How is it ever, in the users benefit for Hd’s to be sold described by their unformatted capacity? EU should regulate against it. if they believe in consumers rights. They have yet to convince me that most of the laws they have introduced to supercede are own, have been in favour of the common man.

Secondly what we need with drive failure is … warning, yes theyre can always be catostrophic failure and therefore a backup is the only real solution, but to be honest if the drives internal self repair mechanism wasn’t constantly hiding the trouble thats going on in the drive, and keeping the knowledge to itself as to how fucked the drive is, until its so bad it falls over, we be allot better off, if only it communicated with us a bit. In theory smart status enables us to see whether the drive is beginning to fail, but only if connected internally, so many people have external drives, smart status is no use at all in this scenario. The truth is the drive standard should be able to store a condition report about the drive mechanism on part of the drive which is accesible when in an external case by the user. So we can get some indication as to when the drive is going home.

Get this I had a drive that was exhibiting hardware failure, disc speed being continually reduced to read parts of the disc, down to the reading at 4k a sec type level. I lost allot of data and it happened without warning. Then when ive finished extracting what i Could lost about 75% of the data in the end. I reformat the drive and drive then says its perfectly fine ? In my opinion whats going on is the internal repair mechanism used the opportunity of a fresh format, and locked of more dodgy portions of the disk away from use and proceeded to format and pretend everything is fine. When in reality probably more of the disk will begin to fail ? In a way these self repairing mechanisms where they ascribe more of the disk as unusable and then keep on going, allows manufacturers to pretend theyre drives are much higher quality than they are, ie if we actually knew how much of the disk sectors were dropping out of use wed be appaled and would complain, but because its all a hidden process were lulled into thinking everything is fine, and drive quality is acceptable, when what users really want is not drives that wll carry on when reformatted but, drives that are polite enough to inform us when they are about/likely to fail, it looks like SSD will be this way inclined hopefully.