Does it bother you that hard drives need replacing every 3 to 5 years?

**goldsdad** · 03-22-2012, 03:20 PM

That's all that I'm aware of in Sys Pref. Anything else related to power management will require the pmset command, as far as I know.

**new_media** · 03-22-2012, 04:02 PM

So which is more expensive, replacing a drive every 5 years or the electricity needed to keep the drive spinning nonstop for 5 years.

**Boy Howdy** · 03-29-2012, 10:14 AM

ksjeff:
I'd like to know this too. Nobody has made reference to enterprise drives which, at three times the price SHOULD BE more reliable and/or last longer...

**EuroChamp** · 03-29-2012, 01:22 PM

Enterprise drivers are designed for 24/7 uptime.
In our company we have 'some' servers and I can tell you: drive failures are very rare today.

On the other hand, our desktops and notebooks have cheaper HDDs and some of them are running 24/7, even here we have almost no drive failures.

But we change our hardware between 3 and 5 years.

And I have to agree Julf, some HDDs are easy to repair with simple changing the electronic board. You are lucky if you own some HDDs of the same model :-)

And I learned, that some of these 'green' supersize discs are not built for 24/7.
WD, Seagate and Samsung - all the same.

And: SSD don't last forever!

Enjoy listening,
Bernhard

**One and a half** · 03-29-2012, 02:53 PM

For file serving use, I use a QNAP 419 in RAID6 config. Drives are Seagate 7200rpm 1.5GB 3 year warranty of which two have failed about 18 months after startup for one, and 20 months for the other. As soon as I received the replacement under warranty, the other one failed, so another trip to the dealer... Their tech told me he had the same drives and all four were replaced, they just die.
The other drama is that if a drive does die in an array, you really need to buy in the first place n+1 as a spare, cause another drive won't work, even if it has the same size. Eventually, you would have to replace all of them in one go anyway, what, every 8 years?

Once bitten, the next alternative is to try enterprise drives, however some of these also failed on me, in real server situations. The only ones that lasted the longest were Hitachi drives, branded by IBM, although that may have changed now. Currently waiting for the prices to drop due to the Thailand floods affecting production and skyrocketing drive prices.

For music only, the mac has a portable FW drive, Seagate Go Flex 1TB, so the RAID is used for file serving and music is duplicated on that drive. For backups, I have another GoFlex 3TB which is used every month for disaster type situations. I wish work was more secure, so I could leave the backup drive there.

Have thought about cloud storage facilities which charge a modest fee per month for storage. What's daunting is the upload of 3TB+ data in the first place. What do you do, send a disk to the facility? Hardly secure is it. Suppose just take it in smaller GB chunks until the job is complete.

Does anyone have a cloud storage facility, not the iCloud nonsense, but storing real files with realistic quantities, not just a couple of hundred MB.

**phofman** · 04-04-2012, 03:30 AM

Drives keep failing, that is just reality. In my experience consumer level 3.5" SATA drives running 24/7 in high load fail in about 2 years, while the much more expensive SAS drives last for many years. We put SAS drives to machines where high-availability is crutial, consumer level SATA to other servers and desktops.

IMO the solution is to use RAID with redundancy for data continuity and regular offline backup for data security. It does not have to be expensive, e.g. for SATA raid we use linux soft raid exclusively with excellent results. When a drive fails (a single kick off the raid array counts), we just replace it with a new one and claim warranty for the failed one. Often the warranty is just a few months expired.

For non-critical home use I would run just a single drive, regularly backed-up to another external drive using an eSATA or USB bay. Proper backup is much more useful than raid in this case. If a single drive cannot provide the required capacity, the backup gets more complicated, requiring multiple drives + bays.

**maddog95** · 04-28-2012, 08:17 PM

It bothers me but I can't do anything about it. So my two - 2TB drives are mirrored through RAID to two more 2TB drives.

I won't lose anything unless the dang thing catches fire!

**Mister Wednesday** · 04-28-2012, 08:40 PM

Greetings all,

An article on the Macworld website regarding hard drive warranty policies which might be of interest to you:

http://www.macworld.com/article/1164...y_periods.html

I have no connection to or association with any of the persons, products, companies or views expressed in the articles referenced above.

Regards,

Mister Wednesday

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