Hi, I have 2 mission-critical work PC's and I'm upgrading the hard-drives on each from a Maxtor 6Y120L0 to a Seagate 320GB SATA II. (The 2 Maxtors to become a striped RAID elsewhere.) I think that when drives are brand new is one of the times when there is the highest incidences of failure, so I'm wondering if it makes sense just to install the drives in the PC as auxiliary storage for a week or so to give them a burn-in period before they become the primary storage medium? I think there are two ways of doing this, to have them just connected to the power, or to the power and to the SATA connection meaning the PC "works them". Does anyone have any thoughts? Pavesa

I haven't personally experienced any first week/ month HDrive failures. Don't see any need for that. If you have mission critical needs for the drives then you should be using a mirrored array or better.

Hi OtheHill All critical files are backed up over the network to other PC's and I have a daily file backup routine so I think loss of data isn't the issue. It's just a question of whether it might be possible to connect the new drive up and sit and leave them for a week to fail if they are going to.. Pavesa

I suppose there is no harm in doing that. However, if you aren't concerned with data loss, why worry about drive failure? You do know the old addage concerning harddrives? It is not IF your harddrive will fail, but when.

Maybe it will fail within the hour ... if not then it will fail tomorrow .. or next week or next month .. or 5 years from now... i_Xp/VistaUser

you could connect it but to burn it in you will need to write to and read from the disk alot. so you get the heads working the full range on the disk. try a burn in program that writes bits to all the disk then goes through a whole diffrent array of patterns. i suggest not just giving it the normal data. not because you might loses it but becasue you want the whole disk thrashed. no point burnig in the normal bit to find it fails when you put alot more data on it. you will also get the disk working hard and raise its temprature so its another working test. your right failure rate as high when hardware is new and when it is old ive found that disks go in about 2 years then about 5 or not at all if thats any help. all text needs typos. There there for the reader to find,to distract them from the total lack of content. google it! wasnt the answer to the question i asked so dont be dense and give me that repl

You know what I'm thinking? I think all PC hardware manufacturers should stamp the product (like food) with 'use by', or 'best before'. i_Xp/VistaUser