I had this thought last night, my original drive in my original server was a 3gig, and it still works, this is from 1997. My current 40 gig drive I got in 2002, so that makes it 7 years old, my 120gig HDD in my gaming machine is 6 years old and my 320 gig drive is 5 years old. The 10 gig drive in my current server is 12 years old.
And they are all working perfectly, a SMART test on them shows them all well within limits. They all have 90+ fitness and 90+ performance. (except the 3 gig which has a high read error count, but no bad clusters and no write errors)
Then there is my HP laptop, that is two years old, with a 100 gb HDD, and it has 120 remapped clusters and only shows 60% fitness and 80% performance. The BIOS test shows the drive as ready to fail.
I remember back in school, they told us the average life expentency of a hard drive is 7 years.
And yet, my highest activty drives, are lasting the longest, while my low activity drive (laptop) is rappidly dying an earily death.
So what gives? Is quality of drives dropping? My newest drive is also my first one dead??? (to be fair, it has been claiming it is going to die for the last 14 months, and still hasn’t died)
I recently bought a Lacie portable HDD, 750 gig, it is almost a year old now, and although it checks out good in the SMART test, I just have to wonder if it will suffer the same fate as the laptop drive.
What have your experiences with hard drives been like?