HD failed on 5 month old Dell 1525

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My hard drive failed so Dell sent me a new one. Installed it and towards the end of the installation of the new drive, a window pop up that said "failed". Could not remember what it said but the strange thing is, it's working great. Everything loaded fine.

The hard drive they sent said refurbished on it. Is it normal for them to send you refurb hard drives? Also, I have to send back the original one. I don't have anything that important on it but was thinking of a way I could destroy it before I send it back. Any ideas? Thanks
 
the most common component to fail on a computer is the hard drive, followed by the power supply ( on a desktop or server ). I cannot imagine why you got a "failed" popup. I have never been sent a refurb hard drive as a replacement - but its really common on anything else (the entire computer, or most other electronics)

if your old hard drive was not working, its not easy to erase it other than taking a string magnet to it. I dont know if you had a laptop or a desktop, but on all desktop pc's I install a 2nd hard drive and mirror it to copy all important data and pictures to a backup. on a laptop you should copy important stuff to an external HD periocially.
 
Thanks, ya I'm not sure why I had that pop up. Hopefully it doesn't become a problem down the road.
 
This is the perfect opportunity to learn the virtues of disk imaging software. Buy an external backup hard drive and keep images on it as backup. Then, given a main HD failure, software installation gone bad, bad virus infection, etc., you can have your operating system back up and running exactly how it was previously in 20 minutes without doing anything more then loading your imaging software and reinstalling an image.
 
Yeah, when I failed a 500GB Seagate 7200.11 on my RAID array I got a refurbished drive. I only found out they were having problems with the 7200.11 series after I bought 5 and had 2 drop out. Oh well.
 
Originally Posted By: Onmo'Eegusee
Yeah, when I failed a 500GB Seagate 7200.11 on my RAID array I got a refurbished drive. I only found out they were having problems with the 7200.11 series after I bought 5 and had 2 drop out. Oh well.


I've had a 1TB and a 250GB Seagate both [censored] within the last two months. I've switched back to WD for my personal stuff.
 
All of my dell computers provided by work have had HD failures. My IBM thinkpad, and macbook pro, both of which get hard use, amongst a large number of other computers in the lab and office, have never had an issue.

I think Dell sources inferior parts to keep costs down, at least on their not-super-high-end stuff.
 
Refurbished parts is part of the experience nowadays. For example, if you buy a Seagate drive, then have to return it in warranty, you WILL receive a refurbished one.
 
FYI they don't open up the drive to refurbish. What they do is to rerun the qualification test and if the drive failed too many sectors, tune it down to a lower capacity.
 
Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
Refurbished parts is part of the experience nowadays. For example, if you buy a Seagate drive, then have to return it in warranty, you WILL receive a refurbished one.



Speaking of which, the last three WD RMA's I did, all the drives that came back were brand new. The REII I sent out, came back as an REIII
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Originally Posted By: PandaBear
FYI they don't open up the drive to refurbish. What they do is to rerun the qualification test and if the drive failed too many sectors, tune it down to a lower capacity.

That's interesting. I wouldn't put it past them.
 
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
FYI they don't open up the drive to refurbish. What they do is to rerun the qualification test and if the drive failed too many sectors, tune it down to a lower capacity.

That's interesting. I wouldn't put it past them.


That's a simplified statement. It checks for a lot more than just bad sectors like fly height, servo parameters, temperature, "sticky" points, etc.

Remember, the drives that fail the OEM qualification test goes to retail packages sold in Bestbuy, Staples, Newegg, etc, and they are good enough for most customer. You should be more worried about mishandling (vibration, drop, shock, etc) more than the refurbish process as those are the #1 user caused failure (#2 being poor cooling) for a drive.

Of course, if the drive is used in a wrong application (consumer drive in a high performance server) then it would wear out prematurely. If there is a design issue then nothing you can to fix that.
 
I had an 80GB Samsung desktop hard drive die on me a few years back after 2 years and they sent me a brand new drive (at least it looked new and didn't say 'refurbished' on it).

Anyways, I bought and installed a new drive before I received the RMA drive and I ended up never even using it. It is still sitting on my desk as a paperweight.
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I've been thinking and hard drives are #3 on the list of computer components that commonly fail, in my experience.

The most common computer component to fail is the optical drive, be it CD, CD-RW, or DVD-RW. I have had more problems with optical drives that won't read a disc (or won't spin, or won't open the tray, or make awful clunking noises while reading a disc) than anything else. In fact I've had computers where I've had to replace the optical drive twice before I replaced the computer with something better.

The next most common computer component to fail is the power supply. They usually just die with no drama, refusing to power on.

The third most common computer component to fail is the hard drive. Usually they fail to spin up. My last hard drive failure was, believe it or not, an 850MB Connor. Every hard drive I've had since then has continued to work well past the point at which it become obsolete.
 
When my hard drive crashed, I was browsing the internet and the computer shut off and restarted with a clicking sound coming from the hard drive. It went from 100% fine to grenading itself in 5 seconds with a POST message saying "Boot disk failure".

At least that's my experience. Do I backup my data now? Nope, I never learn my lessons.
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Originally Posted By: brianl703
I've been thinking and hard drives are #3 on the list of computer components that commonly fail, in my experience.


To me the order is:

1) CPU fan (about 2-3 years each)
2) Power supply (about 3-4 years each)
3) Wireless equipment (router, network card, etc)
4) Hard drive / CD-RW (about 4-5 years each if no design problem, 2-3 months if design problem)
5) Motherboard or video card (last more than 6 years usually, I buy good quality components)

The rest of the stuffs are likely wear and tear on the case, monitors, etc. Those usually last me a good 8 years (yes, I have a monitor that's 8 years old and only recently died).
 
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