life of a hard drive

[SithLord075]

Just curious, but how long does the typical larger capacity HD last before it needs to be replaced? I've heard that lower capacity 2-10GB Western Digital drives are not very durable. I'm using a WD 20GB that's about a year old. Ritually, I perform a scandisk/defrag atleast once a week. How long can I expect to keep this drive, granted it's taken care of?

[Comtech]

I've got a 3 gig Maxtor that's still going fine after 5 years. I've seen WD's that **** out after 2 months, and some that are still going years later.
I've still got 540 seagates that are stacked 7 deep, still working after 10 years.

[thxmanu]

Most manufacturers say 5 years (give or take). As Comtech is saying, some last, some don't.

[nag]

I have a 13 yr old 20 MB HDD which still works(as oversized FDD though).

[thxmanu]

Might as well send it in. It's still under warranty. Get a new drive to use and you can keep the WD "in the hole". Nothing to lose if it's going to die anyway.

[SithLord075]

True, true. I think I'll try a Maxtor drive this time. Does anyone have one of those newer 60GB drives? I was actually amazed just how cheap larger capacity drives have gotten over the last year.

[Richard_Cranium72]

MTBF - Mean Time Between Failure.

This is the duration of on time that the drive is meant to continue working. (MTBF) is a statistical calculation indicating the mean time between randomly occurring hardware failures.

Two parameters are necessary to fully describe how long a piece of hardware will last.
The first parameter is MTBF which is a measure of frequency in which random hardware failures will occur.
The second parameter is mean operating life which defines how long the hardware will last before an anticipated wearout phenomena will occur.
These two parameters combined together give the true projection of the 'real' life of the drive. As an example of how these parameters interrelate, assume your drive has an MTBF of 300,000 hours and an operating life of 5 years.

The drive will operate uninterrupted until failure (such as a file server, for example).
This is telling you that your drive should be very reliable until wearout occurs since the MTBF greatly exceeds the mean life.
However, after 5 years (on the average), expect it to fail due to wearout.

In this example, the actual chances of the drive lasting 3 years is 92%, 4 years is 88%, 5 years is 56% and 6 years is 35%.

A read/write head attached to an actuator arm actually floats on a cushion of air, 1-2 micro-inches (one millionth of an inch) above the surface of the platters.

A slight nudge, a power surge or a contaminant introduced into the drive may cause the head to touch the platter, resulting in a head crash.

The current tolerance drives is 1-2 micro-inches (millionths of an inch). Comparatively, a speck of dust is 4-8 micro-inches and human hair 10 micro-inches. 15 to 20% of the hard drives on campus fail per year?

JE: It's more of a software failure or corruption of the disk file allocation tables, rather than a hardware failure.
When I say software, I mean that the machine tries to start up and it can't find the active system folder, or for some reason the active system folder is damaged.
That can happen because of an application like Netscape that creates a lot of cache files.
Those cache files tend to cause a B-tree corruption problem. The B-tree is part of the disk structure [i.e., part of the software system that keeps track of file locations], and if that gets fouled up, then your hard drive's going to have problems at start-up.
http://www.wiu.edu/users/mifdo/hd.html

There are two kinds of bad sectors:

A soft bad sector comes from the hard-drive formatting wearing out.
You can map it out, or fix it by reformatting the hard drive.

A hard bad sector cannot be fixed. Data will never be able to be written to that sector of the drive.

If you have hard bad sectors, it's a sure sign the hard drive is dying.
http://search.zdnet.com/cgi-bin/texis/zdhelp/zdhelp/search.html?Utext=Hard+drives&Uhcat=Hardware&b=tipzone&Utiptype=answer and numerous Hard Drive failure questions here=>>
http://computing.net/cgi-bin/AT-search.cgi

What is the most common cause of hard drive failure?

Heat!

Hard drives keep getting faster and faster. Viurses of course can destroy a HD.

I'm not a big fan of leaving the thing running 24/7 either,

Have ya ever held a gyroscope with it spinning ??

The HD tries to duplicate that motion, rough on bearings..

running short on time, gotta run
DrVette

[BFlurie]

My two old WD drives -- 1.2G & 1.6G -- are both 5+ yrs w/no bad clusters. My Quantum 3.2G is 1.5 yrs & having problems -- already 13 bad clusters. Had to low-level reformat the C partition twice already. It's hanging on, but having to run Scandisk daily to hunt more bad clusters.

[Ygor]

My original Maxtor lasted until I used an incompetent shipper, about 3 1/2 years. My Maxtor 11.5 gig is still working fine at 3 1/2 now.
The WD I bought last year was rma'd, I hope the replacement works correctly. The one I sent back wouldn't boot at ata66.

[LiLRiceBoi]

the hdd that i hear fails the most are WD drives...i have had an ibm and maxtor for about 3 years and they work great

[Richard_Cranium72]

This year I've had ;

1. Quantum 8.4 Bigfoot-dead from click of death viurs
2. Quantum 2.5 Fireball-Ditto
3. WD 2.1 just dead
4. WD 4.3 super dead, gives BSOD's if ya try to wipe it.
5. WD 1.6 old and tired, past due,, Dead

I like my IBM's , cause they are so quiet you can barely hear them write, my Quantum 13gb @7200 sounds like a jet engine.
My Maxtor's @7200rpm click rather loudly while writing,, can't be healthy.

DrVette

[socalgal]

If you can, get ahold of SpinRite (http://grc.com/spinrite.htm) by Steve Gibson.

[SithLord075]

Great info! Thanks again for all the responses. From what I've just read about SpinRight, it seems like an excellent utility to have. Socalgal, do you use it yourself? Is it really worth the $89?

[SithLord075]

Thank you for your responses. I'm beginning to suspect that my 20GB WD won't last very long...I cannot defrag it because I get an error prompt indicating that errors have been found and that I should run scandisk. Well, I just finished a thorough scan and no errors were found. Any suggestions, or should I go with my instinct and replace this drive? Sending it back to WD to refurbish or repair it after one year just gives me an uncomfortable feeling.