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25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last
MrSeb writes with this excerpt, linking to several pretty graphs: "For more than 30 years, the realm of computing has been intrinsically linked to the humble hard drive. It has been a complex and sometimes torturous relationship, but there's no denying the huge role that hard drives have played in the growth and popularization of PCs, and more recently in the rapid expansion of online and cloud storage. Given our exceedingly heavy reliance on hard drives, it's very, very weird that one piece of vital information still eludes us: How long does a hard drive last? According to some new data, gathered from 25,000 hard drives that have been spinning for four years, it turns out that hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate."
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/02/18/0420247/google-releases-paper-on-disk-reliability
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf
"Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population", dated 2007.
I'm in the market for a new external hard drive (my 1TB one is getting too small for my backups) and kept looking at Seagate. Unfortunately, my father-in-law had a Seagate which broke rather quickly and my wife is convinced that this means all Seagate drives are junk. The reality is that Seagate, Western Digital, and any other large hard drive manufacturer is going to have a lot of failed drives by the sheer fact that they produce a lot of drives. Since people who are happy with their products don't post comments as often as people who aren't happy, you're likely to get a higher percentage of complaints in the reviews than percentage of people who actually experienced problems.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If you are sure that they were a relatively new model, and the refurb was a FACTORY refurb, that might be a good method. If Joe Stocking Clerk did the refurb, who knows what you will get.
When installing, and periodically there after, It is wise to run something like smartctl -a /dev/sd? on your drives and check the power on hours and power cycle count. (Not to mention the reallocated sector count and spin retry).
You would be surprised how many refurbs are actually fairly heavily used, with a lot of hours.
My current server's raid array is averaging 5.9 years, but has only seen 53 power cycles over that time. I actually tend to believe (without a great deal of evidence) that power cycles are harder on drives than running constantly.
Google actually did a similar study some years ago. Their study of over 100,000 drives largely agreed with the present study, right down to the three-node distribution of failures over time.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.