it amazes me how many people report a crashed hard drive

every day or i get a email or 2 that someone has had a major hard drive crash, and they need a new registration key for WD…(really?)

8O 8O 8O 8O 8O

Seems a bit excessive -
I’ve had a “crash” a couple times, but not a hdd crash - something software (Windows) usually.
But, with a proper backup routine, I’ve always been able to bring it all back, including my registration.

So far, 3 years running day and night without HD crash. Hope it will last.

Perhaps a lot of users dedicate older PCs to running WD and their weather stations? If the HDDs have already had a few good years of life before seeing WD and they then get written to every second for another year or two by WD they’re ready to give up. I must admit that with a few PCs, I tend to find that I get at least an unrecoverable disk error (requiring a new hard disk) about once per year.

these are crashes where they have had to re install windows (supposedly)
maybe HD’s are getting flaky these days?

Very suspicious ! I have re-formated the HDD several times since I registered WD in 2001. My original key has always worked…why would they need a new one? :?

I’ve owned hard drives for about 13 years. Had about 15 of them. 2 have failed, due to age (I suppose) and one failed within two weeks of buying it. I caught that one early and backed up before failure impinged on anything major. The other two were not in active/critical use. I certainly think hard drives are better and more reliable especially considering the capacity.
I would suggest that rather than hard drive failure being the cause, its the fact that a lot people wouldn’t back up critical information. And what may appear to be a castastrophic failure of a hard drive or operating system, would in fact be quite recoverable with a little extra knowledge.

One thing I notice is that WD writes to the drive A LOT. The drive on my PC is chattering 24x7 and all it does is WD. This must place some extra strain on the drives.
I was wondering looking at it doing this yesterday if it would be possible (or even an option) to write off to a RAM drive and then off-load that every so often to the HDD. The only danger is that if the PC crashes the RAM drive data would be lost.

my HD is silent…cant hear it being used…so its a goody
i do try and back up important stuff regularly myself…because i guess you just never know when a HD will go pffttttt (i.e you cant reboot back in?)
but maybe just a boot off a floppy and alot of the data would still be there

In my experience XP thrashes drives, especially if you have indexing and system restore turned on.

I had three hard drives go bad. (not my weatherstations computers.) One was bad right out of the box.
Coyote

I’ve had a few DOA HD’s like that too… some have lasted as little as a week and croaked it too.

Maybe Kevin could do a graphic for that, quite a few of us could use it :lol:

Banned from the Ambient Forum
amazing werent you one of their best support persons weatheroz? 8O it will be their loss

you will find it a nice place to be right here , especialy with lots of other aust/NZ users too here :wink:

[quote author=nikoshepherd

It’s “my way, or the highway” over there unfortunately :frowning:

Well I dunno about being their best support person, but I did stick around after I changed to WD to continue to help others in there. Had the highest post counts in the forum though, but that doesn’t mean everything. :slight_smile:

The funny part was the thread, which has now been deleted to protect the guilty, was in regard to Ed changing the location of the images used to promote his products in the default templates of vws that many newbies might not be able to instantly fix up, leaving missing images on their webpages. I foolishly stuck up for the newbies and said it wasn’t fair on them to have their webpages screwed up because someone else decided to change the image locations without any warning or making updated default templates available to download.

I thought it would be common courtesy or simply good business practice to announce such a change before it happened. I know that you’d do the decent thing if you were changing the location of images that appear in the default WD templates, and that’s make new default templates available, as well as a couple of weeks warning of the changes, in order to make it less painful for the newbies out there.

BTW, if you post the words “Weather Display” in that forum, it censors them to display “+++” , so should anyone still posting there might like to add extra spaces or bogus characters in between those two ‘filthy’ words. :wink:

Certainly will be their loss, not mine.

Actually, I’m working on someone to change from vws to Weather Display, they’re the ones I sold my OS station to… really regret suggesting they use vws, but it was at the time when I didn’t understand WD. :frowning:

Some sort of MIRACLE has happened today! 8O

Turned on the computer here… everything’s working fine now!! 8O …Data extraction taking a while… Back on WD 10.32v… not upgrading until all instability bugs have been fixed. :wink:

Banned from the Ambient Forum

Sorry - couldn’t resist…


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