On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Tom Rauschenbach wrote: > send me an email with MTBF of disks as the subject, and a brand name > with a rating ...
No ratings, but some food for thought... All hard disk drives will fail eventually. It is only a matter of when. MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures. Mean. Average. All the MTBF tells you is what you would get if you added the lifetime of all the drives and divided by the number of drives. Individually, you might have three bad drives in a row, while the guy next door has a 10 megabyte MFM drive still going strong. The MTBF given by the manufacturer is predicted. They may be wrong. The MTBF for a hard disk drive is not a single number. You have hours of operation, sure. But you also have head movements (does the disk thrash a lot because it contains a fragmented mailspool?) and spin-up cycles (do you power your PC down at the end of every day?). Figures assume ideal conditions. Temperature stresses, power surges, physical shock, even humidity and dust can affect the actual reliability. Quality problems often effect an entire production run. If, for example, an assembly machine is slightly out of tolerance, you might see thousands or even tens of thousands of drives of a particular model have trouble. Thus, warranty period may be more important than MTBF. Backups are the most important of all. See my first assertion, above. -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
