New laptop 2 drive failures in 2 months

[Velvis]

I purchased and installed a new laptop for a client in mid August. About 2 weeks ago the hard drive failed. Tons of unreadable sectors. Replaced the drive and now it's saying boot device not found.

Is it just crappy odds this happened or could something else be going on?

HP laptop, toshiba 5400 drives (original and replacement)




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[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Could be a coincidence, bad power, overheating, or rough handling of the laptop.

 

[Diggs]

Had that happen (link below) to a Dell, but it was 4-5 hard drives -

https://www.technibble.com/forums/threads/can-you-test-a-sata-controller.71488/

 

[mr m]

Is it just crappy odds this happened or could something else be going on?

The only way to know for sure is to test it extensively 24/7. Do you have a loaner laptop for the client? Even if you don't you still need to keep it in the shop for 2-3 days. This way you can pop in a used HDD and beat it up diagnostically and see what happens. I'd also move, tap and rotate the laptop in different directions while R/W to see if you can make it hiccup.

I can't recall the last time a mobo ate a HDD. I have had a few bad/intermittent data cables.

Anything is possible as Diggs post shows. Did you or your client irritate a Voodoo High Priestess?

 

[HCHTech]

Put in an SSD this time - that should take rough-handling by the client off the table.

 

[TurricanII]

It's a long shot but I would be looking for SMART values that show vibration or shock

 

[Velvis]

I have severe doubt it's shock. It's an old guy and the laptop sits on a desk and never moves. I've been doing work for him for 10 years and the old laptop was never once moved. Sounds more like the Voodoo High Priestess....


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[TurricanII]

It's an old guy and the laptop sits on a desk and never moves.

Ahhh then the problem is of course that ' they don't make them like they used to'!!

 

[fincoder]

Replaced the drive and now it's saying boot device not found.

The first drive failure is likely just random bad luck.

Maybe the second failure is just a bad connection with the SATA port due to the first repair? Maybe just a re-assembly of the new drive will fix it.

 

[Velvis]

The first drive failure is likely just random bad luck.

Maybe the second failure is just a bad connection with the SATA port due to the first repair? Maybe just a re-assembly of the new drive will fix it.

That's a thought. I will check it out on Monday.

Thanks!


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[skdmaster]

Is it the environment where the laptop sits - ex. client had a failed hard drive due to the computer sitting on top of their cash drawer so the closing of the drawer caused the failure.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I had a desktop land on my bench with all the symptoms of a bad hard disk this week. I put it back together with a new SSD and the thing still wouldn't find a hard disk. A short time later, I diagnosed my first defective SATA power connector. The leg was fine, that one connector was bad.

But before you go down the rabbit hole, yank the replacement drive and stuff it onto another system to see if it cooperates. You cannot forget new electronics have a very high fault rate within the first two weeks.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Put in an SSD this time - that should take rough-handling by the client off the table.

Agreed...ditch the pain of a "watch the grass growing" 5,400rpm drive.

 

[fencepost]

SSD. A laptop sitting on a desk may be more likely to have problems than a comparable desktop, because if it's not in a comfortable place for the user it gets moved around either by dragging (those rubber feet catching and causing vibration....) or by being picked up a bit and dropped back into a new location.

 

[GTP]

Agreed...ditch the pain of a "watch the grass growing" 5,400rpm drive.

With the greatest respect...
I use a 2 TB WD "Red" 5400 rpm drive in my gaming machine. I play Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, DOOM, Wolfenstein Old Blood and New Order etc. Thes games are very demanding on hardware and the only "bottleneck" is my ancient video card, (nVidia GeForce GTX 660).
Benchmarks show that the HDD is plenty fast enough and has no impact on gaming performance in my case.
General computing is indistinguishable from a 7200 rpm drive either IMO.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

General computing is indistinguishable from a 7200 rpm drive either IMO.

With many games, such as first person shooters..(especially older ones like Doom or Wolfen) typically yes. Most HDD use is launching the game, and loading levels. Once a level is loaded..not much HDD hits. But what we don't have here is a chart showing actual performance differences. Being a very..very hard core FPS gaming person, (and custom gaming computer builder) (and public gaming server builder/admin) in my past...I'll respectfully disagree....I remember big time the performance differences I'd see when upgrading to 7,200 rpm back then. (cuz when I was peak in the middle of gaming computer building, 5,400rpm drives were still common, 7,200 rpm was a good upgrade. Also which type of 7,200 rpm drive you get is important...there are cheaper ones, less cache, etc. Compared to higher quality ones, 64 megs of cache, etc. WD Black for example.

 

[mr m]

Areal density (the amount of data bits per square inch) is of greater consideration than RPM. The marketing guys sell their wares touting RPM and capacity but that is not the whole story.

When I started in this field tape drives had bit densities of about 256 bits per square inch. The first hard disks were about 2-4 thousand BPSI and 1500-2400 RPM. Today I think 1.3 trillion BPSI is considered state of the art and 15K RPM HDD's are everywhere.

For extreme high end computing the super computers are switching to SSD's because the mechanical limitations of HDD's just can't keep up anymore with the demand of thousands of multiple cores.

 

[Diggs]

My two cents.....

I've been playing a bit of Ghost Recon: Wildlands (released this year). Huge suck on CPU and GPU. I first played the game with a 250GB Samsung Evo but ran out of room and cloned things to a 1TB WD Black. The wait for the level loads with the WD Black is painfully long after gaming with the SSD, but game play feels totally unchanged once the level is loaded.

It's kind of how I view an SSD on a desktop machine in the workplace. People start the same three apps on Monday morning and never turn the machine off. Is it worth the extra $$$ for the SSD? Each manager needs to make the call. Typical spinning drives far outlast a typical business system so the extra life of an SSD is wasted money(?).

 

[GTP]

especially older ones like Doom or Wolfen)

Being a very..very hard core FPS gaming person,

Then you would know that DOOM (released in 2016) and (both) Wolfenstein titles (New order released 2014 and Old Blood released 2015) along with Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 (released 2017) are fairly recent games that require some fairly good specs to achieve smooth gameplay.

 

[NviGate Systems]

One aspect not to forget for mobile systems is the migration to low power chips. I replaced a consumer HP laptop I had gotten in trade with an SSD, and although boot times were faster, there was a very large 30+ seconds lag once it reaches the desktop, the CPU and RAM were far too slow to keep up with the SSD. (Not literally, just as a system when having multiple apps and process open). This system ran at around 1.3Ghz and was quad core.

So in many cases, SSD's are not the be all end all for upgrades if the system simply doesn't have the bandwidth to deal with more throughput and often will bottleneck. Some systems are built to a budget to the point that any deviation from the original design results in a loss of performance, not that it had much to start with.

To the point of spinning hard disks, density plays a role, as does rotation, cache, fragmentation (to some extent), and of course your host system and what version of SATA it supports. Some drive may very well have poor performance if runner in a legacy mode to support older boards. I've seen this with USB flash drives where USB 3 performance is great, but on USB 2 it's a snail.