[OM] Re: CD, DVD lives, July 2005

[Chuck Norcutt]

Maybe, but it would be hard to prove it by me.  I have been running hard 
drives on my personal, at home computers since 1983.  For at least 10 of 
those years (until very recently) I've had two drives installed so that 
one could mirror the other.  Every one of the drives used over that 
period of time was restarted at least once per day and frequently 2-4 
times per day.  If I plan to be gone more than a couple of hours I shut 
down the computer.  Also, for the last couple of years my wife has also 
had her own computer which is treated the same way but rarely gets 
booted more than once per day.

During that time I have had one drive failure which was so long ago I 
can't recall the brand or the size or even any details about how the 
failure manifested itself.  Two or three  years ago I thought I had a 
second failure on a Maxtor drive and returned it to them under warranty. 
  They returned is as "no trouble found" and I eventually discovered 
that the failure was actually an intermittent failure on one channel of 
the disk controller.  I replaced the motherboard and all was well.

While I accept that I am *possibly* shortening the theoretical MTBF the 
actual MTBF appears to be longer than the time interval during which I 
eventually consider the drives to be obsolete and replace them with 
larger capacity drives.  That's probably about three years so I estimate 
that the drives are certainly good for at least 1,500 restarts if not 
way more than that.

Chuck Norcutt

Wayne Harridge wrote:
> 
> 
>> Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>> I'm using a pair of 160 GB IDE drives mounted in USB conversion
>> cases to
>> 
>> do my backup.  I have no concerns about their electronic or
>> mechanical life since the only time they're ever powered on is when
>> they're actually performing a backup which is, at most, once a
>> week.
> 
> 
> Keep in mind that you may actually be reducing the MTBF of the drives
> by using them in this way due to thermal & electrical cycling.  There
> are many factors to consider, but you might be better off keeping
> these drives powered up continuously.
> 
> ...Wayne
> 
> 
> Wayne Harridge
> 
> http://lrh.structuregraphs.com
> 
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