Most of the time the hard drive will either fail in the first few days of use or will last for quite a few years.
The ones I had fail were unusual in that they failed just after the end of the warranty period. Fortunately in each case the drives started making noises before they failed and I was able to make a complete copy to a new drive before they actually failed completely.
I have my trusty copy of SpinRite by Steve Gibson, it’s managed to recover every prematurely failed hard disk I’ve ever had… if only I knew about the product during that massive hard disk wipe-out in the 90’s where I lost 2GB’s worth of source code which I had produced… oh well
Is that what that software is for. I’d never quite looked at the page referencing it long enough to realise. Always on the way past to one of his other products.
Yea, SpinRite is basically the industry standard for hard disk recovery… even the ones that won’t boot or are barely recognised by the BIOS in some cases can be recovered enough to boot from (to backup the data before replacing the drive)… it’s an amazing piece of software, there’s nothing else I’ve come across on the market that can resurrect damaged disks to that extent, I’ve saved a LOT of data using it so I can’t sing it’s praises highly enough, it’s like witchcraft or voodoo.
but the platters has to be spinning, and the arm has to be moving for it to work. I have never lost data from disks that still had a fraction of life left.
as long as it’s spinning and the arm is moving - even with a lot of noise both from the platters and sometimes even with the “click of death” from the arm, i have still managed to get data out. I have opened some with a screwdriver, while others has been opened with a saw and axe
but mostly the tools has been the tools in windows, - a disktool run from a cd/diskette from the disk manufactor combined with different recovery tools over the years, which these last years has mostly been disk explorer and get data back from runtime software.
a good recovery software should in my opinion recover from a source to a destination, and from what i know spinrite does not do this
it keeps refreshing the surface and control reads to get as much data from the sectors as possible, before it - puts it back on the same drive again. in my opinion it’s more important getting your files from the disk to a safe place than to scan and try to rebuild sectors, as the disk can die while running spinrite.
if i would use spinrite, it would have to be after rescuing my data - but why would i use it now, as the disk will most likely die again after a while anyway if you manage to repair it.
I have not tried spinrite myself because of this. some times you only get one shot to save your files, and i have lost too much data to start playing russian roulette with it
For me the western digital is the best and have used the drive for many years.
I have also tried the seagate but not satisfied with it. After its failure I used the windows data recovery software from Stellar Phoenix.
More details about the western digital can be seen here
I guess all drives (brand) has some lemons in their batches one way or the other. Most of my HD’s are Seagate and I think I get better performance from them vs WD’s.