Just venting a bit...

Hi-
 
I went for years and years without a single hardware failure that I can recall (just lucky, I guess.) Within the past few years, I've had two Seagate 1TB drives fail (to their credit, they replaced them free of charge each time and extended the warranty) then a Canon printer died a couple of months out of warranty and most recently the HDMI port on my HP x2301 monitor went south -- again, just a few months out of warranty.
 
I will never buy another Canon printer nor another HP monitor, not out of spite, but just because I don't trust that their products are reliable and I can't afford to keep replacing them. Canon bugs me because they're now selling their printers for next to nothing and clearly making up the difference with the crazy amounts they're charging for ink. When I bought the printer, much less expensive cartridge replacements were available (at least on Amazon) but those appear to be gone now. I now have a Brother, which I don't like as well, but at least I can get relatively cheap ink for it (temporarily.)  I'm also buying extended warranties (from third parties,) which I never did before.
 
I had an Okidata printer for more than a decade that just worked, period. I still have working hard drives that are literally decades old. Granted they're not as large or as fast, but they still work fine. I remember when I first got the 1TB Seagate I thought "What if this dies? Isn't it better to have multiple smaller drives, or do I need to have multiple TB drives to back this one up to just in case?" ad infinitum.
 
I guess I'll just purchase extended warranties for all hardware from now on. Aargh! Is it my imagination, or is hardware just not as well made as it used to be?
 
Thanks-
 
-Susan

As a former computer tech and a large Network Manager, things "break" in and out of warranty.  Even the highest rated reliability items fail.  We had a lot of high end IBM equipment in our network and had equipment failures.  We had what was considered, at the time, the top line data communications modems and there were failures. 
 
Current hardware, I see someone praise a particular manufacturer because of longevity and no failures and then I can see someone else that has had a problem and "I'm never buying that brand again". 
 
My own case, I built a desktop PC using a Gigabyte motherboard.  I had several problems with the board, and it was even replaced once under warranty but the second board developed problems.  I finally replaced it with an ASRock motherboard and no more problems.  I could say I'm not buying a Gigabyte motherboard if I build another PC but may never have problems with a new board.
 
Murphy's Law does apply.

 
Given this sad trend, I've started hoarding items that I like and which I predict will have been cheapened even more by the time I have to replace them.  So instead of just replacing something, I'll buy many to last me till I'm old.
 
I do this also for things that I like but will have changed simply because companies are always changing the products even if they work just fine.  Often the change is done by someone/committee who has obiously never used the product to any great extent and suddenly something is awkward or no longer works.  So I buy several of something so I don't have to get used to something different when it breaks next year.  For instance, I like flat (and cheap) computer mice so when Dell stopped selling the one I was used to, and I discovered just about nobody made flat mice, I bought a hoard of HP Z4000s on sale which'll last me forever.  Same with Dell multi-lingual multi-media keyboards which I was lucky enough to find NOS on ebay from some seller in Texas.
 
For a while it was useful to pay more for something still made in North America, but I've been disappointed of late by even those products becoming poorly made.
 
On the subject of printers, I'm pretty amazed at how inexpensive they've become.  I know it's because of the ridiculous prices for the ink cartridges, but you don't have to buy them.  I've always only bought Epson, since dot-matrix-with-a-typewriter-ribbon days.  (I used to reink that ribbon using a bottle of black ink and an electric drill to get the ribbon to pass over a pad soaked in ink.)  In the last couple of years I've bought two 4-in-1 Epson Workforce printers for 100$ each (colour printing, fax, copy, scan).  These are big, complicated machines, so 100$ is impressive (ok, they're mostly cheap plastic whereas the dot-matrix was solid metal and would have survived a flight out the window). I refill 3rd party ink cartriges myself for next to nothing (a huge bottle of black ink is around 30$, colour is more).
 
I've still never had a hard drive fail, but I don't look forward to buying a new one.  Maybe I won't have to, big SSDs are getting cheap.
 

 
This about sums it up :
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_r9AnvHLjk
 
 

As azslow3 mentioned above, when multiple things fail in a short time you need to take a look at power and grounding. Invest in a real power conditioner / surge suppressor / UPS /  power distribution box and it might save your bacon down the road. If possible, run a dedicated circuit to your audio and computer equipment in which there is a separate ground wire that doesn't connect to the neutral anywhere except the N-G bond at the service panel. If that's not possible, consider an isolation transformer and make sure all your gear is on the secondary side of it. That'll will improve power quality, safety and greatly reduce hum/RFI/EFI problems.
 
I learned these lessons working with large computer rooms and multi-million dollar systems that drive huge companies - and consequently cannot go down, ever. Many of my customers measured downtime in millions of dollars per minute.
 
Of course, I couldn't personally justify the kinds of extreme measures those big operations took, but I have implemented a poor man's version. Doing the grunt labor myself it cost only about $500 total, including the UPS. I'd originally planned on adding an isolation transformer but couldn't afford it - turned out not to be necessary.

I've got through two 2TB USB drives I use for backups, one a Western Digital and one a Seagate, both bought within a month of each other. Both lasted about a year and then failed. Now I'm shopping for a single 4TB drive knowing full well that the same thing will happen. I fear for the integrity of my backups. 

 I had great luck with Seagate ST3500s. They started having errors after 7-8 years of service.
 WB Blues seem to be more reliable for me than Blacks.  IDE drives seem to last forever.
 AS for printers it's the only thing HP gets right. I had a 920 that was solid.
 I have a Brother Laser Printer.  It works fine.  Most of my printing is PDF.
 
 My mom gave me an older Brother LP with over a dozens cartridges. The drum wheel was going bad which was a $250 repair.  I gave it to a friend who runs a computer repair shop. While I didn't want to invest the money for the repair he said the old ones are worth fixing.
 
 I have two legacy systems with Intel and Asus boards.  When the components die they won't be replaced. A Q6600 will still run modern DAW software.  The other has an AMD Phenom IIx4 945 with an Asus board and nVidia chipset. It's still pretty good for audio.
 
 M-Audio gear: 2 AP2496, 1 AP192, FW 410 still in use.  Terratec EWX 2496 with Vista64 beta drivers still in use.
 
 The most I ever forked over was $500 for a Yamaha SW1000XG and was rendered useless with AMD and Intel updating platforms.  If I could do that over again I would buy an RME Hammerfall PCI card. Still supported to this day.  Another one was a Tascam 822 PCI, rock solid, low latency, not bothered by IRQ sharing, only to be retired because of no 64 bit drivers.
 
 With M-Audio dropping driver support for good stuff, Tascam and Yamaha increasing their lists of legacy devices, these are on my do not buy ever list.
 
 I've had more good luck with hardware than bad.
 

Hi all-
 
Thanks for the comments. I probably made the time of these failures sound compressed; it was actually over a few years that my drives, printer and monitor failed. I never lost data from the Seagate drives that died since I could tell from the sound they made while reading folders that something was wrong and I was able to get the data I needed from them backed up before the replacement drives arrived.
 
The Canon printer dying bothered me, since it was *just* out of warranty; there was absolutely no warning; I'd just bought replacement ink for it and it was such a dog-gone pretty printer!
 
I'm still using my HP monitor (with VGA rather than HDMI input.) I bought a $10.00 DP to VGA adapter so I can use one of my Samsung monitors alongside it with my laptop.
 
I know all hardware will ultimately fail. I've actually been very fortunate over the years, but since I *was* so fortunate with drives, printers and monitors for so long, I guess the last few failures surprised me a bit, hence the vent.
 
Thanks again-
 
-Susan

Speak of the devil... I have a 1TB WD Black HDD going bad. I can't complain as it is about 7 years old.  Luckily it's just slow and hasn't failed completely yet. I'm off to Microcenter when they open. I'm going to replace it with another 4TB WD Black and replace my system drive with a Samsung SSD.
 
I ran across something that we may want to be aware of though.  It may just be a coincidence but I had the music cranked to a fairly loud level. I'm wondering if keeping the CPU on the desk with the speakers may cause an issue with the drives. I have never had any issues before (that I know of) but after listening for a while is when I noticed the drive going bad. The drive going bad is also the same drive where I keep my music files.
 
 
Perhaps the vibrations caused a head crash or bad spots on the platters? Just a thought...

jbow
I understand. I've had pretty good luck but have had failures that went from bad to worse.
I REALLY need to get a docking station and a few HDs for backup, I do backup but I need to start cloning and doing it right... however, every time I go shopping online for hard drives and looks at the ones I can afford, not the cheapest, middle of the range, I read a few good reviews and some horror stories. It is depressing for someone like me who really knows nothing about all this, I just do what others tell me I should and hope it works. I guess I'm just going to cross my fingers and buy some HDs and a USB 3 docking station. I know I need SATA and USB 3.0. SATA, or SATA III who knows? Not me.
 
When I was still using a 386x (a Cyber Max with TURBO Boost), I think it was when I had updated to the wonderful OS Windows ME... my C Drive crashed. I put it in the shop and asked them to try wiping the C drive and re-installing an OS... and to NOT do ANYTHNG to the second HD. They wiped both drives then denied they did it. The second drive had about 5 years of my daughters music on it. I finally got most of it restored for her a few years ago, she had moved on and is producing other music, she was a DnB DJ playing clubs back then.
I learned a big lesson... pull all the drives you don't want messed with before letting anyone work on your computer.
Another reason I need to start cloning my drives.
I am interested too... is a drive a drive or is a Toshiba better than a Seagate better than some other? I figure for backups green drives are OK but if I have to actually replace a HD in a machine maybe by then SSDs will be cheaper.
 
Hardware failures are always bad news.

Hi Julien-
 
I'm glad you got at least most of your daughter's music restored.
 
Yeah, hardware when it dies is very disappointing ;)!
 
-Susan