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How long should a hard drive last and are the new solid state drives going to be more reliable? –Peter

Today’s hard drives are faster, store more information, and are more reliable than ever before, but just like any other electronic devices, they have the possibility of failing.

Current hard drives are designed to run non-stop for years and have warranties that range from one to five years, but that is of little comfort if a six-month-old drive full of your family photos, address books, or financial information fails and you don’t have a current backup.

A thin attempt at trying to rate the life of a hard drive through MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) has been around for a long time, but the reason I call it “thin” is that every manufacturer uses different parameters for publishing this spec.

An MTBF of 700,000 hours equates to about 80 years, which is NOT how long you can expect the hard drive to last, but a rating based on a bunch of math that the manufacturer chose that can be misleading.

MTBF has become in the words of a pundit on the Internet “a statistical measure that we are not supposed to believe,” so don’t take it at face value.

Based on our Data Recovery lab’s experience over the years, a high MTBF rating is fairly immaterial because the vast majority of the failed drives we are asked to recover data from are less than three years old.

What makes a hard drive failure unlike any other type of electronic failure is not only do you lose the use of the device, you potentially lose all of the information that is stored on it.

Think about how tragic the failure of your DVD player would be if all your movies and family videos disappeared along with it.

Despite the age and mechanical nature of magnetic hard drives (which were first created in 1956), they continue to be the most economical way to store large amounts of information.

For almost the entire 20+ years that I have been involved in the computer industry, I have been hearing the prophecies of the “end of the magnetic hard drive.”

Despite all of the various alternative storage technologies that have been developed, none have been able to overcome a simple economic equation: the cost per megabyte.

The most recent entry into mass storage is the Solid State Drive (SSD) which is based on the same technology as your digital camera’s memory card, just a lot bigger (and a lot more expensive)!

As a point of reference, the current price for an 80 GB SSD is over $1500, while a magnetic 80 GB drive is less than $60. The SSD’s cost per GB will have to come way down before the average Joe has any interest in owning it.

While it’s true that SSDs have no moving parts, there is no data that suggests that they are more reliable as a result. In fact, some are suggesting that since chip failure is more common than drive failure in today’s personal computers, it might actually make SSDs less reliable in the long run.

The most interesting thing that I have seen from the mass storage community is what are being labeled “hybrid” hard drives (HHDs).

Hybrids incorporate the best of today’s magnetic technology with a very large Solid State “cache” drive, which makes the drive faster and consume less battery life making them ideal for laptops.

A cache circuit stores recently accessed information, which reduces the need to go back to the spinning magnetic hard drive which is what speeds up access times.

There are some drawbacks to this method of data storage and access, so the jury is still out as to whether this combination is worth the extra money.

What you really need to take away from this column is this:

There are only two kinds of hard drives: those that have failed and those that are going to fail, so plan accordingly (back up, back up, back up)!

Ken Colburn
President of Data Doctors Computer Services, Host of the award-winning Computer Corner radio show, and Author of Computer Q&A in the East Valley Tribune newspapers.

Gnomie Evan writes:

This last Christmas, I got an Iomega 500 GB External HDD. I had thought long and hard about what I wanted to ask for as my storage solution, and this is what I finally came up with. I thought it might be helpful for people to consider some things if they are looking into external hard drives.

1. Consider what you are going to be using it for. If you are going to be using it to store lots of HD movies, you are going to want a larger hard drive. If you simply want a hard drive for portability, consider smaller, more portable hard drives — usually in the 150 to 300 GB range. If you are going to use it as a backup solution, make sure that your external is significantly larger than your internal — backup software will fill it up quickly with periodic updates.

2. Determine what connection you want to use for your hard drive. If you are looking to use it from place to place and transfer between computers, go with USB2 — they are fairly universal and have become a standard. If you are looking for speed and your drive is mostly a desktop one and more or less stationary, and if you have a FireWire 400 or 800 port, use that as your connection. FireWire 800 just blows USB2 and FireWire 400 out of the water, but even FireWire 400 is faster than USB2. I know, it’s misleading. You will look at data transfer rates, and USB2 is rated at 480 mbps vs. only 400 mbps for FireWire 400, but these are merely hypothetical. In reality, FireWire 400 is much quicker at large data transfers.
3. If you make your own externals, make sure you that you did your homework. I had a friend who put together an external HDD himself and plugged it in and the thing caught fire! Whatever he did with his connections was definitely ill-advised.
4. Understand that, just like any other hard drive, externals will fragment and may require periodic cleanups with some third party software (unless your backup software stores data in such a way to prevent fragmentation).
5. Make sure your hard drive is in an area where it will not overheat. Do not place it in a way that the airflow or vents are blocked. They will overheat. Leave space between the back and the wall and don’t put it in an enclosed space as these can cause heat to build up in the space and can potentially ruin your hard drive.

I hope that this might help other people in the process of deciding on a storage solution.