At 08:16 PM 8/30/03 -0400, David Fenton wrote: >I wouldn't recommend swapping drives for no reason at all, just >because they are 6 months old, because the drives that are still in >good working order after 6 months are the ones that are going to be >reliable for 5 or 10 years of use.
Warranty time reductions reflect drive failure rates outside the 1-year window, even while claimed MTBF rates have risen to 1 million hours (greater than a century). MTBF means little in real-life use, though, and that may reflect the warranty situation. I've personally had 5 drive failures -- one IBM, two Maxtors, one Seagate, one WD. The only one less than a year old was the IBM. One of the Maxtors was the built-on controller board, 18 months out. The rest were mechanical. I've also repaired computers in a shop here in Vermont since 1980. Drives start to fail regularly after 2-3 years. They are mechanical devices, so the geometric burn-in curve doesn't apply as it does with non-moving electronic components. They will fail due to head crashes, platter warping, seized bearings, overheating, arm cracks, controller board failure (often linked to problems with the head arms), and children. I had one unit with constant head crashes; when I learned the owners were next to active railroad tracks, it only took the installation of a cushion to increase disk life. My drive upgrading penchant is more typical than not among users of media machines. Admittedly many Finale owners are in the engraving business and not multimedia artists or gamers with huge files, but large drives are increasingly commonplace as media applications are bundled with one's off-the-shelf Dell or Gateway. New hard drives fly off the shelf at Staples when they go on sale. The 5-year-old drive is a rarity among primary machines, even here in rural America. Dennis _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
