Spot on, I have experienced my drives to either fail quite soon, or "never". I am still running one of my very early 40GB hard disks. It must be like 8 years old.
How long do disk drives last?
41–50 of 162 posts
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#42These numbers line up nicely with what I've experienced on much smaller scales (I've never personally cared about more than a few hundred spinning drives at once), which is that in a nice mix of old, middle-aged, and new drives, 5-10% go kaput each year.
Incidentally, about "consumer-grade drives", the last time I looked into this, I was led to believe that if it's SATA and 7200RPM (or less), there's no hardware distinction. It's just firmware. Consumer drives try very hard to recover data from a bad sector, while Enterprise/RAID drives have a recovery time limit to prevent them being unnecessarily dropped from an array (which will have its own recovery mechanisms). That's it.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#43Anybody knows how long floppy disks, diskettes and their respective drives last? Odd question, but I've always been wondering. These things just seem to hast forever.
According to this article[0], the data from old floppy disks is pretty much gone.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I understand, at this point all 3 major hard disk vendors have very similar failure rates. The thing to look out for is that certain runs of drives may be "contaminated" during the manufacturing process, but knowing which ones is pretty unpredictable.
Also some combinations of devices can create problems. We had a RAID controller that randomly rebuild mirrored sets because the drive was 'dead'. After the rebuild the drive seemed fine. We concluded there was some firmware delay that caused the controller to time out some operation and call the drive 'failed'. We replaced the drives with a different brand and the 'failures' went away.
> We concluded there was some firmware delay that caused the controller to time out some operation and call the drive 'failed'.
There is indeed a firmware setting on how long the drive spends checking for errors after it detects one, during which the drive doesn't respond. Sometimes this is too long for the RAID controller, so it drops it.
It used to be you could buy WD Caviar Black drives and tweak that timeout setting on the controller to effectively have WD RE drives (enterprise version of the WD Black drives). They removed that "feature" a few years ago.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#45The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years. * Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newegg review (DOA and early mortality show up with more frequency). Yes, I know using reviews are not accurate but since there is no public information of drive failure rates there is not really much to go on. * The reduction of manufacturer warranty since Thailan…
The RED drives you are refering to actually have some of the worst reviews around compared to even normal consumer drives. (Source: newegg reviews you mentioned)
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a horrible idea! The logistics to collect and ship the old tech to Africa alone would probably cost more then just buying it bulk from China and ship in one batch. But there are other considerations: * This would also result in a big pile of waste in Africa, as their recycling infrastructure is limited. * They need food, shelter, stable politics and functional education before they can make any use of computer…
You could not believe the price they have to pay for computer. It is easily 3x, 4x the price we pay for the same hardware. And I they do need computer. But, it is possible that the logistic/shipping is more expensive than the production of new hardware. Also, cheaper more energy efficient hardware could be more cost effective. source: A friend of mine worked for ong in Burkina Faso
I do believe you. It's economics of scale: they don't have it.
While most of the western world has huge fright ship docks that can load/unload and ship relatively price efficient, Africa does not.
This means, the primary means to ship stuff there is via airplane, which is notoriously weight constrained, which in turn makes shipping bulk goods expensive.
This makes shipping newer, lighter tech even more cost effective than old hardware.
p.s. This is probably true for anything they need to import, not just tech.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#47These numbers line up nicely with what I've experienced on much smaller scales (I've never personally cared about more than a few hundred spinning drives at once), which is that in a nice mix of old, middle-aged, and new drives, 5-10% go kaput each year. Incidentally, about "consumer-grade drives", the last time I looked into this, I was led to believe that if it's SATA and 7200RPM (or less), there's no hardware dist…
Well Intel tells us different story[1] that promises
1. More performance
2. Less vibration (improves performance)
3. ECC Memory
There is a long feature reference that mentions things like: higher RPM, more quality, larger magnets, air turbulance control, dual processors, etc.
I'm not a spec in hard drives, just that I remember reading this stuff when trying to figure out do I need it. In the end, For my small-scale corporate file server, I chose zfs raidz with consumer grade disk drives.
[1] Enterprise-class versus Desktop-class Hard Drives: http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/sb/ent...
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#48Anybody knows how long floppy disks, diskettes and their respective drives last? Odd question, but I've always been wondering. These things just seem to hast forever.
Anecdotal data-point: a few years ago I rescued the data off my 3.5" floppies from the early 90's (IBM PC and Atari ST formats) and they all seemed to be fine.
I don't have any hardware to read my pile to 5.25 Atari 800 disks.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#49The hard disk drive quality has dropped over the last few years. * Most consumer drives over 2TB have extremely poor reliability. Just check any Amazon or Newegg review (DOA and early mortality show up with more frequency). Yes, I know using reviews are not accurate but since there is no public information of drive failure rates there is not really much to go on. * The reduction of manufacturer warranty since Thailan…
Why avoid the green drives? I assumed those were less power hungry and spinning slower so more reliable. I've been ordering them for RAID5 arrays and not had too many issues yet.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#50If some of them live a long, long time, it makes it hard to compute the average. Also, a few outliers can throw off the average and make it less useful.
Proper statistical analysis would help you there.