ahajv4life

What's the average life of a HD/how often they go bad?

LittleHoov

this is from G4

While it's not unusual to get a hard drive that doesn't work on arrival, or fails within the first few months, most hard drives should last about 4 to 6 years. In a laboratory setting, hard drives have a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) of 300,000 hours. That means, when 1,000 hard drives are run continuously, one fails every 300,000 hours. But the MTBF isn't a very accurate gauge of a hard drive's real-world lifespan.

Remember that your hard drive is a delicate mechanism, complete with bearings and moving parts-- just like any household appliance. Any unusual noises coming from your hard drive could be a sign that it's failing.

The top three things that will kill your hard drive are:

1. Overuse (such as defragging your hard drive every day)
2. Overheating due to lack of ventilation
3. Electrical shocks-- get a surge protect

ahajv4life

thx!!

narafa

Also bare in mind that higher speed hard disks have relatively shorter lives than smaller speed ones. In other words, don't expect your 10,000 RPM hard disk to live longer than your 5,400 RPM old hard disk provided that almost all conditions are kept the same.

Higher RPM increases friction between the reading needle and the storage disc and thus overheat your hard disk, that's why all high speed new hard disks overheat while older low speed ones don't. This overheating reduces the lifetime of the speedy hard disks greatly.

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ripken2004

i think i have a 3400rmp maxtor that has been alive for 9 yrs now, no problems with it at all and it is used every single day

narafa

Ya, I have a 1.3 GB Maxtor too which is still alive and working fine till now for almost 9 or 10 years too. I don't know the speed, but it's pretty low speed, I am sure.

My 8 GB WD HD, 5400 RPM, is also alive for over 6 years now, since 1999.

Believe me guys, all the new Hard disks are just crap, their quality are much lower than the older devices and this affects the life time greatly, although the storage is huge, who needs all this storage while having a DVD-RW

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- Intel P4 1.8 Ghz - 512 KB L2 Cache
- GigaByte MoBo with built in sound
- 384 MB SDRAM PC133
- GeForce 2 MX 400, 64 MB
- 80 GB Segate HDD + 80 GB WD HDD
- 52X LG CD-ROM
- 52X-24X-52X LG CD-RW
- LG 14" Monitor :mad:
- NIC 10/100
- Rockwell Internal Modem
- ADSL 256 Kbps :mad:
- Generic Floppy, Keyboard, Mouse & Speakers

Protected by Norton Corporate Edition & Sygate Personal Firewall

If you are dead sure that you are right, then probably the rest of the world is WRONG!!

Platino

I'd like to add:

4. Blows (e.g. when you accidently hit the case of your running computer and consequently cause a head-crash on the plates of the hard drive)

This reminds me when my IBM HD felt off a unbelievable height of 10 centimeters on a blank sheet - after this that thing was absolutely down the drain and all data was lost. -.-

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The_Other_One

Drives are actually quite sturdy when they aren't going. The heads are suppose to park so they can take some pretty dramatic blows and still work. Running, on the other hand, is a whole other story.

As for revs, that's something I dind't think about, though most of my 7200RPM drives have been good. All but maxtors -.- Thost lasted less than a year for me. All my others I've had for closer to 3 years without a problem.

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Praetor

How does one specifically differentiate from use and overuse?

HDDs usually max out <60C and their kill temp is much higher than that

Absolutely

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Scrapped>.<

what you said. don't ever hit the front case of a running Desktop no matter how mad you may be, because i kill two of my hardrives because my computer was going slow. a 60GB harddrive that came with the sony computer and the 200GB maxtor harddrive. the 60GB i had for like about 3 years and the 200GB it die like after on month because of the hitting.