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Problems with Dell Hard Drives?

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by briwlls

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I've been having an awful lot of clients running Dell recently have hard drive failures, specifically the Inspiron 5100's but also some desktops. I'm curious to see if others here in the group have noticed this trend?

Note, I'm not knocking Dell, I think they make a good machine and still recommend them to clients.

7 replies

by jjs1984

i currently am using an Inspiron 5100 and it's done me good for 2 yrs now...dell is good but their tech support, well they get a 1 outa 10 at best. I haven't had any hard drive failures as of yet.

by willcomp

Dell has basically become a "white box" reseller of PCs. Their Dimension 2400, 3000, and 4700 series and notebooks (and possibly other lines) are manufactured and assembled in the Pacific rim.

Since Dell is not a manufacturer, the question is: Who manufactured the hard drives? As we have seen in recent years, a particular manufacturer may have a flaw that takes time to begin appearing.

Based on ones I've seen the desktops are mostly WD. Notebook drives are probably from a different manufacturer.

Dalton

by jaqui

from what I've seen of dell it's fujitsu hard drives in the notebooks,
and toshiba cdroms.

only dell notebook I owned had no hard drive problems, but floppy, cdrom, and battery packs were really bad.

on top of that dell's support was the worst I have ever seen.( like zero support for this notebook )
they have this burr in thier butts about keeping support nationalised, yet don't support all products on all national sites.
( dell.ca has crap for support for notebooks, dell usa has support for the particular model but not for people in canada. )

dell corporate headquarters don't care that thier rep is going to hades because they don't support the products.

by bakasan

The company I work for has about 350 Dell Optiplex computers and we have about 2 HDD failures per month. Dell's components are purchaced in bulk to the lowest bidder...That's why the HDD models, Nic cards, video seem to change within a model.

generally I am happy with the product, I would just wish they could select a more reliable HDD.

by susan

I just got 2 Dell Inspiron 5100s myself that are bad, (tested bad on read tests). Of course they went bad 3 mths after the warranty ran out. They are at a school and the service tags are in the same series, hjh1341 & jjh1341. I find this very odd. Also, we had in a lab of Optiplex 270s, 3 hard drives went bad in a month- also after their warranties just ran out. Dell seems to be getting alot of so-called "bad" batches these days.

by fred123456

We run a strictly Dell Shop, we have a total of somewhere between 6000 and 7000 Dell PC's and servers. Harddrive problems are a common occurance but not overly common. Usually we are within plus or minus 4% of our total number of devices, per month, with issues. But we suspect that a majority of our HD problems occur on devices that are not maintained, defrag etc...

One post mentioned the dismal response with Dell phone support. We no longer use Dell support numbers. Each analyst creates his own support account with the Dell support site and submit tickets via the web. 99% of time we get our replacement hardware the next day.

Though we had a different number to call for support, to call in a faulty harddrive was a one to two hour process.

by bostech

... and save on fewer warranty claims for bad HDs. Seagate HDs come with 5-yr warranties. Whenever a computer has a bad drive, is past warranty and is worth keeping, we go with Seagate for our clients. It is hardly worth saving a few bucks on cheaper drives with 1- or 3- yr warranties.

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