Sudden increase in 'stuck spindle' drive failures in Enterprise

Question

I'm trying to wrap my head around a sudden increase in drive failures (non-system or disk error \ drive no longer detected in BIOS).  We've had a total of 6 drives suddenly fail in the past 3 days, we typically have less than that fail in an ENTIRE year. I tested 4 of these drives and all 4 had the 5 beeps \ siren sounding error code (see stuck spindle audio in the link below). http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php I have a hard time believing this is a legitimate hardware issue but is it even possible for something to trigger a 'false-positive' condition?  To rule out a voltage spike or electrical damage these drives\PC's that exhibit these issues are spread throughout 3 different physical locations in different states. There have been numerous deep scanning security products pushed to these PC's in the past 2 months, more than I can even list.  Is it possible that somehow one of these products are corrupting the firmware on these drives to cause this? List of products I'm aware of that are on these systems : McAfee HIPsMcAfee AgentMcAfee Deep CommandMcAfee VirusScan Enterprise Newest products :Digital GuardianTanium ClientenCaseFireAMP Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm no drive expert but 18 drives failing since August with the same problem and they all had your "deep scan security" stuff applied on them? It seems to me the problem is something with your software that is doing a major number on those drives like nothing else, have you tried just running them without all that "security agent"  junk? It makes sens that if you alone have experinced this kind of failure that if it was a problem with the drives themselves hundreds or thousands of people would be complaining of the same problem. I've run my WD drives hard for 18 years in many machines and I've never had even one fail in any way, but then I run them on Mac machines and none of them use any of those "deep scan" security agents, Norton or any of that other stuff.