What do you assume for hard drive life?

[cadder]

I've had a lot of different hard drive systems in my home computers, starting at 20Mb MFM, then progressing through RLL, IDE, ESDI and ATA. I've only had one hard drive failure during that time, probably because no single hard drive stayed around long enough to fail. In a period of 4 years, we experienced hard drive failures in ALL of our work computers. Plus we've probably all known people or heard stories of drives that failed and people lost everything. I've also seen a lot of changes in the industry and some of the good players went away. I ask my supplier about this frequently and over the years at any given time the companies that he will have best luck with changes from one to another.

So I decided that I would increase my vigilance with backups, but also I would replace my drives after a certain time period, before they are as likely to fail.

What do you guys do? Replace it after it fails? Upgrade so frequently that failure chances are reduced? Set your own usable life for a drive and replace it when it reaches the end of that life?

 

[malveaux]

Heya,

I've had a single drive fail on me, an old 45gig WD drive that had a recall on it, actually, because it had a known problem called the "click of death." I kept mine regardless. I had two in a RAID0 setup, in an always on power mode, never turned off the system, and never let it spin down; I kept it moving fast, moving hot, because I wanted maximum performance. After a long time, I turned it off, once, and it cooled down over night. Next day, click of death. Good bye drive.

Every other drive I've had, still works to this day. Perfectly. Some are 10+ years old. Some more recent.

Have quite a few computers at work that are `always on' and have not had a single drive failure in 6 years.

I don't expect a lot of drive failure. It's funny, but it seems to fail right away or never.

Cheers,

 

[cadder]

There is something to be said for "always on". I've done it both ways- always on has lead to cooling fan bearing problems, and I think I remember even a hard drive bearing problem. Also it could be that once a hard drive makes it past 2 or 3 years, it will likely last a long time.