Hard disk average lifetime?

[Machamix]

Hi, anyone knows the average lifetime of a quantum fireball ide hdd, that is used everyday for about 10 or 12 hours?

Thanks in advance

[socalgal]

Machamix - I closed the double post so it's less confusing (I also neglected to post a note there why, just wanted to let you know.) /forum/smile.gif

[Machamix]

Thanks socalgal, sorry for the double post, i made an error and double pressed the "submit" button

[LED]

It's hard to state the lifetime because of so many factors, bus speed, stress on multitasking, heat enviroment, which HD as some are made in different countries with unkown quality control. I have 2 Quantum Fireballs. One is 2 years old (SE) and the other is 4 (ST) and beleive me they have been used a lot.

[welsh wizard]

this may be of help not just to Fireballs,
most harddrives that we have to replace are either less than 6 months old or on average 5 to 6 years, WD have a tendancy to fail about 2 years 10 months, I wonder if this has something to do with there warranty time?
ww

[nilknarf]

The "official" average lifetime of a modern HD is 15,000 to 18,000 hours of use. On a 24/7/365 cycle, this is about 2 years.

Unofficially I'm using HD's that are up to 5 years old. I typically have been upgrading HD's before they go bad. You will typically have warning signs of impending drive failure, so don't worry too much because you'll see it coming when they fail. I would expect most drives to last 2-3 years. Most have warranties at least that long, so if they fail, you can have them repaired. Just be sure to do good backups. /forum/smile.gif

[nilknarf]

This is for welsh wizard...

Warranties represent the quality and confidence of a manufacturer. If they don't think it will last for more than x time, then that's how long their warranty is.

This is a fact, regardless of what the manufacturers say!
/forum/smile.gif

[welsh wizard]

to nilknarf, the interesting thing is WD give 3 year warr. my comment about warr not expiring before fail of drive was more a sarcastic remark about why they fail at that time, I can't always prove it but when repairs are done a lot of the time the failers could have been forced acording to tech eng they just can't prove it! /forum/wink.gif

[KillerBug]

I have 2 Quantum hard drives in my 486 machines that I had been using as servers (one print, one file). They were about 5 years old (both of them) when they started to act funny, then the one in the file server (having more usage) stopped loading correctly, I put the print server stuff on a disket set, so it takes 2 diskets to boot, moved the one from it into the file server, and re-loaded everything, about a month later, it started acting up, not as bad, I looked at it close, and it had 2 small errors on the media itself, once marked the hard drive worked again, but I decided to let the 486 systems rest in peace and let a pentium take over both jobs.