Are Disc Players Dead?

Dhl93449 - Taiyo Yuden guarantees 100 years. The issue is dye. Long lasting phthalocyanine dye (Mitsui Gold, Mitsui Silver) is more expensive than cyanine dye and can last 200 years on gold but is more sensitive to light and laser power variations. Cyanine dye is by itself unstable and has to be stabilized. I'm not sure what Taiyo Yuden uses but they invented CD-R technology and are known to be very reliable and long lasting. I went thru perhaps 500 Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs and never had bad one or one that failed. I have many about 15 years old CD-Rs working fine.

As for hard drives - I might be very lucky but I had only one disk failure at work and one at home (laptop) in last 25 years. Currently I'm running 6 hard disks at home and 2 at work for many years without any problems. In addition to these 6 drives I have two backups - just in case. Very often people who have failures are more likely to write but even then my drives (Fantom G-Force) have pretty good review. As soon as prices of SS drives drop down more I'm getting one for music storage.

I had 5 hard drives fail in 5 years.

"I had 5 hard drives fail in 5 years."

We have whole bunch of computers at work, perhaps 30, and one or two failures over 20 years. We end up replacing computers earlier (10 years or so) because they're getting outdated - that might be the reason. What is the brand that gave you 5 failures in five years?

I use a Drobo for a network drive. Just plugged into my router. It backs itself up, very cool, and I can hot swap any 2 of the 5 drives that fail without any loss of data.

It works!!

10-04-11: Jeffreybehr
Do remember that there are only 2 kinds of HDs--those that have failed and those that will.

Very well put.

My perception has been that hard drive longevity is pretty much unpredictable, and any correlation between the likelihood of failure and the brand of the drive will vary over the years.

Around 10 or 12 years ago IBM manufactured a widely used series of drives called the Deskstars, which failed so frequently that they were widely referred to as the IBM Deathstars. I had one of them, and it lasted about 5 months. Shortly afterwards IBM got out of the business, selling that division to Hitachi.

BTW, IMO one of the ultimate examples of the famous saying popularized by Mark Twain, that there are "lies, damn lies, and statistics," are the MTBF (mean time between failure) specs that are often provided by hard drive manufacturers. Those numbers are commonly on the order of a million hours or so, which is about 114 years. But what the number really means is that if a very large number of drives are run at the same time, then on average one of those drives will fail for each million cumulative hours of operation of all the drives. In other words, the statistic doesn't take into account the failure rate increase that will occur as the drives get older.

Regards,
-- Al