What percentage of your hard drives fail?

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
?i think google runs its own system health software and doesn't just rely on smart.

I was referring to:

"3.5.1 Scan Errors:
Drives typically scan the disk surface in the background and report errors as they discover them. Large scan error counts can be indicative of surface defects, and therefore are believed to be indicative of lower reliability. In our population, fewer than 2% of the drives show scan errors and they are nearly uniformly spread across various disk models.
... We find that the group of drives with scan errors are ten times more likely to fail than the group with no errors. ..."

It doesn't look like Google routines if it's being done by the drive. I was just wondering how to get the scan error results. It looks like a good failure predictor.

 

[myocardia]

I've probably owned at least 25 hard drives over the years. My first was a 20MB Seagate. Not one of them has ever failed, at least while I owned it. I still own two hard drives that I bought in the 90's, and both still work, though they haven't been used much at all for 3 or 4 years now. As a matter of fact, I've only ever had any trouble at all with one HD, a 40GB Maxtor, which I still use, developed a bad sector in it's boot sector, and had to be zero-filled. That was about 3 years ago, and it still works as well as it ever did, as far as I can tell.

Want to know what causes most HD's to fail? Spin-ups. If you want your hard drives to last, stop letting Windoze turn them off.

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: myocardia
If you want your hard drives to last, stop letting Windoze turn them off.

Interesting you mentioned that. I stopped doing this a year ago because of the noise. Windows would turn them off at the configured time and back on every 15-30 minutes to do 'something'. It just makes sense to minimize mechanical movement in any product.

The advances in hd technology and reliability have been remarkable. In the '80s, there were quite a few failures but they're rare now. These failures were usually at the sector level and not for the entire drive (partial failures?). I've had several laptops with only one hd failure and it was probably due to heat failure elsewhere in the laptop. Another laptop was dropped while running and didn't fail - never understood why.

There was a discussion elsewhere about the physical orientation contributing to failure. One person was convinced that mounting a drive vertically is bad.

 

[Modelworks]

It doesn't matter if a drive is mounted vertical , at an angle, or upside down.

The moving parts are held in place by bearings, seals, bolts.
Gravity doesn't factor into it

 

[seemingly random]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
It doesn't matter if a drive is mounted vertical , at an angle, or upside down.

The moving parts are held in place by bearings, seals, bolts.
Gravity doesn't factor into it

That's what I contended but changing another's perceptions can be fruitless sometimes. In addition, I'm not an ME and when ME arguments are used, I stay quiet. There was a quote from a manufacturer about possible problems a few degrees off axis but this doesn't explain why laptop hd's don't fail more often - at least when they're used in a lap - which is rarely level.

 

[RebateMonger]

My experience with desktop hard drives, extending over about 22 years now, is that their failure rate is close to what Google found. About 7% per year of use. In a company with 20 PCs, I'll see one or two drive failures per year.

I've also seen a LOT of failures of external hard drives being used for backups. Likely, they are running too hot during hours of continuous file transfers, although I usually pick housings with built-in fans.

 

[corkyg]

I really can't count the hard drives I have had since 1986 - but in 21 years, I have only had one failure.