[X4U] Applecare and hard drives

[Philip J Robar]

On Oct 4, 2005, at 11:59 PM, Jon Warms wrote:

> Without any supporting data other than my own experiences,
> I hypothesize that within the last two years of an Applecare
> contract, something like half the laptop and mini drives will fail.
> If this is true,  ...

Maybe you're just trying to make a point, but this is so far from  
reality that it begs for a response. HDs commonly have a MTBF of  
500,000 to a 1,000,000 hours. Since most people don't know what Mean  
Time Between Failure really means I'll quote from a Samsung page,  
"SAMSUNG's MTBF for HDDs is 500,000 hours. That means that if you use  
your PC for 9 hours every day, your HDD should operate for 152  
years." For details see <http://www.samsung.com/Products/ 
HardDiskDrive/whitepapers/WhitePaper_05.htm>.

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.


Phil