[X4U] Applecare and hard drives

[Linda]

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.

My story is vastly different. I'm a work at home freelancer. My dual G4 had
three internal hard disks (the original, then two replacements) fail in
short succession (a 2-month period); and two of my Maxtor external FW drives
had one fail with a head crash six months into ownership, with the other
losing its mount point about every 2 months over the life of the drive so
far (now almost 2 years). I replaced a hard disk in an iMac DVSE (graphite)
after 3 years of that person's ownership, and the hard disk in my old
Toshiba Satellite laptop failed with repeated I/O errors (even after a total
reformat) after 4-1/2. That's just in the last five years, with the handful
of personal users I help take care of.

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.

Of course, YMMV.