Less than two months ago, my 4TB HDD from Transcend died after being used for only 3 years. It’d never been dropped or anything but I used it as a main storage for my stuff, since I learned to never keep anything in the laptop itself except the programs. There was no backup and I tried to restore the data but unfortunately I’m not even able to know what’s its problem using CrystalDiskInfo or Windows’ CHKDSK command (there’s no abnormal sound but it never gets recognized when plugged in). So, I learned the importance of backup, storage device health, encryption and that kind of stuff the hard way.

I was having another HDD, so I used it as a main replacement (it’s one year old) and bought two brand-new 5TB HDDs (one from Seagate while the other from WD). I used the WD My Passport as a backup but while it was being encrypted by VeraCrypt and reaching 80%, i got an error message saying it’s damaged, ‘heart beating’ sound appeared on top of the normal spinning sound and I couldn’t access it.

Now after being formatted, it turned out it had pending (bad) sectors and in less than 24 hours, the number went from 8 to 75! I bought another new WD 5TB HDD to replace this one (just to secure my data [I’m paranoid now 😔💔] and buying a new one is cheaper than sending the dysfunctional drive to WD, I’m not from the US). This whole experience is daunting and losing time, money and data is not fun.

My question is why are the storage devices this way, and why do devices fail constantly and we have to replace them every other year? I’m not a conspiracy theorist but is the storage devices production industry a scam, to profit and keep us hooked (much like how smartphone companies want you to buy a new phone every years)?

I’ve no problem buying new storage every 10 years but things fail in less than 3 years? That’s insane.