Reality Check: Modern hard drive reliability. "Drops & Heat & Moving Parts, Oh my!" - Page 2

Join Date: Apr 2007
Posts: 3

Likelihood of more posts because the previous one got pissed on by people with nothing better to do: 0

< 1000 posts no respect xD

post counts do not equal respect. A person with 50 posts can command respect by being a helpful member of the community...

Yes, and the posting above reported on useful experience (and from an application area most of us would not otherwise know about).
Although, since zzpulp also has <1000 too, I assume there was irony in there

Me and Chris are on the same page ...
Anyway, yeah, I just now read his post...relevent and thoughtful I'd say...ok I guess we can just let it die now

The article is a very nice summary of the factors that affect hdd reliability, and I can't agree more with the comments about back-ups. However, I have to disagree with some of the other points.
MTBF rating of 330,000 hours does not mean that the lifetime of the drive is 37 years. It means that if you buy a drive and replace it after every 5 years (the rated service life), and the drive operates within the specified environment parameters, you can expect (on average) to have a drive fail every 330000 hours. This is very different than expecting your single drive you buy today to last 37 years.
On the Load/Unload count, many modern drives use this as a power saving feature - when the heads are unloaded, the servo can be turned off. The Hitachi OEM manuals explain the feature in great detail, but the point I want to make is that the Load/Unload cycle doesn't just happen when you turn the computer off. One Hitachi drive I had unloaded the heads after 10 seconds of idling after heavy load and 3 second during very light load. The drive reached the 200,000 mark in about 1 year, with hundreds of cycles every day.
Unless the laptop has a shock sensor, there is no way to guarantee the heads are parked during motion. I've had to replace dozens of drives in laptops that were "just moved gently" while working. With new OSs performing background maintenance of file system, the heads are unloaded even less often. As for heat, an older HP model had the memory slot just below the hard drive. The computer was used on a pillow, and soon the drive failed. When I checked the SMART attributes, the drive had reached a temperature of 75C while the laptop was used in a more or less normal way.

I guess I did a lot more writing than I intended. The points is that yes, drives nowadays are very reliable, and are designed to withstand shocks and high temperatures. Yet, I never move my laptop with the drive operating and always use it on a hard surface. This is based not on opinion but on facts and experience.

Sh, it happens.

The simple solution is to have an external drive (or fileserver) that you backup to regularly. That way;

1. you have a backup in case the HD fails

2. the HD won't fail (because of 1... computers know murphy's law better than we do)

The practical side is that most head crashes do limited damage. A lot of laptop users DO use their machines while in motion... on a train or a plane, for example. However, if you have a decent amount of memory and are not doing anything too intensive, a decent laptop probably won't be accessing the hard drive most of the time. Even if it is, so long as the head crash does not affect the FAT, you will probably not lose much data.

Before anybody else jumps on the assumption bandwagon I suggest you take your own reality check and read what I said again. See that my mention of join date and post count was in direct reply to the question of why an old thread was dragged up after two years, no reference to the users knowlege was made, to do so or think that way (as you demonstrate)would be quite short sighted. So Back in your box son...

Yes, you implied that adding useful new information to old threads was a stupid thing to do, and backed that up by asserting that it had only been done because the poster was a noob. Presumably experienced users have learned not to contribute useful information.

Way to go, scaring off the new users! I find your assumption that adding good information to an old thread rather than, presumably, either starting a new duplicate one or just not posting at all, is unfounded.

...and since we all know I can't keep my mouth shut at these sorts of opportunities, , I'll say that I took the low post count and recent join date completely separate from the content, and only applied it to the fact that the member should've started a new thread if he was so knowledgeable in this field.
There is plenty of wasted space here on the NBF, and if that's really your concern, I suggest you stop contributing to the Dell Rep Thread, as currently you have 114 posts there that have nothing to do with notebook technology.
But as we all know, this technology evolves quite quickly, and what was true about components two years ago is very often no longer true about today's replacement components.

Soooo, the ressurecter of this thread certainly had relative insight that warranted starting a new thread, and we should all encourage new members to do so when they have information very specific to share.
However, there's no denying that there are many members with double, triple, multiple accounts where "new members" disruptively add to threads or dredge up old ones. As a result, new members do have to "prove" themselves to be genuine in their intentions, as far as I'm concerned, and only for that reason do I ever pay attention to a member's post count.
Those with high post counts relative to their join date (joined six months ago with twelve hundred posts, for example) raise my skeptical brow just as much as those with low post counts relative to their join date (joined two years ago, with only five posts, for example).

A member's post count has never been a direct reflection, at least to me, of their knowledge or helpfulness. It has always been a reflection of their intent here at the NBF.

Furthermore, I find technical threads that run on for over a hundred posts over the course of several months very cumbersome, because there's simply too much to wade through.
A thread here at NBF is a bit like a piece of fruit growing off a tree. If the same piece of fruit didn't get replaced by a new one just like it, it would get old and rotten.
So we should, uhmmm...
...welcome the new fruit?

New Fruit!

What I can add - my laptop go through X-ray machine on the security stand couple of times per month for three years. The only problem I have - my CD/DVD stop read DVD and CD reading/writing unreliable now. Not sure if it related to X-ray.