Mick 53 Loc: Minneapolis

Hello Mark. Bummer! I have had pretty good luck with Western Digital. I have currently 2 4TB WdDrives and carbonite for back up. When I had one crash Carbonite backed it up to my new drive. I pay 100.00 a year but worth the off-site protection. Good luck

Jimmy T Loc: Virginia

When I retired in 2008 I bought a Maxtor one TB external HD ($350.00) w/internal fan (9x5X7") and it weighs a ton. I thought that it was the last external HD that I would ever have to buy, grin.
It was in constant use until 2015 when I bought two Seagate 5TB external HDs from Costco. They have been in constant use backing everything up at 5 pm every night.
I also have 3 or 4 smaller (<1TB/ea), portable (USB powered) hard drives that I rarely ever use. They all work, the last time I checked.

I guess I have been lucky because they all still work. I might add that none have been dropped or "thumped about".
I guess we can all guess what will happen next? Hahahaha!
Smile,
JimmyT Sends

Mark Williams

Please explain RAID

BboH Loc: s of 2/21, Ellicott City, MD

I had 1 Buffalo for about 10 years, only replaced it with another because both the Buffalo tech and the computer company I use said it was just a matter of time. Have had a Synology for about 6 years, had one drive fail, replaced it and the RAID system restored the data that it contained.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

Knock on wood, NO!

Canon Alchemist Loc: Central Florida

I have had some of the USB cables go bad, so the drive wouldn't power up. Switched cables and powered right up. I have several backups to the backups as well as cloud backups so as not to loose any files.

Eagle Wing

Several years ago I had two Seagate drives setup in my PC in a Raid configuration fail simultaneously. I was told by my PC support company that they had seen numerous problems with Seagate drives. I switched to WD drives and none of those have ever failed. Just my experience and that turned me off with Seagate. I now buy my WD drives either from BestBuy or B&H. Costco seems to sell only Seagate.

gwcole

Hi Mark. You didn't describe the failure of the drive. Not sure this will help but I used it on a couple of drives back in the mid 90s. Take the drive and put it in the freezer for a few hours. Take it out and hook it up. Is it working? If so, copy everything to another hard drive. You only have 15 minutes or so. This works best if the drive is removed from its case but it should work in a case. Freezing it restores it briefly. When doing this with an uncased drive it helps to periodically tap the drive lightly with the handle of a screwdriver. This is assuming that the data has not been corrupted.

bweber Loc: Newton, MA

No. I mine are on all of the time as I use Carbon Copy Cloner to run daily scheduled backups. and one large drive for Time Machine. My drives are either G Technology or sea gate portable. I use multiple backups in case of failure of a drive, but so far, and some of them have run for many years, I have never had a drive fail.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I have a few external drives. There are two popular sizes, one about the size of a deck of cards, the other about the size of a small book. The small ones are just connected with a USB cable to the computer. The larger ones have a USB cable to the computer and a power supply (generally a wall wart).

I had a couple of the larger ones quit working. I took one apart, which involved finding a seam in the plastic case and getting a knife in there and breaking up the plastic. Inside there was a regular internal hard drive. I had a case that would take a SATA drive, so I put it into that and the disk worked. The problem was probably in the old case holding the drive. The old hard drive was pretty small so I just took the data off it and put it onto my regular backup drives.

I had a couple of the small drives quit over the years. Both of them had gotten knocked off the table onto the floor. That really kills them when they are running. Even if they're not running, the chances of damage from drops is significant. Since then I have gotten into the habit of keeping all my external drives on the floor, laying down so they can't fall over.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Yes, it is definitely you. There is no other logical explanation for a hard drive dying.

The only drive I've had fail was an external that fell to the floor while doing a backup. This is going back to the 1970s. I now use HGST Ultrastar drives. I buy the reconditioned ones, for a very good price, and they've been running for years, both internal and externally.

6TB for $96.
https://smile.amazon.com/HGST-HUS726060ALE610-0F23001-Enterprise-Refurbished/dp/B07BYHRD52/ref=sr_1_8?dchild=1&keywords=hgst+uyltradesk&qid=1587130956&sr=8-8

Dossile

Hard drive failures are awful. You have my condolences. Because of that, for photography I use 3 external drives, for everything else I use the cloud. Photo files are too big. When I download photos I synchronize the shots to go to two 8 TB hard drives that require 110v and one that is portable and USB driven that I intermittently download a backup copy to and keep at my office. My computer has a 250 GB SSD and is used only as a workspace for pictures that are actively being worked on or getting ready for printing. Once finished with PP I download back to the drives.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Did you try a third party disk repair utility? Check Disk?

I learned years ago to use a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to keep my computer and drives running when power fails. Here in the South, thunderstorms, ice storms, and drunks smashing into power poles at 90 MPH are common enough.

Dirty power and power interruption can cause drive problems. So can unplugging a mounted drive.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Since the OP hasn’t replied to the questions concerning the drive’s power source (which may very well be the issue), I’ll just offer some general advice. Buy 1 (or 2 if you wish to mirror the data) enterprise class drive such as the HGST Ultrastar drive that Jerry mentioned above, and put it in a fan cooled enclosure that you purchase separately - just takes minutes. And also, as previously mentioned, place it somewhere that it won’t be subject to physical shock.

Forget the cheap prepackaged external drives. You cannot engineer, design, build and market (at a profit) a quality drive, enclosure, interface and possibly a power supply and cable for $69-$99. Yes, people buy them and claim to have great luck with the cheap POS, but it will eventually die and take your precious data with it. All HDs eventually die, but cheap, poorly cooled ones go a lot sooner!

And a final reminder: you need a primary (working) copy of your data, a backup, and an off-site disaster recovery copy.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

How does leaving drives on 24/7 cause to overheat? Makes no sense. I've had two external drives on my computer for years never failed never overheated. The first drive is my main Data drive the second one is my first backup. Are left on 24/7 with my PC which has never failed.

Same with my security system, as everyone else's, which are left on 24/7 hard drives don't fail and there's no fan in these systems.