Has anyone's hard drive failed?

I read on Wikipedia that all hard drives fail due to their mechanical nature. Has anyone with a FX laptop had their hard drive fail on them? None of my data is backed up. I am wondering how much longer I have before I'm fouled.

I am using the original hard drive.

 

Not yet, although I have a 4-5 year old NX860XL. A lot depends on usage and environment, too.

 

A friend just had his fail, and when I spilled the wine on my laptop it blitzed my hard drive so no info was retrievable. I use Acronis and try to clone my drive about ones a month. I had my second drive in the laptop, and had about 3 month old clone, just swapped the drives and was back up and running.

 

Mine been on Raid0 for 2 years now. (the laptop now I've handed down now to my little sister.)

 

You shouldnt be calculating how much life your hard drive has left, it could fail at any given time for 101 reasons.

You should always be backing up your data. Invest in an external hard drive.

 

My hard drive failed a few months ago and I only had my Gateway FX P-7801u for a year and a half by then. I had the original Hitachi HD (which failed) and a Western Digital in the second drive bay , which is running like a champ. Fortunately, I had an external hard drive to save all my data even though Windows 7 wasn't booting up. I used a Linux Boot CD using my USB key and that saved me.

I can't emphasize this more than flipfire has stated. Buy an external hard drive now! Your data is worth more than the $50-$100 of a reliable external hard drive.

 

mine failed..good indicator is temps slowly getting hotter and then real hot while gaming. if yours does fail, you can still recover the data. tough and you may lose some things. use the plug in for an external. drive will probobly skip, but you'll still be able to recover data..

 

Still haven't had the original drive in my 6860fx fail. Bought it when it first came out, and for a while I just left it at home turned on for days at a time. Don't use it as much now tho.

 

I own an MT6451 and my HD was failing. I was able to move alot of my "everyday" files to an external HD (there werent alot of them).

I "ditto" what everybody says - invest in an external HD and backup regularly.

 

ALL HDD's and SSD's etc will eventually fail. As they say nothing lasts forever. The type of failure though is important. If the mechanicals start going and bad sectors start showing you may have enough time to get your data.

The problem is catastophic failures, where an instant 100% failure comes into play. Abuse or accidents is a big cause of this but it can happen on its own too. For this reason a good backup is a must have! Even backups can fail but it is better to be protected.

 

I can't emphasize enough that an external hard drive is a terrible backup solution. External hard drives have a much higher failure rate due to bumps and heat issues than internal hard drives.

An external is great as one part of a backup, but I'd use at least a second backup solution as well. One backup solution will always fail when you need it most. In addition, if you get your computer stolen, its easy to steal the external HDD at the same time and you've still lost your data.

However, external HDD's are better than the customers I get who have everything important to them on a flash drive that quit working or broke.

On servers I recommend Carbonite as a decent backup solution, but its way too heavy/resource intensive to use on a day to day machine.

 

My gateway 6831 hard drive never failed after about 2 years of constant use. It was a wd

 

Mine failed barely after a year so I was totally out of service by gateway.

It was a Hitachi drive so I had looked up if they would support it and apparently their warranty is for 3 years. But since it was put into a retail computer they transferred all warranty responsibility to gateway.

It got a click of death.

Now it has a Western Digital drive in it.