Hard Drive Problems

For the past 3 years I have had 4 HD failed on me regularly on one machine it doesn't move from the same spot or nor dose it get hit but I have the same machine for another family member and the HD haven't failed one is it possible for something in the computer to make it fail again and again even with different brands

Back in the day i had to replace my external burner five times...
It can be a lot of stuff.
How to set it up.
weird programming error
viruses
the computer was bad hardware
power surges and shortages.
i see you posted this on beeping
hard drives just fail but 4 in three years... replace computer or let a repair shop see what the hell is going on... should be cheap or free consultation... 49$ at the most.

yea I posted this on 4 different forums I don't like to dip my spoon in one bowl

You might try checking your power supply or the data connection to the motherboard. If your power supply is sending too much voltage to the hard drive it will significantly shorten its lifespan. It's probably less heard of but the motherboard can even be shorting it out. I bet you've been plugging each new drive into the same connectors. Test the power supply at a PC store or Best Buy if your desperate. I'd go with a small PC store, they often won't charge to do the test(Best Buy will always). If your handy with a multi-meter you could do this yourself.

Measuring the voltage on a PSU's outlets is a start, but nowhere near enough.

The critical thing to look out for is whether the PSU holds its voltage under its nominal load. Cheap PSUs are notorious for not being capable of this and this can be only measure when the PSU is under load.

Thing you can do:
-Buy a good PSU, reviewed by these guys: http://www.jonnyguru.com/

Here's why I reccomed these guys: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/410

-Buy a UPS. This solves problems with the purity of your electric source and protects your PC from power surges.

-Buy an external hard-disk to periodically backup your data.

-Buy a RAID card (preferably hardware RAID if you have the money) and mirror (RAID 1) the contents of your hard-drive. So called "firmware" RAID (often availible through integrated chipsets on your motherboard) are also a solution but will use your main CPU for calculations.

a) RAID 1 creates 1:1 copy of your stuff, is fast but you can only use 50% of your available space. (Needs at least 2 hard drives).

b)RAID 5 divides drives to stripes, and calculates a parity stripe for each set of data stripes. You effectively loose one drive to this purpose, so use you can use about 66%-80% of your available space. (Needs at least 3 hard drives).

Unlike RAID 1, when an error occurs to restore your data you *must* put a new drive into the array and rebuild it. If a further drive error occurs during this process you may loose data. This is more likely than one's given to think, since if the drives are old enough to fail, chances are when one is in bad shape so are the others.

c) RAID 6 is a better alternative as it creates 2 parity stripes for each set of data-stripes, so it can recover even from (albeit a single) drive error during array rebuild. (Needs at least 4 hard drives).