HP laptops Hard drives: Fail too fast? Also, Poor ciculation: Whats your take?

[computer_freak]

I have had too many hp computers hard drives fail too fast. One was this desktop, The hard drive failed in 3 months, replaced under warranty. Second one was a laptop, i went through 3 NEW, not refurbished, hard drives in 6 months. And now, on my third computer, laptop, It is failing and i hear grinding noises. And after only a year. On the first laptop, It was due to heat problems and poor circulation. Yet, get this: I had it on a elevated surface wit holes cut out for the fans and other areas like the RAM and hard drive. And fans underneath to coo it. Yet it registered at 145 degrees F one day!. AT IDLE!
I ran motherboard monitor on it one day and it got so hot it shut down the computer!!
This is just not right!! I mean, a hard drive fresh out of the factory fail in 3 months? I switched to a Sony desktop, and i heard it going so quietly. Which made me curious. So i opened the computer, to find ONE FAN! and ONE VENT! Oh, it it was by the cd drives, which are barely used. NOT even one on the processor! What were they thinking? so i added one and its much better now!
And that sony desktop. it separated the cd drives and the rest of the computer with an area in between. No place for good air circulation to get through.
Whats your take on this? Have you had any problems with poor circulation and hard drives failing too fast?

I switched all my hard drives to WD(western digital) and i haven't had one fail me yet!

[LaRoza]

That is odd. Laptop hard disks may be failing because of movement while running though.

The only drives I had fail were very, very old.

[computer_freak]

these have hardly been moved much. The one exception is sending one to colorado to my sister. BTW: i live in ohio so it ould have been that, but It came back working fine.
I have had so many hard drives fail i went ahead and bought this:
http://www.granitedigital.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=200
and this:
grc.com Look for spinrite there.
Both are amazing at hard drives!

[HermanAB]

According to Google's research, temperature has no effect on HDD failure rates, however, the HDDs do fail 10x more often than the manufacturers claim.

[FuturePilot]

I've had this HP laptop for over a year now and no problem with the hard drive. It was even dropped once, no twice :-&

[Icehuck]

Hard drives fail all the time and it definitely is not a rare occurrence. Moving parts will always be prone to failure. It doesn't really matter who built the system, the parts are all made in either Taiwan or China.

[gn2]

I like Samsung drives. Never had one fail.

Almost all the hard drive failures I've ever encountered have been Maxtor drives.

However Maxtor have now been absorbed by Seagate and things should have improved.

[toupeiro]

I run an HP Mobile Workstation 8710w. With the built in Quadro-FX card, this thing probably deals with more heat than your average run-of-the-mill laptop. It's been bulletproof. No complaints. I've recently been to HP's Colorado facility to see some of the next-generation high end desktops and laptops, and they are very impressive. HP really is raising the bar on workstation class hardware in my opinion.

[smartboyathome]

I like Samsung drives. Never had one fail.

Almost all the hard drive failures I've ever encountered have been Maxtor drives.

However Maxtor have now been absorbed by Seagate and things should have improved.

They have, at least where it concerns my $100 320GB external drive. Been running it pretty rigorously for almost 8 months as my primary drive, no problems whatsoever.

[mordak13]

That is odd. Laptop hard disks may be failing because of movement while running though.

The only drives I had fail were very, very old.

I have to agree with LaRoza. All my laptop drive failures have been the result of the laptop being either dropped or moved abruptly while it's performing a write operation to disk. Heat can have a slower effect on them but the dropping will do it quicker. Even a lite toss onto the bed can be enough to damage the spinning platter.