[Gllug] Life of hard drives

[Dermot Moynihan]

At 07:40 06/03/03, you wrote:

>Hello,
>    I see that Seagate now claim a MTBF of 1200000 hours (just under 137
>years) for some of their drives. This does not mean that they are expected
>to last that long, just that they claim to have few failures at the bottom
>of the "bathtub curve" between initial failures and end-of-life. The safe
>design life looks like about 5 years. This of course comes at the price of a
>very fast but expensive drive aimed at servers. Most of the less expensive
>drives seem to have a design life of a year or so, although I understand
>that Seagate have a generally good reputation overall.
>    I would like to find a drive that does not need to be fast, or noisy, but
>has as long a life as possible. Are any drives made which have the same
>amount of trouble paid to bearings and manufacture, and are also designed
>not to thrash the bearings?

I bought a Western Digital Caviar 7200RPM 40GB less than 2 years ago from 
Simply Computers and it's already making threatening noises.

Just bought a Maxtor 80GB - while investigating what type to get I 
discovered that IBM give 3 years guarantee. Western Digital, Maxtor and 
Seagate now only give 1 year.

Not sure what it means but I don't feel it bodes well.

Rgds
dermot

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