[X4U] Applecare and hard drives

Philip J Robar pjrobar at areyoureallythatstupid.org
Wed Oct 5 12:10:21 PDT 2005


> On Oct 5, 2005, at 6:33 AM, Peter Krug wrote:
>
>> On Oct 5, 2005, at 9:13 AM, Linda wrote:
>>
>>> On 10/5/05 3:32 AM, Philip J Robar wrote:
>>>
>>> In the 11 years that I managed 100's of machines that ran 24 hours a
>>> day I only had 2 hard drives fail. The vast majority of people will
>>> never experience a hard drive failure during their life.
>>
>> IMO hard disks are the weak link in a computer, and there are only  
>> two kinds
>> of computer users: Those who have already had a disk crash/data  
>> problem not
>> of their own making, and those who are about to. Once upon a time  
>> I thought
>> they were trustworthy and rock-solid, but now the only peace of  
>> mind I have
>> is extensive data duplication.

Drives are so inexpensive these days that it doesn't make sense not  
to have everything mirrored, unless the computer in question is a  
laptop and even then cloning on a regular basis should be the norm.  
I'm getting a 160 GB drive today for $30 after rebate.


> My experience regarding hard drives is that quality control in the  
> last few years may be going downhill.  We had 20 beige G3's (ca.  
> 1998) and none of their HDs have failed, these are 6-8 GB drives.   
> As we've upgraded to newer machines, I've put these drives into new  
> G4 towers (it makes the user feel better to still see all their  
> stuff, and gives them an emergency boot disc after I upgrade the  
> system software).  I've had 3 HDs out of 20 fail in the last 4  
> years, but all of them were the drives that shipped with the new  
> towers.  The older drives keep chugging along.  Is it because  
> corruption is more likely as drive density increases?

To be fair I have to admit that the machines I managed were Sun  
Workstations and Servers with Sun qualified SCSI HDs.

Even the failure rate of the infamous IBM "DeathStar" drives of a few  
years ago wasn't outside of the expected range. It just happened to  
be enough higher that it got people's attention. On the other hand HD  
manufacturers are under tremendous price pressures just like everyone  
in the high tech. world. Are they cutting corners, especially on  
consumer level drives? I'd argue that statistically there's no  
evidence of this.


Phil



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