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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?"
I'm still using a 40 Gig HDD that came with a HP system (not in the same system any more) for the last 5 years. It's a Seagate. But I've used other drives that I've simply disposed of due to limited size and space in the tower that lasted for even longer.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
In my experience, if you buy a $100 drive to have as a spare, by the time one of your existing drives failed, that $100 drive will be of a size so small you can't even purchase it anymore, and will certainly be smaller than you want. Also, if you are anything like me you'll need a spare SATA disk, a PATA disk, and a 2.5" disk. Now you are talking about $300 (more in my currency), and there are better things to buy for that kind of money.
My rules would be:
. Run RAID such that you have 1 redundant drive per 1-4 other drives (eg a single RAID5 set of no more than 5 disks, or just RAID1 on two disks). Buy a laptop that does RAID1.
. Back up your stuff.
. Actually monitor your disks. Modern disks should indicate that there are problems long before getting the data off becomes a problem. Sometimes they go from working perfectly to completely dead (motor or head actuator burnout), but often it's a gradual thing. A client of ours had a computer running for months that would take 10 minutes or more to boot because there were some 'barely readable' sectors. Proper disk monitoring [sh/w]ould have picked it up much earlier.