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How Often Do You Replace Your Hard Drives?
Telemachas asks: "I recently purchased a Dell P4 2.8 GHz swap meet computer with a 200 gig hard disk for a good price and all is working fine. It does not seem prudent, however, to trust my data on a swap meet item. For another @ $ 75.00 each I can purchase new 200 gig HDDs. I would also like to do my first RAID system. I am now wondering how often, if at all, do Slashdot readers replace their HDDs?"
One day too late
Running Knoppix on a dumb terminal with only a cd-rom drive, network card, motherboard, etc. without a harddrive, and then backing up everything onto a server over a broadband internet connection. Off site data center takes care of data backup, redundancy, etc. No mess!
I third that
Never start replacing components unless it's the power supply or fans. Normally once my hardware starts screwing up I just sell the whole thing at a swapmeet as generally all the components will start all screwing up together.
Err, good luck with your new machine.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Why REPLACE a drive when you can ADD a drive ?
Besides, whoever already said "the older a drive is, the least likely it is to get broken" got it pretty right.
And, as for "permanent storage"... why would you EVER trust your HDD and your HDD only to "keep data safe" ?
Everything that's critical (and not so secret) goes as soon as possible on a backup CD/DVD (the more the merrier), on other home/office computers, even on memory sticks or whatever other removable media you might have at hand... and if possible, also some remote (and remotely accessible) location.
Or you could do it the "really tough guy way"... you know, the way of "I don't make backups, I put it online and let everybody else mirror it".
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