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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?"
When they break?
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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I started building computers twelve years ago.
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The only drive I've had die before I retired it myself from sheer obsolescence was an IBM 20GB "DeskStar" model; this happened about five years ago, IIRC. The drive made noise and froze the system when I would read particular files; to my frustration, it occurred when I read some of the files that were important to me (documents, programming projects, one folder of MP3s, etc.)
My solution was to put the drive in the freezer for a few hours; UNBELIEVABLY, it worked - I would have about ten minutes to copy as much as I could off the drive before it would start making noise again. I got most of what I needed off of it.
Incidentally, IBM was very good about the whole thing; they sent me a new drive the day I called them. Too bad they sold their HD division to Hitachi...
Anyway, I've had FAR worse luck with power supplies; I usually go through one of those every other year. Recently, ALL of the drives in my RAID 5 array (4x 120GB Seagate drives) as well as a fifth one (an identical Seagate 120GB that's standalone) started making noise at around the same time; of course I assumed there was some defect with this particular drive model.
But thankfully, it turned out only to be my power supply (the +5V line would deliver +4.4V ~ +4.6V, while the +12V line would fluctuate between +11V and +13V). I can only conclude that Seagate drives are less tolerant than IBM/Hitachi's of power supply fluctuations, since I also have an old 80GB IBM/Hitachi Deskstar and a much newer 250GB SATA IBM/Hitachi drive, and neither batted an eye.
Likewise, the system showed no other symptoms that pointed at the power supply; so a week or so ago, this post would have looked very different, with a few "F-You Seagate"'s thrown in there.
I replace my hard drive when the S.M.A.R.T. info starts to signify problems, such as too many relocated sectors.
As I've already seen a couple of people say, don't preemptively replace your hard drives.
Allow me to add: Here's why.
Hardware failure rates follow a curve on average. They fail a lot after initial purchase, then slope down to their minimum after a couple of [relevant time periods] (probably "weeks" or "months" for hard drives, varies by what kind of thing it is), then slowly slopes upwards again.
(Please do not miss the phrase "on average". Certain specific flaws can cause a certain product line to have unusual characteristics, like a sudden spike at six months or something. However, unless you somehow figure out a way to guess which hard drives are going to have such failures in six months when it's pretty amazing for the exact same hard drive to even be on the market for six months, the fact that these things can theoretically happen can't have much impact on your decisions. After all, if you knew that was going to happen, you'd just plain not buy the drive, period, regardless of the argument in this post.)
Therefore, if you've got a "burned in" drive, you will be replacing a known-high-reliablility component with a component with a lower expected reliability. (I use "expected" in the probability/statistics sense here.) Unless you've discovered that you do have one of those funky products that all die in ten months, this is a bad move on average.
I replace hard drives when they fail. I try to act as if they could die at any minute, although I fail.
(But I try to get better. I'm in an all-laptop house, so it's difficult to have the convenience of an integrated backup solution and an automated, unforgettable script. However, with the recent Linux kernels finally supporting my SD card reader, I've gotten a high-capacity, slow, cheap SD card to stick in the previously-useless slot and I have an rsync now backing up the files I'd cry if I lost every hour. Sure, 1GB can't backup my entire system but most people's "cry if I lost it" datasets would fit into that. (Yes, there are exceptions... but if you're one of them, you've already got another back up solution in place, right? Right?))
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 don't upgrade single drives at a time. I have dedicated file servers to put the majority of my data on. The first was 8x20GB drives, then 8x120GB drives and my current is 8x250GB drives. I rebuild when I run out of space and can afford the upgrade. When I do, I take down the old system and have several drives to throw around in spare systems and friends computers. This happens every few years I guess. The file servers are all RAID 5 and I upgraded to a gigabit network with the last one so it's pretty speedy and redundant. It's also handy when you have data to share between several computers and several users. Though, I believe my next system will simply be a MacPro with 3x750GB drives. I'm getting to the point where I wish the majority of my data was on my computer locally so I don't have to worry about permissions and resource forks. I'm also getting tired of the whole second-computer-for-data thing. I'm ready to consolidate. I guess I'll finally have to do decent backups though in case a drive goes down.
And recover them from the backup. You do make backups don't you?
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The redundancy buys you reduced downtime in the event of most failures. Go with multiple RAIDs in different systems (or cities!) for backup.
Until they start sounding funny, generally, but I always make backups of real data.
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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
Rule number one: always keep an extra drive around. Drives are cheap, and they die regularly. Also, the cost of buying that _one_ extra drive is constant. You always have an extra drive around. It's not like you have to buy two each time you go to the store. You drives will die at 8pm on a Sunday night, just before you go on that 3-week business trip, otherwise. I promise.
Rule number two: never spend more than $100. The best $/GB always seems to me to be in the $100 range these days. I usually make sure to pick up drives at Fry's whenever I see something substantially larger than what I have now for less than $100.
Rule number three: Stay ahead of drive failures. If you have important data on those crappy, cheap $100 IDE drives, replace them every two years at least. In those two years, you can double your capacity for less cost. Use the old drives for backups of important stuff, just in case a newer drive bites the dust. Or, leave it as-is, and use it like a snapshot of your working data.
And I'm not sure that using an old drive is worth geek cred points at all, though I guess if it's all that's needed for your particular application, then I guess it's worth a little -- but a full point? Not unless it's ESDI, RLL or MFM!
My experience is that new drives have a higher failure rate than drives in service for years. If I were to replace my drives as a matter of course, I have a feeling I would spend more time recovering from lemons than I would had I left the old drives in.
>If you replace them on a schedule, you're still not guaranteed 100% reliability because a drive can fail way before MTBF...
It is a common misperception that MTBF ratings mean anything about how long an individual device is supposed to last. It's only a measure across a large number of units in total power-on hours, and only within the expected "useful life."
For example, consider a hard drive that has an MTBF of 100,000 hours (11 years), and a 5-year intended useful life. If you have 1,000 of these drives, you can expect, on average, one to fail every 100 hours within the first five years. After that, all bets are off.
So not only does a 100,000 hour MTBF not mean you'll get 11 years, you're lucky (or, more precisely, not unlucky) if you get 5 years.
As many others have said, if you intend to keep it, back it up. Every drive is only guaranteed to work until it fails.
IBM once described it this way:
http://web.archive.org/web/20001202154100/http://
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I'm a Mac user and my hard drives have lasted.... Umm Forever(+5 years)
Wait scratch that, One drive died in a power surge when I yanked the cords
to save the computer from a burning building (don't ask)
But I read about windows users replacing drives every year or so...
Now Apple uses IBM Drives and I've always upgraded with the same
are they just better or is HFS HFS+ just that much gentler on the disks than FAT16 and FAT32
I'm a PC user. I have lost two HDDs (in the same machine) to a faulty power supply. The HDD went out, I replaced it. The replacement went out in short order(hours.) I pulled the swapped the mo-bo with a known good one and put a multimeter across the opwer supply. 18 volts on the 12 volt rail. Glad I didn't just throw in ANOTHER HDD based on the asumption that the mo-bo was the only potentialy bad component.
Other than they I buy new HDDs when they fill up.
I put old ones out of service when they feel restrictive in their capacity.
I have four boxes (work, home, laptop, game system.) The Work, Home, and Game machines have HDD#1 in the 40-80GB range for the OS drive. HDD#2 varries in size from 120-200GB. The Home box has a third HDD, a 200GB model. The laptop has the factory 20GB drive.
As the drives get crowded I replace them with larger (and usualy lower price) HDDs. The old storage/media HDDs get turned into OS drives. My most valueable data (Home Videos, Photos, work stuff) are duplicated on at least two drives in each machine. When a file is updated on the home or game system it will be copied to the 2nd HDD in the machine. If the matching file on the other machine is not changed then the new update on the file is copied to the HDDs of the other machine.
Matching the Work machine to the Home and Game systems involves drag-and-drop and a smaller USB HDD.
My system is probably not typical. The Game system is also our HTPC and the HOME system is the bittorent machine. They really use up disk space. The mirroring of critical files in a non-raid system of multiple HDDS is also not likely to be typical; I don't trust anything important to a single HDD or even to multiple HDDs in the same box(after having a Power Supply fry HDDs.)
I also backup my files on a monthly basis to DVD.
I donate my "discarded" HDDs when I put them out of service. Usualy I keep a HDD in service for two to four years. Although the 200GB drive on the bittorent machine is a little tight for space . . . if you think of "only" 30GB free as short on space.
All the machines use FAT16 or 32. Other than the PS incident I have yet to have a HDD fail.
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