Hard Disk Opionions Needed

[emoric]

Hello,

I have a home network set up with 2 laptops and 1 desktop all running WinXP Pro. The desktop acts as a server and shares over 100GBs of media files such as music, photos, videos, thinks of that sort towards my laptops. The hard disk is a Western Digital 200GB. Its was bought around 2004. As more and more data becomes stored on that drive, the more I become nervous. I have no back up of the drive and I seriously need to consider it. How long do these drives last? Any experiences? I would like to hear some. It would be wise to purchase a brand new Seagate or no?

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Well, if a mod comes around. Please move this to hardware. My apologies!

 

[fairnooks]

You need a backup if the drive with the only copy is one day old, one year old, or four years old. Hard drives can fail at any time but statistically the curve shows more failure early in a drives life then relative stability for years 2 and 3 and then a higher rate of failure again in year 4 and beyond. Google did a study with their hundreds of thousands of hard drives and its in the neighborhood of 5-8% failure rate for hard drives more than 4 years old.

 

[Elvandil]

No matter how long they "usually" last. They have a mean-time-to-failure, but that is exactly that--a "mean" time, an average. Some fail quite early and others seem to last forever. The lesson is that all drives fail and that one will, too. And there is no predicting when that will happen. That in itself ought to make you want a backup. I'd be nervous, too.

If you'd like someone to say, "Don't worry about it. Drives last forever and I'm sure you'll be fine", then I think you came to the wrong place.

 

[emoric]

Oh jeez. Thanks for the heads up. If I were to go buy a new disk, what manufacture would you recommend?
Serial of course.

 

[Hughv]

I've become a Western Digital fan lately, but I don't think the brands matter much in the long run. Today's best is tomorrow's loser.
If you follow the logic that "Hard Drives Fail", then you'll realize that you need CD/DVD backup as well.

 

[emoric]

I've become a Western Digital fan lately, but I don't think the brands matter much in the long run. Today's best is tomorrow's loser.
If you follow the logic that "Hard Drives Fail", then you'll realize that you need CD/DVD backup as well.

Great spoken words.

 

[Elvandil]

WD has always had a good replacement policy (which helps little with the data). Any major brand should be OK. "Jiang's Hard Drives" probably not a good idea.

(Just saw your Hardware note )