View Single Post
  #2  
Old October 23rd 03, 12:32 PM
kony
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 12:09:21 +0100, Mark M
wrote:

I would guess that the failure curve of a hard drive is much like
that for a lot of electronic equipment. It is probably a sort of
wonky "U" shape.

If it fails then the drive is likely to fail quite early on in its
life. After it passes this period then it is more likely to fail
after some years as it gets older.

Does anybody know approximately how long this period is of relatively
high risk of early failure? This must vary from one model of hard
drive to another but, very approximately, after what period of time
would it be?

I may be wrong but I would guess there is a bit of a "knee" in the
shape of the reliability curve where the risk of failure changes.

If I get a new ATA/IDE hard drive I don't like to use it for live
data until it has been running on test for a while. But how long is
sensible for this test period?

At a usage pattern of 10 hours a day for the hard drive, would this
period be three or four days? A week? Three weeks?


Mostly what I hear about is situations where the drive is bad right at
the start, or works fine for at least a few months. Unles you hear
strange noises coming from the drive right away it's unlikely you'd
benefit from an extended burn-in of a few days to weeks.

There isn't really much you can do beyond keeping it cool and using a
decent power supply, but if you're that concerned about it then run a
Raid mirror. If wouldn't hurt to check the drive with the
manufacturer's diagnostics right after installing it, and using a disk
scanner to do thorough write/read tests for a few pases, but otherwise
all you can do is replace the drive by the time it's expected lifespan
has elapsed, which used to be 3-4 years, though that might've changed
by now.


Dave