Just found out 40% of drive failures in my shop were from PSU ripple, not the drives themselves

I was going through old test logs from the last 2 years at my shop in Austin and noticed a pattern. Nearly half the drives we replaced had clean SMART data but were throwing bad sector remaps. Found a deep dive on HDD reliability forums that pointed to power supply ripple as the culprit. Now I check every PSU rail on a scope before swapping a drive. Has anyone else seen this kind of failure rate from power issues?

2 comments

2 Comments

williams.amy6d ago

Whoa, "clean SMART data but throwing bad sector remaps" is wild, I never even thought to check that. That honestly sounds like a nightmare to track down without a scope, I'd just assume the drives were dying normally. I mean, it makes sense that dirty power would mess with write operations but 40% is insane, that's a huge hidden failure rate.

ryanprice6d ago

Is 40% really that crazy though?