T42 Repeated Drive Failure

Hi,

I have had the hard drive fail on my T42 laptop twice now. The first time it happened, the laptop was about a month old. The hard drive was replaced and it failed again now that the laptop is about 2 years old. My IT guy says that the failure was caused by running a space heater under the desk that the laptop sits upon, but I don't believe him. Can anyone tell me why the drives keep failing in this laptop?

 

Are you subjecting your notebook to excessive trauma? As well made as ThinkPads are made, they aren't meant to stand excessive force.

 

Other than that it seems strange thats it's only two years old, isn't the model about 6 years old?

Btw. you haven't disabled the harddrive protection system from IBM/Lenovo?

 

Yes. I'm sorry. It's a T400. I got it confused with another laptop I used to use at another company.

As for excessive trauma, it has fallen once, but the drive was fine for months after that. I do a lot of traveling, but I usually take care of it.

 

Ok, harddrives do fail, I just had a 6 month WD Blue series fail on me, so I wouldn't worry to much about it in the future.

 

Well was the drive actively reading/writing something? As it's been stated, drives do fail. Always good to have constant backups.

 

Keeping your laptop on top of a space heater is a bad idea. If your hard drive dies after 2 years of high use and high travel, it did it's job.

Rotational disk drives are pretty cheap now. You can get 320GB 7200rpm drives for $50 so don't be afraid to swap in a new drive every year or so.

 

Just stay away from me, you must have terrible luck. The chances of laptop's drive failing have little to do with the laptop itself. One reason might be that you use the laptop when it is moving causing the hdd to get damage, however Lenovo active protection should help you minimize that. Other than that I think mostly you just have bad luck or the hdd you have in you system is not durable enough for your usage.

 

While rare, I've seen drives that were DOA or that lasted several weeks. I've seen ones that lasted a couple of years, and I may still have a 40MB 3.5" half-height Western Digital first-generation IDE that could still be working (used to have it around just to show people); it was the last time I plugged it in, years ago.

I think your drive failures are coincidence, and have nothing to do with the laptop hardware itself. If it was your hardware, you'd be having more frequent failures. I had to have a system board replaced in my 386SX back in the day (under warranty) because its controller was killing drives every 30 days --which is very rare.