Are Disc Players Dead?

"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 We end up replacing computers earlier (10 years or so) because they're getting outdated - that might be the reason.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

Al, I lost a bunch of drives too, that's why I paid up for the Drobo after much research, and loss of some priceless digital video footage of our chidren (thank God we found the actual digital tapes), and of course then having to re-load hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands to be honest, of CD's.

Look into it. I have had drives fail in the Drobo, it just tells me it failed, I buy and replace that drive, no loss of info.

Very, Very cool.

Hi Mac,

Yes, a Drobo is definitely a neat approach. Keep in mind, though, that neither it nor anything else is 100% fail-safe, and so it doesn't eliminate the need for a separate second backup for really important stuff. For instance, if the power supply or the controller circuits in the Drobo were to go berserk, all of its drives could conceivably be corrupted or damaged simultaneously.

Best regards,
-- Al