[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Hard-Drive Failures Surprisingly Frequent here

[zboner]

My drive just failed last week and I ordered a new one and I installd it yesterday when it came.The SMART feature did show me a message though. Also, Windows also showed me a message saying to back up my data because hard drive failure was imminent.

[chrisdon]

I use cuxlden to distribute very large video files and back up my entire HD.This program support 512Gb zipped file to distribute!search 'cuxlden' on google.com

[blackcross]

MTTF is different than MTBF. Most manufacturers report MTBF based on component vendor data: in other words a paper exercise. Real world returns analysis of all types of hardware need to be correlated to the paper study to provide "correction factors".Activity does play a major part in drive failures: if you are using a consumer drive in a server role, it will die sooner: MTTF. The duty cycle is the key: how hard and how long is it being run. Consumer drives have made huge reliability leaps in the past 10 years but they are not designed for extended access 24x7 for example.

[PolarUpgrade]

The data is questionable in my view. Counting drives that have been returned by the user as failed could be very misleading. That's because drive makers in my experience supply the user at purchase with test software that often reports a need to replace a drive without reporting the actual fault to the user, and which often needlessly claims the drive is failing or has failed. Why does this matter? It matters because in my experience such factors as misconfigured drives or too-old controller cards (for the drive capacity), often cause periodic scan errors to manifest during tests.An end user might try to use an older partition manager that cannot work properly with drives over 80 or even 160 gigs or so. Such utilities often APPEAR to work but create partitions that cause the drive to write data incorrectly. Moreover, even Windows' built-in disk management console on Win 2000 and XP often will not catch the misconfiguration, causing what. look like bad sectors over time.

[dannysdailys]

Who cares about hard drive failures: RAID 1; Learn it, Know it, Live it...

[Doug]

Exactly correct dannysdailys.Just as I said in my comment on PC disasters. There are no PC disasters, only human disasters.If you want no PC breakdowns (hard drive failures and etc.) then you'll need to either build or buy a perfect computer. Fat chance. The ONLY thing to do is backup, backup, and backup again. All computer related disasters can be tied directly to operator stupidity, ignorance, laziness, or just plain worthlessness.I can't wait to hear the crying and moaning from the people who've bought 750GB - 1 TB drives only to lose everything because they just can't "learn it, know it, and live it". Poor fools, and they are so arrogant as to blame the HDD makers for their data loss. Catch on people....ALL things mechanical break sooner or later! There are no free lunches and every one of us either takes personal responsibility for data security or get our butts in a jam. Me? I'm a pre RAID user so I back up my critical data to an internal data drive, two unrelated web sites, CD, and a flash drive. And my backup to backup is good old hardcopy filed away at home and at work. Paranoid? You dang right. And you reader, better get that way.

[Sin91]

I recently lost a HD and SMART didn't give me any warning. Oh well, gave me an excuse to buy a WD Raptor.