[citation][nom]hellwig[/nom]All I ever read is that the long term reliability of these bigs drives is not so good. In fact, wasn't there an article on here (or linked from Tom's) that stated that the number of sectors on the disk, and the MTBF (calculated in accesses or something like that) means you can't read the entire disk without encountering an unrecoverable error? I.e. if the drive may encounter one failure every 1 Trillion accesses, well guess what, that drive has 1 trillion bytes on it, so how quickly will it take to reach that failure count?I'd like to see a reliability article done by Tom's. Put some of these 1TB and 2TB drives into various 24/7 scenarios and see how long they last without failures. These drives are getting bigger, but are they getting more reliable? 3TB is an awful lot of data to lose if you encounter a file system error and have to reformat.[/citation]
I agree. It is the first thing I thought when I saw the headline. If I were in the HDD industry, I would try to sell RAID0 drives stand alone. So basically, sell two HDDs that fit in a 3.5 bay with a light ( and driver optional) that blicks if one HDD fails, or sell portable HDDs that sandwich dual HDD. If one fails, you replace one of them. Or it can be done like car headlights, if one fails, you know you have to move the data to a new drive. Of course we can get Raid0 with existing tech, but I think make it more user-friendly. everybody stores their family albums and home videos on these drives now and there is not industry-wide option to provide redundancy in a simple package.