[Eug-lug] More Laptop Woes

[Quentin Hartman]

On 5/21/07, toman at ellisdunes.org <toman at ellisdunes.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> Opinions sought:
>
> I have a friend with a Dell laptop that's old enough to be out of
> warranty, but not too old to be useful.
> The 20G hard drive in it failed, so I replaced it for him with a 60G
> drive a few months ago.
> Now that has failed as well, and even if I mount it in a USB enclosure,
> it still fails. So the questions are;
> Is this a pair of bad drives, or one bad controller? RMA the drive? Can
> the controller be replaced, and if so
> is it worth it? Should I just tell him to buy a Mac (because he's
> thinking of going back to Windows)? In this instance, data recovery
> would be nice, but it's not a huge concern.


If it doesn't work in a known good USB enclosure, it's almost definitely two
bad drives. Id' definitely RMA it if it's under warranty. The question then
becomes, why did they fail? Maybe you just got unlucky, that's certainly not
unheard of. Maybe your friend mistreats his equipment (unintentionally or
not) and he killed them. Maybe the Dell has a design flaw and cooked the
drives. Maybe your friend likes to use his laptop in bed or on the couch,
and unwittingly sets it on a soft surface that blocks a cooling vent, and
cooked the drives.

Unforutnately, without more information, it's hard to make a recommendation.
What make / model is the newer drive? Maybe it has known problems.
Personally, I recommend Seagate drives in most cases. They are at least as
reliable as other makes, and every one of them carries a 5 year warranty.

Remember that with hard drives, the questions isn't "if" they will fail,
it's "When".


                                                 Confused in Cottage
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-- =

-Regards-

-Quentin Hartman-
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