
Class action claims Windows 10 causes hard drive failures and other problems - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/unhappy-windows-10-upgraders-take-microsoft-to-court-for-lost-data-damaged-pcs/
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nisa
Not really Microsofts fault but difficult to check for and explain that some
disks that are already broken start to die or refuse to work after an Upgrade
that rewrites big parts of the disks. Bad sectors are getting remapped when
beeing written to and likely writing 10-15gb on these disks caused the disk to
reach it's reserved sectors and just giving up - or the new writes couldn't be
read anymore after booting.

However for someone that has no knowledge about computers and just uses them
this issues might make them angry at Windows 10.

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rbanffy
Windows update could check SMART readings before attempting the upgrade. It's
like 10 lines of code...

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PaulHoule
I have seen machines that looked OK but then you try to upgrade the OS and all
hell breaks lose and when you look closely you see that disk errors messed up
the install, sometimes trashing the whole system. (Although on one Windows
machine it would always roll back the install and leave the machine usable)

I have seen this on both macosx and windows.

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ivraatiems
I haven't seen any compelling evidence that W10's upgrade process is so broken
as to break hardware or fundamentally not work correctly as described here. It
sounds like coincidence.

But the fact that I read "Windows 10 destroys hard drives," nodded to myself,
and thought "huh, maybe," is indicative of how incredibly poor Microsoft's QA
has become lately, and how low my trust is in them as an entity. Businesswise,
they've adopted some great strategies. Software quality wise, not so much.

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Santosh83
On a related note, what would be HN readers' preferred HDD SMART monitoring
tool for Windows? Back on Linux the GNOME Disks utility did the job adequately
but am now on Windows.

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brainfire
What do you want to do exactly? Windows will log and give a pop-up if a disk
SMART status indicates it's failing.

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TwoNineA
Google did some tests/research/study a few years back and they noticed that
hard drives fail around 40% of the time without showing any signs with SMART
attributes.

EDIT: Ok, few years = 10. [http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-
failure-exper...](http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-
experience/)

~~~
brainfire
Fair- matches my experiences (seems to me it only flags a drive at the point
where it's physically clicking or otherwise very dead) but they specifically
asked for a SMART monitoring tool.

