtors. They also seem to be getting suspiciously cheap, up to £5 per unit on 40gb.