Have you ever had a hard drive die?

I've never had a hard drive fail, and I've also never truly backed up my computer. I think that if the hard drive died, I'd think more about backing up than I currently do.

I had my backup drive start dying to the extent that when I tried to access it, my PC would BSOD.

Luckily, I had all my Data across 3 drives at this point, so nothing was lost.

Ever since, I have made sure to have multiple HDDs in every desktop, and an external clone of every laptop I own.

Never.

My PC fell off the table while on and copying data (...don't ask!) and it kept power on and nothing inc the hard drives broke or have failed in the year since then.

A friend dropped my laptop, cracked the case a little and the hard drive is fine (not to mention the screen and everything else). The force popped the battery out though. I'm always slinging my laptop onto my bed too if i'm in a hurry and it's constantly been fine. I don't try to do it too much though!

I do know that laptop drives are designed with a little more shock resistance and most drives should survive a couple of bumps when not writing or reading data because the heads are in park mode off the platter (spinning part of the disk) so damage is often caused by these smashing into the disk and damaging the surface. (think of a record player) I'm sure they get bumped around a bit too in transit from the store.

I've only had old drives slow down, a common symptom of old mechanical drives as the parts wear out.

Heat is a drives enemy, keep em cool and they should be ok for 5 or 10 years (or the manufacturers avg recommended operating lifetime). Though inevitably some will fail due to the inability to make all x thousand drives 100% reliable.

Fail to prepare and prepare for fail.

External drives are the worst though for failure because they get really hot and often the cases usb brain dies.

I've had two die... both were Seagate drives, one being a 500GB, the other a 200GB.

For some reason, I never had a hard drive die. I used to have a old machiene, 18+ years and the motherboard died before the hard drive (as in never use it anymore)

I've had a computer from 2004 in I think 2010 tell me it was about to die.

I have had one hard drive (out of a dozen?) and one solid state drive (out of one) die.

Sick feeling to see boot error and hear grinding noises. My backup was a month old. I was able to recover the drive using "SpinRite", a bit pricey but worth it. Lesson learned - backup more often.

Yup, I lose a drive every once in a while... Failures are a bit more common when you have as many hard disks as I do, though. My media server alone has 12 drives in it, and my main desktop has 4, and I have way more computers than that.

I hadn't but then all of a sudden i had three drives fail all within around a couple of months on completely separate machines . 1 in a black macbook, and 2 in two separate macbook pro 15".

The most important one was my macbook pro 15" used for work and it cost me £500 to get the drive restored as i didn't have a bootable backup saved!!!!

Needless to say I went out the next day and bought i big bastard external firewire drive and now back up all my machines. Although that reminds me, i haven't done it for a couple of months now so that's my next job this morning.