Okay, I can still be a bit productive today with my hauben but I’ve had yet another drive start to fail. Obviously I started to worry this was me but well… Do you know what the fail rate of shipped drives in the first year actually is? Between 1-5% Yes between one in every 20 and one in every 100. I can’t think of any industry where that’s close to acceptable. The problem can be physical or firmware.

See also https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2023/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive_failure#Metrics_of_failures

Oh and this is even worse, if possible, for people who use RAID. This is where you have several harddives acting as one- so data is spread rather than discretely per drive. And obviously the more drives you have the greater the odds of buying one that’s already bad.

I’ve experienced the firmware issue. And as the firmware update was quietly rolled out and never really admitted to, even when I did get the update the damage was done. I’ve stabilised the drive but there is still an unknown in regards to whether it actually is stable.

So I’ve got a really similar issue, but it seems all the bad sectors are in the MFT. Which was “repaired” but only to make it stable, the errors in terms of location of files remains. And for each error/warning I found in my logs? The same brand and series were in the top results. Oh and there is no firmware update. And the drive tools from the same generation don’t work. The depreciated one did.

So I’ve got another drive on the way.

To say I’m fatigued is to say the least. And worried? Yep. My entire folder of photos organised year by year (already backed up) seemed to have disappeared but I think it’s been moved. In theory I can copy the image of the drive and even if the file locations are wrong the error free drive will allow me to move them. And they should look like they are in the right place- thumbnails on folders show incorrect contents too.

I really needed that money for my ICMS registration. Or skincare. Or physio. Or glasses. And that failure rate will still apply to this drive. So the first thing I’ll need to do is search for the serial number and any issues so I can RMA it. I can’t do that with my current drives as they are full of data.