At 10:06 AM 8/6/01 -0600, Roger wrote the following:
>Does anyone have a ball-park on the life expectancy of HDDs these days?
>I heard someone say that you "can't expect your hard-drive to last more
>than 5 years." That seemed wrong to me - too short. Anyone have any
>info?
Definition of a few terms you may see when checking drive life.
MTBF: mean time between failures. This gives an estimate of the life of the
drive by approximating the number of hours that will elapse between failures
when a group of drives of this type are run under ideal conditions. It does
not mean how long you should expect any particular drive to last. A model
with a significantly larger MTBF figure can be reasonably predicted to last
longer than one with a smaller value, but these are just engineering
estimates.
Service Life: The manufacturer's designed life expectancy of the drive. For
the stated number of years, the manufacturer of the drive believes the unit
will work reliably and safely; beyond that point the drive may continue to
work but the chance of problems increases significantly
Warranty Length: The number of years the manufacturer warrants the drive.
Look for differences between this figure and the service life of the drive.
5-year life is pretty common (i.e. 40,00 start/stop cycles)
For example: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/prodspec/d60gxp_sp.pdf
See section 9.4.4
Start here: http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/library/datasheet.htm
--
Gerry Boyd
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