Why do SSDs/HDDs hate me?

Hardware
1

I'll try to make this as quick as possible the failures will not be in order but my machine and did happen in the last 4 years.

Laptop Dell XPS L501X- original drive replaced with larger faster one WD black 750GB, 2 years later dies, RMA replacement drive dies 1yr later.

The laptop was cared for and never dropped or mishandled, about 1 year after installing the first drive I retired the laptop to school work at a desk since the battery was shot with the occasional game at a friends house. The second drive was almost always on the desk I can only think of one time I took it somewhere.

Custom built (by me) desktop corsair 750w GOLD rated PSU, Asus z87 pro motherboard on APC UPS 1500 backup/surge- last an Adata Premier Pro SP900 128GB SSD after 1.5-2 years, lost a Seagate Momentus 2.5in 500GB

Brothers custom built (by him) desktop (he didn't buy very premium parts Bronze PSU and a $50 MSI motherboard with an 8350)- 3-year-old Seagate 3.5 2TB becomes really slow even under a LiveCD boot of Linux and occasionally makes a weird sound so he replaces it. (On the live boot we copied files from is SSD to the Seagate with speeds no faster than 10MB/s, also tried NAS to HDD)

Fathers desktop (I can't remember everything but does have a GOLD rated PSU)- After 6 months Adata Premier Pro SP900 128GB SSD dies.

The following computer aren't even in the same building.

Fathers desktop at work, Gateway DX4860 (on a surge protector/UPS and whatever generator the building has) - after having an SSD in his home desktop complains his work one is now too slow, so I put in a Mushkin eco2 120GB and it died after 2 years.

Family friend desktop I built- WD 1TB blue could not be recognized and was making a loud clicking noise, it was fine before they lost power during a thunderstorm, it is on a surge protector but I question whether or not it died on it own or the storm did something.

I'm trying to figure out why they are dying they aren't the cheapest drives I can find and I have some HDDs in computers from the mid-90s that still work but my current ones just don't last. So anybody have any ideas/recommendations to stop the death?

Thanks in advance.

2

Sounds like you gave the same tech luck as me. Best thing to do is to buy hardware that is known to be reliable. Hdd stick with wd and buy blacks, 1 or 2tb.ssd go Samsung pro. 10 year warranty and known for reliability. Motherboards go Asus workstation. Built with reliability in mind. Pricy but you get what you pay for. They're generally designed like a server mobo. Gpu you're a bit out of luck as no option is really known for reliability. So evga for their warranty. If you have to go amd, get a custom sapphire card. Other brands for reliability are LG, corsair for ram and Intel. Brands to avoid are Seagate, Acer, asrock(though they're changing) gigabyte. Msi . I have gone through 11 monitors in the last 3 years but when I pay extra for quality hardware from reliable brands, hardware generally lasts.

3

well seagate had a scandle involving their 500gb hdd being shit. that's before then 2tb and 3tb shit drive thing. long story but the TL:DR is seagate drives are cheap because they suck. the clicking thing is known as the click of death. it happens when the arm holding the laser that reads the disk hits the spindle as it goes back and forth trying and failing to read the drive. it is usually caused by damage to the disk or laser or seal being compromised and dust getting inside the enclosure. this is one of the more common COD's of hard drives. the adata drives are not the best. they are known for being cheap not reliable.
muskins reactor series is pretty good but the eco 2 series not so much.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226678
reading the comments about 1/4 are "hey my SSD died in under a year" which to be fair this is the cheapest of the cheap and the newer models dont have this problem.

i think your problem is with one exception(WD black) you are buying a lot of cheapest of the cheap drives and many of them are so cheap because that model or company is bad and has high failure rates.

rule of thumb is stay away from seagates always.
when you get a new drive stress test it for a long time. some people do a week or more but i generally do about 12 hours. the purpose of this is to find errors and see if it dies. if something is wrong with the drive a heavy stress test for a long period of time will find it early while it's still under warranty.
and research the drive before you buy. seagate has a reputation for being shit. adata is known for being cheap not good. the old eco muskin drives are known for being cheap not good. wd is generally good but every brand has lemons.

4

I haven't watched the tek in a while almost a year now if not more but I bought the adata because Logan liked them said this one has been through a lot and still works, now I don't know if that changed . I know I didn't buy the highest quality SSDs but I did look around a little and avoided the badly reviewed ones.

I don't know what's wrong with my desktop but it tends to randomly brick USB thumb drives anything from cheapest target brand to SanDisk, pny, Samsung, Lexar, etc too many to count but while it annoyed me I never cared enough to try and warranty them because they weren't worth my time. By brick I mean I would be doing something copying/writing or even browsing in explorer and it would stop whatever I was doing and say drive needs to be formatted before use and if I tried to format it error disk is write protected, try different computer/os same thing even in Linux mint trying terminal commands couldn't bring them back. Before you say it's a windows problem the first os I installed was 8 which later updated to 10 when it came out and after being fed up with problems I never had with 8 or 7 (long story) I wiped it and installed 7.

Please tell me HGST is still good because I just bought one, Login was building a NAS with them in one of the last episodes I watched.

5

i have 2 hgst's and yea still good. my question is could it be you have a bad motherboard or psu? could you be getting surges that are frying your hardware? if not you just have shit luck.

6

Well if it surges I would think my APC 1500 would stop them and my dads APC 1250 then whatever commercial one his work supplied him with. My PSU is a Corsair 750 watt Gold rated I don't know the model but it's fully modular.

Every computer I had a hand in building has a Gold rated PSU the exception is my brother who didn't want to pay that much and bought a bronze rated one.

I never buy Seagate the ones I have came out of other pre-built computers or I got for free. Well since I bought cheap SSDs besides Samsung who makes good ones?

7

Sounds like a typical drive failure experience. Keep in mind that drives have higher failure rate than most components and you have to win the silicon lottery to get a really good one. There are consumer drives and enterprise level drives. Enterprise drives are more expensive and more robust, but you might buy a consumer level drive that lasts longer than an enterprise level drive. It is all luck, and that is why you need to have your data backed up so that you do not lose anything. Using a filesystem like ZFS on linux or freeNAS will ensure that your data does not get corrupted over the years. Having gold rated power supply does not mean that the drives have a reduced chance of failure.

8

I do have a freenas set up and I do backup the few important things I have (99% of my stuff is games + junk) I'm not concerned about data loss it's the failure rate I have. I did go back and look at the reviews of the drives I bought and there are a bunch of reviews that say they failed early that weren't there when I bought them.​