Hard Drive questions

[sft42]

What's the average life expectancy of a hard drive? anyone know or indeed is there any measurement of this and does capacity, cache size, spin speed make a difference.....also once the drive has decided to stop working is there any way at all of retreiving data on the disc?

[Phantaxus]

well warranties on hard drives are now down to one year so they should manage that at least. There are some drives with a three year warranty ( Western Digital JB series springs to mind) For my own pc I would not buy a drive with a one year warranty. If you know the make and model of your hard drive you should be able to find its MTBF (mean time before failure) this figure will give you an indication of how many hours the drive should run for before failure. There are companies who specialise in recovering data from dead drives but the cost is likely to be prohibative.

[Hippy]

I look after servers at work and replace the drives every year. I overlooked one set earlier this year and one of a pair failed. It was only 14 months old and was a SCSI very expensive and supposedly reliable type.

These units run continuously, so for home use the life span will be longer. I have one at home (6gb; massive at one time) that is seven years old and still going strong, though it is only used for occasional data storage.

The best plan for data recovery is to backup and backup, then backup again. Don't forget to backup, by the way. Did I mention backups? Backups are so cheap, and your data may be very valuable. If your business would grind to a halt if a disc failed then you should have more parallel discs and multiple backups, both on and off site.

[j2buttonsw]

Hippy, you replace all the drives annually? That must be expensive! What do you do with old ones? EBay? We trust RAID 5 and swap out any failed drives when they happen (we have never had two drives go at the same time, though). I am also surprised you didn't mention the importance of backing up one's data.

[Hippy]

Consider one department: turnover �5-6 million per year, cost of two discs for IDE RAID array �120 - �200. Throw in the cost of ten or so DAT tapes for backup (replace those on regular basis too!) �90. Total yearly cost �300 max. That's 0.005% of turnover. Small price to pay for peace of mind.

Old units recycled locally so some costs recovered.

Price of toatal failure = no business, no turnover and for me; no job. The answer is simple!

[j2buttonsw]

2 x IDE drives on RAID 1 for a �6 million operation... ok

[robber1]

I use Norton ghost to copy my Hard drive to disc.Can easily be reinstalled onto a new drive.

[lisaj]

Yes, but robber1, you can't ghost the drive with the server still live. Backing up servers without downtime is where companies like Veritas make their money (and god knows j2, hippy and myself will wonder how since backup software never seems to work as asvertised :-))