Multiple failures. Need insight

[CrimsonEclipse]

I recently had a series of hard drive failures and I need a little insight.

First, my laptop HD (WD 500GB Scorpio) SATA failed. Win7 kept trying to restore it but with no success. I tried a recovery by using a USB connection to a known good computer and it wouldn't even format. I'm assuming a complete hardware failure.

Second, I had a WD external Terabyte SATA with all of my music, data, etc. I was able to recover some data (about 2%) and the drive has been unreliable ever since.

Third, a Maxtor desktop drive IDE. Also a backup, also no data, no format.

And my final hope, a WD Desktop 160GB IDE with my data, just decided to give me the click of death.

All were tried on multiple computers with the same results.

Me laptop is running with an old 120GB HD using WinXP and a also a 250GB HD with Linux without problems.

How have I lost data on 4 hard drives using different connections?
I figured that having 3 backup drives was enough.

I didn't lose anything really valuable, but it brings a concern on what I might have done wrong, something obvious.

So, please, any insight to what's going wrong would be welcome.

CE

[rdgrimes]

FWIW, you're never really "backed up" unless you have 2 copies plus the original.

Sounds like a case of very bad luck to me. Have you considered drawing chalk pentagrams on the back of each hard drive? I've got around 10-12 HDDs running here and haven't had a failure for years. Externals are always shut down when not in use.

[CrimsonEclipse]

I also kept externals off and in a separate areas.

It would also seem that 3 out of 4 of my failed drives was Western Digital.

My next step is to sacrifice a chicken to the electron spirits.

[rdgrimes]

I have WD (mostly) and also Seagate and Samsung HDDs, they all seem to have the same degree of reliability.

Maybe you're failure-proof now for a few years?