Hard-Drive Failures Surprisingly Frequent

[rkr1958]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131168-page,1/article.html#

Your hard drive may not be as reliable as manufacturers would like you to think. Recent studies by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Google suggest that vendor Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) ratings for hard drives are a bit misleading.

I always knew it. I've lost four harddrives in the past six years. Over this time I've owned a total of 9. The oldest working drive is 3.5-years and the youngest is a couple of months.

[ozymango]

Interesting report, but I don't get this part:

Surprisingly, Google's study found no correlation between drive failure and elevated heat and activity levels. The largest percentage of failures occurred on drives operating within a mild 77-to-88-degree range. However, desktop PCs typically operate at temperatures well over the maximum of 125 degrees reported in the Google study, so the findings do not support running hard drives without adequate airflow to cool them.

Now, if the largest percentage of failures occurred on drives operating within a certain (relatively cool) temperature range, and desktop PC's typically operate at temperatures well over the maximum of 125 degrees reported ... seems to me this is saying that cooling the drive makes no real difference. Yet the findings "do not support running hard drives without adequate airflow to cool them."

What findings?! They've got desktop PCs you can fry an egg on but the largest percentage of failed drives is coming from the cooler machines!

[jagabo]

They're simply saying Google's data can't be extrapolated to temperatures found in typical desktop computers. Since all Google's drives run under 125 degrees it's always possible, for example, that every drive fails at 130 degrees. Google would never have found this.

[zoobie]

I just had my big HDD change it's label to FAT16 and XP didn't recognize it. I then read it happens "occassionally" and thought wtf? Turns out I had completely filled it up within a few mb and it evidently needed more space to operate. After removing some files, I immediately backed it up with datadiscs because I can't trust HDD's anymore.