Dell Hard Drive Failures

Bobbin

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Hi all,

I don't know if this is just an isolated occurence with me or what but as of late I have been experiencing an unusual amount of Dell Hard Drive failures particularly amongst the Latitude E6400/6410 series laptops.

I can understand laptops going through a lot more punishment than desktops but I have been getting at least one user on average every week to week and a half now. I do PC support for about 265 PC's, just over half of which are laptops so I don't know if those numbers make a HDD failure this often par of the course? But I don't recall that it used to happen this often prior to the E-Series laptops.

I thought I would ask the general public before enquiring with Dell just to find out if anyone else can also confirm that they have noticed this sort of thing? :o It could also just be coincedence so any info on your experiences would be appreciated :)
 
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We've had a pretty even mishmash in terms of notebook HDD issues for 2011. Toshiba, Lenovo and Dell, none of the brands seem to stick out so far in my environment this year. Dell's mostly use Seagate drives. Maybe a bad batch of drives?
 
D830

hi we had a similar issue with a batch of D830's whereby i can say 70% of them failed after 4 months to 12 months mostly seagates.
but i know we bought them in a bulk order whereas our build to order units don't have this issue??
 
Thanks for the quick replies :) yeah I suppose we could nail it down to a batch issue. I think most of these laptops were ordered in one go as part of our hardware upgrade process.

As such I suppose there is very little I can do about it :/ only concern is even with plenty of notification many of our users still don't back-up their work :(
 
Dell

well i would suggest you speak to your SDM and get them to formalate a solution for you
maybe send a batch of replacement drives to you and replace them before hand?
just an option if you wanna be pro-active
i basically left it but dealt with btaches of 15 at a time that was critical users
and got them swopped out before hand.
 
I have an E6400 and have fortunately had no drive failures yet. On the other hand I have a colleague who HAS had a drive give up on him. Not sure how he treated his laptop, ie. whether it was from abuse or not. I have seen how some people treat their laptops and I wonder why their drives don't fail more than they do.

Sent from my GT-I9000 using MyBroadband Android App
 
What sort of failures are you experiencing with the drives, what symptoms?

Failure to boot into OS all of a sudden - sometimes a corrupt system file or sometimes just seems to freeze in a loading state. Bad CRC on random files when trying data recovery. Errors in diagnostics utility such as 2000-0142 on the HDD self-test.
 
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Failure to boot into OS all of a sudden - sometimes a corrupt system file or sometimes just seems to freeze in a loading state. Bad CRC on random files when trying data recovery. Errors in diagnostics utility such as 2000-0142 on the HDD self-test.

Sounds like bad media...which fits, I suppose, to a bad batch. Can't really pin it on Dell though, bad quality on Seagate's part.
 
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