Specific model of laptop hard drive dies after using it in laptop?

Question

I have a Dell Inspiron 17R 7720 Special Edition laptop. It came with 2 hard drives of 1 TB (thus a total of 2 TB). To date, the motherboard has been replaced at least three times now due to (different) defects.

The last motherboard replacement took place about a month ago, where my laptop was sent in for repair in an international repair center (in Germany, apparently).

When I got the laptop, I replaced the primary hard drive myself with an SSD, and kept the other 1 TB drive in it. Worked perfect up until the last repair, where the 1 TB HDD suddenly stopped working after about 15 minutes of usage. I thought the drive simply failed (maybe due to its travel to the Dell repair center), so I replaced it with a spare drive I had laying around (320 GB), and to date, that 320 GB hard drive still works.

So I asked for a replacement drive to replace the broken 1 TB drive, which arrived yesterday. Popped it in, it worked for 15 minutes, and yet again the drive seemed to have died.

I've asked for a replacing motherboard at Dell support now, but I'm curious whether it's actually possible that the hard drive is dead, because the other 320 GB hard drive still works fine.

So, 2 questions:

• Is there any way I can investigate this "broken" hard disk myself before Dell supplies me with a replacing motherboard (and probably another hard drive)?
• Why is my 320 GB hard drive not broken after 15 minutes of use?

For those interested, the 1 TB hard drive in question is a Seagate ST1000LM024.

Answer 1

Not surprisingly, mechanical hard drives do fail. The Annualized Failure Rate is, very roughly speaking, around 2% in the first year of a hard drive's life.

Mechanical hard drives are sensitive to shock, and yes poor handling during shipping can damage a hard drive or reduce it's life expectancy even when well packed. Having said that, 2.5-inch drives are generally less sensitive to shock than their 3.5inch counterparts, but still.

So, looking at that 2% figure, it is absolutely possible that you just got really unlucky. It's going to happen to someone. Like the guy who wins the lottery, someone's eventually going to get a string of bad hard drives in a row.

If it's not bad luck, then it's likely to be poor handling. And if it's not poor handling, then it's likely to be a manufacturing anomaly that affects a particular model, batch, or a seemingly random bunch of hard drives ultimately affected by a batch of faulty components common between them all.

As for investigating the issue? If the hard drive is properly dead then you won't even be able to get SMART (internal monitoring) data out of it. Even if you did get the SMART data out of it, it probably wouldn't tell you anything you don't already know ;-)

EDIT: There is of course a chance that your laptop/motherboard is frying hard drives. Stupidly small chance, but it's possible. I can say this with some confidence because I once lost three SSD hard drives over six months to a faulty PC. To this day I'm not sure whether it was a faulty power supply or motherboard, because I just threw the damn thing out onto a skip bin, but yes those SSDs (two Intel, one Samsung) all died thanks to that PC. Since then I have never had an SSD die on me and I've installed at least a dozen to date.