Help! My office bought 22 desktops from HP around 11/04. We installed them on 11/28/04 and have been having tremendous failures with hard drives. We have a 3 year warranty and HP has sent spares but we need a more permanent solution. The failures are in 2 size drives, 40 and 160 GB. We have had a total of 15 failures. 11 on original drives - 50%, and 4 on replacements - 36.6%. Some machines are on UPS's, all have surge protectors and we are using HP's diagnostic program to determine failure. Heat is not an issue as we are in air conditioned office. HP has offered to replace remaining original Hard Drives, but the replacements are also failing at very high rate (36% in less time). We are getting killed with productivity. Other than scrapping the computers anybody have any ideas? 18 are HP dc 5000 4 are hp ws 4200 All are running xp pro original fails are; Ssamsung 40 GB Seagate 160 GB Replacements are Maxtor 40 and 160gb (we have not had a duel fail on the 160’s…Maxtor yet) It sure seems like the problem is not a hard drive issue but something else. Please e-mail with any ideas. Mike

Hi Mike, E-mailing you with ideas is not going to help anyone here now or in the future. The idea of a fourm is to exchange knowledge throughout the community. That aside I personally would start replacing the desktops one at a time. I suggest you get in with competent local system builder who will offer you more than replacement drives and oversea support. Have them build you one or two and see how they go. Jimi_l

Quote "We have a 3 year warranty and HP has sent spares but we need a more permanent solution."So have you sent back at least one computer for analysis.Why aren't you taking advantage of your warranty?It seems like 14 months is a long time to let a company ship you hard drives.I am puzzled that you are handling HP's warranty issuesfor them.No offense meant by this statement.I just don't get it!!

That seems unusual. The only HDD failure I've had personally occurred when I had the HDD hanging outside of the case dangling from the IDE cable and power connector and I banged against the side of the case. Is there anything unusual about the way these PCs are being used? Are the computers getting banged around? Could someone in the office benefit from having the computers be down?

I agree with BadBoy, there is something very fishy about your situation. Hard drives just do not die at that rate.

You may want to check the power management settings to make sure they're shutting off after a period of non-use. Other increased wear and tear could be due to constant reading and writing to the drive. That could be caused by insufficient RAM, but 512 ought to be enough. Is there good ventilation around the drives? You may want to add an internal fan.

If the computers have been or are being moved around "roughly" its not too hard to damage a harddrive..If you received all those computers from the same shipment the delivery service could have been hard on them..The way a harddrive was treated before it got to you greatly determines the lifespan of it. Was the Harddrives noisy when you first got them? Were they noisy a couple days before they went out? It would be too much of a coincidence to be anything but bad handling. VeL