How often do you replace your hard drives?

[digitalwanderer]

I don't replace them 'til they die, I just keep adding new ones and whenever I do a OS reinstall after I added another new one I generally move my OS to a partition on the newer drive. I keep backups of all critical stuff on 4 different PCs, just in case.

 

[DigitalSoul]

Well, my 40 gig I got 5 years is still going. The 200 gig I got last year was suppose to make it obsolete and so was the 160 gig I got this past summer. Now I have 4 hard drives in my system. The next hard drive will surely replace the 40 gig haha.

I back up all my[important] data to dvd-rw.

 

[NovemberMike]

Easiest way to do this: Buy a ton of DVD-R (or RW, your pick). Back up everything you have twice (I am referring to images here). Store one complete image in your house so that in case of a catastrophic hardware failure you can rebuild quickly. Store the other in a Secure Location (I recommend a safety deposit box at a bank). This takes about 4 hours total and is the most secure thing you can do. Update the backups however often you deem necessary, but keep in mind that this is for the major things you can't afford to lose, like wedding pictures or videos of your kids, not cat pictures or other random things. Those can be kept as safe as they need to be by doing a RAID setup or just regular backups to an external hard drive.

Just remember that for things you can't afford to lose you have to protect yourself against hardware failures, user error and environmental dangers like fires. RAID only protects you against hardware, so make sure you have a plan for the other two.

 

[PARANOiA]

Well I just bought another 500gb drive, to chuck in to my 200/200/120 system... but given the failure rate discussion, I'll use this as my "stuff" drive, keeping my delicates (photos and whatnot) where they are for the next six months or so.

 

[vazel]

Here's a good article: No cure in sight for unpredictable hard drive loss

If you care about data loss so much why not go RAID5? That way you only replace the drives as necessary.

 

[hoho]

Easiest way to do this: Buy a ton of DVD-R (or RW, your pick). Back up everything you have twice (I am referring to images here). Store one complete image in your house so that in case of a catastrophic hardware failure you can rebuild quickly. Store the other in a Secure Location (I recommend a safety deposit box at a bank). This takes about 4 hours total and is the most secure thing you can do.

Well, I don't really trust optical disks that much. If I'd back up on them I'd have more than two copies and do full backups every now and then. In the end I'd have a huge pile of disks and no idea what is where

 

[stevem]

I thought disk drives are more likely to to fail early on in their life, so surely by replacing more often you're making it more likely that you have a HDD fail at some point? If a drive stays reliable in the first 3 months or so, it's much more likely to stay reliable.

That's been my experience, but I've had drives slowly accumulate reallocated sectors. Any current pending sectors need to be dealt with.

I have had 1 drive failure in years and that was the infamous IBM Deathstar (Deskstar) and I have massive amount of drives from 750GB down to paper weights of 13GB drives that would not die and can't find a use for.

I've got an old box running now with two IBM DeathStar GXP75s. They'd been sitting in the IT manager's cupboard for years. Both had bad sectors & wouldn't seek properly on power on. I relieved him of the burden & flashed updated firmware, then re-zeroed them. I've quite frankly thrashed them in the last couple of months installing older games, etc, & they haven't missed a beat.

I had a home server initially set up with a 3 disk RAID 5 but the drives were only 36GB. A couple of years ago I upgraded it & replaced the RAID with 2x200GB SATA & added another 2x500GB earlier this year. It's mostly used for media storage/streaming. I do ad hoc backups. I'll get around to automating backups, etc, one day...

 

[trinibwoy]

When they start generating errors or making sounds indicative of mechanical failure. Have had the same drives for years now.

 

[Valzic]

Yeah i still have 2 running on my daughter's computer (one of them the RMA'd one that died). I just moved them off my bread and butter machine that I work on and onto my daughter's computer that runs less critical apps like SIMS (although she might disagree with that assessment )

 

[stevem]

Both drives are 5 platter 75GB & cooled by a 92mm intake fan @ 7V. Initially they were noisy on spin-up but now they're OK. Also set AAM to silent, but now run them at full seek speed. I half expected them to explode, but their SMART stats have steadily improved with use...

There was a page, on an edu site IIRC, that showed the glass platters rubbed clean of magnetic media.

 

[Bludd]

I still have my Deathstar. It almost died once but I got a firmware update from IBM, did a complete wipe in a IBM util made for that, and set the drive to silent mode (unless in this mode, it is insanely noisy when doing almost anything but idling). It still lives, but I don't trust it with anything critical.

 

[L233]

I have an old Maxtor 5400rpm 40GB hard drive in a PC that has been running 24/7 for years with almost constant disk access and it still works fine.

In my main desktop, HDs die like flies despite the fact that it doesn't run all day. The last one that died was a Hitachi 160GB. Before that Samsung. And before that Maxtor. And IBM before that. Another Seagate 80GB died in my office PC the other day. And btw., I've never had a HD fail within the first 12 months.

I've never had much of a problem with HD failures until recent years. They used to last long enough until I would replace them anyway. IMO HDs are getting less and less reliable and it's pissing me off.

I recently bought an external HD just for backup purposes. I'd pay a premium for more reliable hard drives.

Fake edit:
Is there still anyone crazy enough to run a Raid-0 rig?

 

[hoho]

IMO HDs are getting less and less reliable and it's pissing me off.

In my oppinion your motherboard is the fault. Possibly capacitors are getting bad.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

Fake edit:
Is there still anyone crazy enough to run a Raid-0 rig?

What are you kidding me? RAID 0 is where it's at. I won't run anything other than a stripe if I have identical drives. I don't store important data on my PC so what do I care if the stripe crashes and I have to rebuild? Besides, I have a DVD burner to back data up.

 

[L233]

In my oppinion your motherboard is the fault. Possibly capacitors are getting bad.

Errm, I wasn't talking about the same PC with the same mainboard here. These harddrives I listed failed during the past few years on several different PCs I had.

Besides, why would a burst capacitor on my mainboard make my HDs fail?

 

[L233]

What are you kidding me? RAID 0 is where it's at.

What is where? You mean the negligible performance increase in real-world applications, if there even is one? IMO not really worth the double chance of hardware failure and the problems with migrating your Raid-0 rig to a new PC or mainboard.

With HD failure rates being what they are, it's just too much of a risk. Even if you don't store critical information it's still a fucking mess to reinstall your OS and all of your applications and games and make it work the way you like it.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

What is where? You mean the negligible performance increase in real-world applications, if there even is one? IMO not really worth the double chance of hardware failure and the problems with migrating your Raid-0 rig to a new PC or mainboard.

Load times and file copy times are where it's at. Of course your hard drives don't affect application performance

With HD failure rates being what they are, it's just too much of a risk. Even if you don't store critical information it's still a fucking mess to reinstall your OS and all of your applications and games and make it work the way you like it.

I had 6 HDs in my previous rig, which I owned for about a year and a half. 0 HD failures during that time. 1 array corruption (thanks to NV's shit-tastic NF4 RAID).

 

[L233]

Load times and file copy times are where it's at. Of course your hard drives don't affect application performance

File copy times, yes, but not not always. Doesn't help when copying files between the RAID-0 and non-RAID-0 drives. Won't help with copying files from CDs/DVDs, external HDs or USB sticks and such. So really, how many fily copy operations do you usually do on the same drive?

Application load times? Barely, especially games are hardly affected. Seek time is the limiting factor here, not sustained throughput. From the few benchmarks I remember, there are only very few cases in which a RAID-0 cut application load times to any significant degree.

You can make the test yourself. Get a stopwatch, copy a game to a non raid-0 drive, measure the load time. Compare it to the load time on the Raid-0.


Edit:
RAID-0 is next to useless for application load times. See here. There is no compelling reason to use RAID-0, only dangers and disadvantages.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

File copy times, yes, but not not always. Doesn't help when copying files between the RAID-0 and non-RAID-0 drives. Won't help with copying files from CDs/DVDs, external HDs or USB sticks and such. So really, how many fily copy operations do you usually do on the same drive?

Application load times? Barely, especially games are hardly affected. Seek time is the limiting factor here, not sustained throughput. From the few benchmarks I remember, there are only very few cases in which a RAID-0 cut application load times to any significant degree.

You can make the test yourself. Get a stopwatch, copy a game to a non raid-0 drive, measure the load time. Compare it to the load time on the Raid-0.


Edit:
RAID-0 is next to useless for application load times. See here.

sigh

I've done my own benchmarks comparing my own system RAID'd and un-RAID'd. Guess which was faster.

 

[L233]

sigh

I've done my own benchmarks comparing my own system RAID'd and un-RAID'd. Guess which was faster.

I guess you PC must magically work differently from everybody else's then. Could you tell me more about your "benchmarks"? Were they real-world application load times or irrelevent peak throughput measurements?

I had a RAID-0 at one point and the reason why I got rid of it was that it didn't make one lick of a difference. And I did the stopwatch thing I suggested.