Another one bites the dust
For the 5th time this year, a hard drive has failed on a computer I use regularly. Two on my main PC, one on my Media Center PC, my laptop hard drive, and a PC at work. Luckily, I back everything up on a daily basis so I was up and running the next day with everything restored. This time the dead drive was a Western Digital 120GB UltraATA drive (one of the first 8MB cache versions released in 2001). Of course I took the opportunity to upgrade my total capacity. With the addition of a 320GB drive, I’m now up to 1.24TB of total space.
How long is a typical hard drive supposed to last with regular usage? I used to think 10 years, or at a minimum longer than the life of the PC. These days, my drives aren’t lasting 5 years. As drives get larger, the trend seems to be going downwards. I suppose as time passes, demand for more storage space increases. If I have to replace older, slower, lower capacity drives every so often due to failure, it’s not the end of the world. I just wish I could pick the date and time.
One moral of the whole story is to backup your data. All drives fail eventually. It’s just a matter of when.
December 24th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
This comment is off topic and I apologize for that but I could not figure out how to contact you. Referring to http://apacheguide.org/, it’s really an AMAZING tutorial and I thank you so much for it. I was wondering if you had the time, could add the Pear Module to the tutorial? Thank you
December 31st, 2006 at 1:33 pm
Check your apartment’s power, if the voltage drops frequently that will kill HDD’s very quickly. If you can’t fix the problem at its source then you’ll probably need to use UPS’s for essential equipment.
Even if you’ve got the lowest quality HDDs I find it very unlikely that you’d lose that many disks in a year without outside influences.
I’ve never had a hard disk fail except at work - and only in the plant which has massive undervoltages and spikes 24/7. I’ve got Maxtors, Seagates, Western Digitals, and even a really shitty Quantum, all ATA. Most are more than 5 years old, and these machines are on almost all day if not 24/7.