Can anyone tell me what is the AVERAGE life of a hard drive? Is it about 10 years, or longer
10 years? You wish. The life span (MTBF)of the new HDs is between three and five years. Simple maintenance can keep it running smoothly well past the time it has become obsolete.
i_XpUser
Well, I have 2 HDs 10 yrs old up and running in my older PC systems my kids use. Yes, they are obsolete (1-1.2 GB) but OK for light win95 or win98 use. I also have a couple of HDs that are 5-10 years old and work fine.
The secret is shutting PC down when not used. Running 24/7 takes a hudge tall on drives.
Also, some newer HD are not as reliable as old ones used to be. 7200RPM IBM's deskstar (aka deathstar) come to mind. It died on me after 3 years of light use.
"Average life." Can anyone define that term? What is "average?"
Depends on how the thing is used, the environment, how hot and cold, many, many, variables.
the thing is, here, SOME of us had computers when a new hard drive--when a 20 MEG a bite drive was BIG, cost thousands of dollars---4000.00US
Now, you can buy a HUGE capacity drive for not much over 100.00US. At that price, backups and replacement spares seem cheap.
I agree with name that the term "average" is no such thing. Notice that I used the term MTBF The HD manufacturers uses mean-time between failure to detonate the so-called average life of a HD. Usually most HD under normal wear exceeds the MTBF curve. i_XpUser
Seagate has a 5 year warranty on most of their stuff. If the MTBF of most drives is 3 to 5 yrs then it makes a lot of sense to buy seagate drives. A lot of other manufacturers offer warranty only 1 to 3 yrs which appears to be more alligned with the MTBF. For me, my next drive will be a seagate.
PS This is not a paid advertisement. I do not work for or hold stocks in Seagate.
If anyone knows of a drivemaker who offers a longer warranty at a reasonable price then let me know.I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.
xp user, by simple maintainance do you mean things like defraging and deleting temporary files? I must admit I have a clear out once in a while but I never bother with defraging - it doesn't seem to make hardly any differencr)
I second for seagate, it's very queit and bulletproof. These days I prefer the most reliable drive vs the fastest. I guess I'm getting older...
I recently bought maxtor 300 giggie. Maxtor warranty is for one year only. xp user, by simple maintainance do you mean things like defraging and deleting temporary files? I must admit I have a clear out once in a while but I never bother with defraging - it doesn't seem to make hardly any differencr)
Yes and also make sure that (1) the PC PSU at peak performance, (2) Keep it protected against sudden shutoff (surge, etc) (3) don't move it around too often ( I know this is unavoidable with laptops).
You have every right not to defrag your HD and I respect that. But I can caution you to just wait until your PC performance bottom out.
i_XpUser
actually, because of the way NTFS is designed, defragging a hard drive in XP is fairly useless. As is defragging in EXT2/3 in linux. I think it's cute that everyone thinks they are an expert. Manufacturers state that an average life of a hard drive is 5 years or 20,000 hours. Hard drives are mechanical tools, they are nowhere near as reliable as a solid state storage tool (flash memory, etc), but for every drive that is delivered DOA, there is another drive that lasts for 10+ years without ever hiccuping. And for the user stating prices. You can NOT put a price on data. a 100 dollar hard drive can hold priceless amounts of information.
