Hard Drives and failure

[MrChupon]

I was just clicking around on Slashdot today, and I noticed an announcement that Maxtor will be releasing a 320GB hard drive soon. While browsing the comments, I noticed that inbetween all the porn jokes and arguing, the most common theme of the posts seemed to be complaints about backing up data and how quickly hard drives fail. Times were getting thrown around, stories of drives failing in 6 weeks, one year, etc.

Thats when it hit me.. in 15 years of computing, I've never had a hard disk fail on me. Ever. And come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure what causes hard disk failure.

Does hard drive failure come about by random mechanical chance? Is the fact that I dont run my computer as a read/write intesive server what is saving me? Is it sheer luck?

Reading the comments today is scary. I dont keep very good backups. Is it just a case of a vocal minority of people who have had problems speaking way too loud? Or are everyones hard drives dropping like flies around me and I am just long overdue?

How common is Hard Disk failure REALLY? And what causes it? And does the way you use your comptuer increase/decrease the chance of this? For example do I have to go about backing up my parents websurfing box where nothing gets written to the HDD other than a lot of webbrowser cache and an occasional Word document? Or is this more of a thing that strikes in a 24/7 10,000 users connected server type environment?

Any thoughts/insights/links/flames would certainly be interesting. Thanks.

 

[ProviaFan]

I've never had any one of my current (3, two western digitals and one maxtor) hard drives fail (/me knocks on wood cautiously). The only one that crashed was an ancient 30MB hard drive in my old IBM PS/1.

 

[MWink]

I've never had a hard disk randomly fail on me. I take very good care of my system. I use a UPS and other high quality components. I have had 2 hard drives fail but it was not their fault. One was a WD 2.5GB that got hundreds (literally) of bad sectors because the computer kept shutting down after 3 seconds of being on (in the middle of spinning up). The other one was an IBM TravelStar 40GB that died because my modem kept causing the system to hard lock requiring me to turn it off (not properly shut down).

No matter what I STRONGLY recommend everyone backup any important data. I don't really have any critical data but I still backup to an external hard drive every week or so. Just last week someone asked me to get the data off his broken laptop. He said the data is worth thousands of dollars and he had no backup. I took one look at the laptop and was ROTFL. The laptop looked like someone took a hammer and a screw driver to it with intent to kill.

The LCD's case was cracked. The cover that goes over the LCD's hinges was totally gone. There were major scratches all over the thing (you have to see it to believe it). I couldn't believe it actually booted when I pressed the power button. As far as I could tell it is still fully working (dispite its appearance). I guess Dell's really are durable (it's a 5 year old Inspiron 3000).

BTW, I did get the data off it and backed it up to CD-R's. He owes me BIG.