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How Often Do You Replace Your Hard Drives?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the mean-time-between-failure dept.

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?"

6 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Uhh... by Omeger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When they break?

    1. Re:Uhh... by matt74441 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I second that. I like to avoid wasting money whenever possible, but thats just me...

    2. Re:Uhh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Of course. For HDDs the Time Between Failure distribution is just too broad.

      If you replace them on a schedule, you're still not guaranteed 100% reliability because a drive can fail way before MTBF, and you waste the drives that wouldn't fail if you had kept them. Seems like a lose-lose situation to me.

      So backup often, or use RAID. Replace the HDDs when they break.

    3. Re:Uhh... by Silver+Sloth · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Seriously. The older a drive is, in my experience the less likely it is to die. The first six months are the worst.
      This is known as the bathtub curve. If you plot failures against time then there is a high level at the beginning (the tap end) which decreases quickly as any weak or substandard components fail. Then there is a long flat bit as everything runs as normal with a (hopefully) low chance failure rate. Finally, as the components reach their end of life the failure rate begins to rise giving the shape (well, use your imagination) of a bathtub.

      With hard drives the far end of the bathtub tends to be obscured by obsolescence.

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  2. Do Raid 1, replace when 1 goes down by Salvance · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For home, I never replace a drive unless one goes down. I just have one drive backup to the other (and vice versa) at night, then store my important files at work.

    At work, we have everything setup as Raid 1, and only replace drives when they go down, which is rarely. Not sure if this is the best approach, but considering we take offsite incremental backups every 15 minutes it's not really a catastrophic event even if both go down.

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  3. Replace them when they blow up. by Spit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And recover them from the backup. You do make backups don't you?

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