New Mystery Issue - Machine Won't Boot or Get Past Initial Black Screen

[fincoder]

I have never had a hard drive go from 100% functioning to zero like this before.

I thought it was a client computer? How can you be certain the drive was 100% the day before failure? Often the user ignores warning signs.
Anyway, regardless, I've had about 2 sudden HDD failures like yours so far this year and perhaps a dozen over my time in a small country town repair shop. Maybe my (mostly residential) customers have older computers on average.

I also do not love SSDs as many do for one of the reasons mentioned, repeatedly, in this very topic. They tend to fail out of the blue with zero warning before doing so

In light of the sudden HDD failure you have just witnessed and have been assured that do happen occasionally, this argument is not strong. Backups are needed no matter what kind of storage is used, to protect against failure as well as viruses and other causes of data loss. Also it's unclear whether sudden HDD failure is less common than SSD failure, maybe not.

 

[Sky-Knight]

WD Blue 3D VLAND SSD is 1.75M Hours MTTF. (199.7 years)
WD Gold HDD is 2M Hours MTBF.
WD Blue HDD is 750k hours MTBF. (86 years)

The Gold and the Blue SSD are warranted for 5 years, the blue HDD for 2.

Now... those of us with brains in our heads know those platter drives are done at 4 years, though the Gold is still under warranty for another year so I tend to just replace them as their warranties burn up.

SSDs that live past the first 30 days I replace when the software tells me to replace them.

But from the warranty docs we can assume that WD thinks their crap SSDs are at least as reliable as their entry level server platter drives.

 

[GTP]

Holy crap. How much did you charge to do all that stuff? Must've taken forever. With how much I would've had to charge to do all that stuff, I would have just quoted a replacement SSD and data backup. 1 hour of my time + a cheap SSD vs. 2-3 hours doing all that crap and leaving client with a slow as molasses hard drive.

FFS I give up.
The shaming never stops on this forum
@Kraken

 

[sapphirescales]

The shaming

I'm not trying to shame anyone. It's a legitimate question/comment. I'm sorry if you took it the wrong way. That wasn't my intention.

 

[britechguy]

I would not consider an expression of surprise, and real surprise, to be shaming in any way, either.

I've been on the receiving and giving end of both that sort of surprised reaction, and actual shaming, on many occasions. And there are times when shaming is absolutely, entirely appropriate. When someone does something wrong, blatantly wrong, the appropriate reaction from others is shaming and shunning. This was neither.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I read that as an expression of shock or surprise as well.

Take care not to read text negatively, it's human nature, and it's a thing. We tend to inject our own emotional state into text for some reason. Which under most circumstances results in things being read with a negativity filter. Combine that with the fact that we're all IT pros here, and we have a disproportionate amount of people that shall we say... lack social graces. It comes with the territory, and makes things difficult sometimes. I hate stereotyping, but they do exist for a reason after all.

 

[sapphirescales]

I would not consider an expression of surprise, and real surprise, to be shaming in any way, either.

Yes, it was definitely surprise on my part. We've just moved past the point of needing to do all that stuff nowadays. It just takes too long when a replacement SSD is so cheap and re-imaging a drive is so quick and easy. The only time I'd do something like that is if it was an old legacy computer running XP or older with custom software that couldn't easily be reinstalled, and I still would've simply imaged that drive to another new drive (SATA based SSD or CF card) and then tried to fix whatever software issues were preventing bootup.

IT pros...lack social graces

Ain't that the truth? It's really hard to find an employee who's actually good at their job AND good with clients and can sell. If you can find an employee like that, do whatever it takes to make them stick around. I don't know why it's so rare to find a good IT person who also has good social skills, but it just is. I like to think I do, but that's only when I'm in selling/client mode. In my personal life I'm terrible at socializing. So sorry @Barcelona and everyone else here on Technibble. I'm not trying to sell you guys anything so I have pretty much zero social skills on here.