The “Break it Down” Blog

Well for the first time in 10 years a Seagate drive just failed on me. 1 year old 7200.9 SATA drive from Newegg just crapped out last night while I was trying to load something. In true hard-drive failure fashion it went something like this:

1. Try and load game
2. Load seems frozen, minimal disk access
3. Let computer sit for 10mins while it’s thinking
4. Machine bluescreens and reboots
5. After Windows loads and I login and initial programs are loading, computer locks up
6. I hit reset, now on Windows loading computer locks up again
7. I hit reset again, now computer takes forever at the disk-detection phase during BIOS load and finally times out, reporting no disk found

Wow… well as loyal as I have been to Seagate, never straying except for one time I got an IBM Deathstar and all 3 of them failed in 3 months. Now that Seagate has failed on me, it has sort of freed me up to consider something like the Western Digital 10k Raptor, which is a drive I have avoided like the plague because it is from Western Digital, a company that across a 20-person nerd sampling of friends, has a 50-60% failure rate. Aparently the Raptors are getting better and now that the second generation are out, I’m more curious about them.