Hard Drive Age

[BillBarrett]

Here's a question from the reliability engineer in me. . .

We have pair of 300 gig drives in a RAID 0 array that have been running around the clock for 3 years. Do some of you just replace drives before they fail or wait for signs of problems? I surely plan to replace them sometime over the next year. I'll obviously get much bigger drives but my main reason is so I never go through a catastrophic failure. Maybe I could archive stuff to them as individual drives and retire them?

[antonsvideo]

it is hard to say when a hard drive will fail, I had them fail after 1 week of use and others work fine after 6 years

I suppose it comes down to what they of the week they were made, Monday morning could be bad?

[TrackRanger]

As well as some video, we mainly write software applications and build industrial computer systems. We have worked in developing and maintaining computer hardware from Mainframes to PC's for many years.

Our philosophy is "Sooner or later, everybody will get a turn at a hard drive failure." Moreover, your first sign of a problem will probably be when you have unrecoverable data on your disks. Hard drives are cheap. Really cheap. Compare the cost of the drive to the cost of replacing the data on them (even if you did have backups).

On systems that run non-stop, we replace our drives about every 3 years. Drive manufacturers sometimes give a 5 year warranty, but they don't have to replace the data, only the drive. On good quality disk drives, we've seen problems develop starting from about 3 to 5 years. Our advice would be to think about replacing them sooner rather than later. It'll be the far cheapest option.

Trevor
Advantech Design

[rando]

check out this baby!

http://www.drobo.com/products_demo.aspx

[GrassValley_BH]

Excellent advice Trevor! I agree wholeheartedly.

It's a terrible sinking feeling to know you've just killed a drive with irreplacable data on it. But I seem to have an addiction to data so... go figure.

[shueardm]

Hi Trevor,

Some drives are clearly built for using in RAID arrays eg, WD YS series which is what I have. Do you have a preference (if you are talking video RAID)
Mark

[gdame]

I use the Seagate NS enterprise series SATA-300 drives. Run smooth, cool and quiet. 5 Year warrantee, 32MB L2 Cache, Available in 1TB 3.5" form factor.

[aldigitalguy]

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

Fact Hard Drives Crash
Accept the fact that Hard Drives are temporary storage!!!!
If you are thinking about backing them up, then you probably should have already!

[gdame]

Fact Hard Drives Crash
Accept the fact that Hard Drives are temporary storage!!!!
If you are thinking about backing them up, then you probably should have already!

Man from Siam is right!

Not only do I use Seagate Enterprise drives but run them in a raid 0+1. Fast and Mirrored. Safest way to go. I even include a spare drive as an option on most systems.