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Data Storage

Submission + - Why do hard drives die so early in life? (custkb.com)

Submitted by
Catalina588
Catalina588 writes: "Linked to this post is Seagate's knowledge base, http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931 where owners of Seagate's 1 TB 7200.11 drives (including me) will find the six steps to determining whether your Seagate or Maxtor hard drive needs new firmware, and what to do if you lose data on that hard drive. The problem is serious enough that Seagate is offering to recover lost data for free.

Hard drive failures are second only to Windows corruption in my ongoing headaches of computing in this decade. I have two Hitachi 500 GB Deskstar drives in the basement pile of electronic junk. They both failed catastrophically in less than a year of ordinary use.

Hard drive manufacturers quote average hard drive life as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). Ordinary consumer drives are in the 500,000 hour MTBF range, while enterprise (e.g., more expensive) hard drives can range up to 1.5 million hour MTBF. Since there are 8,760 hours in a 24x7 year, 500,000 hour average MTBF is a lot of years. Right? Yeah, 57 years is the answer. The key word in this consumer claim is "average". Real drives last anywhere from fifteen minutes to fifteen years.

But based on my own miserable experience, I challenge these vendor 500,00 hour MTBF claims as misleading and unproven. I'd like to see a state attorney general document what the real expected life is of a consumer hard drive, and how consumers should treat their drives to maximize life. For instance, is letting Windows shut an idle disk drive down after 10 minutes or so causing thermal stress with continual power-cycle starts and stops?

What is your experience with hard drive longevity in a consumer environment? What steps will maximize hard drive life?"
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows 7 Beta Downloaders Get Garbage (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Catalina588
Catalina588 writes: Neowin.net http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/09/windows-7-public-beta-released-remember-to-patch posts links to Microsoft's Download Center for the much-awaited Windows 7 Beta, activation keys, and patches. The Microsoft site was deluged yesterday but is back up on Saturday morning (Eastern US Time). Unfortunately, the thousands of users fighting to get one of the 2.5 million Windows 7 downloads promised by Microsoft are liable to be disappointed; the download completes "successfully" after sending only a couple hundred megabytes of the 2.43 GB ISO file. Burned to a DVD, the result is another digital coaster. This puts disappointed users back in the overloaded download queue. In short, Microsoft's presumed ability to ship working bits across the Internet is compromised by this download-fiasco episode.

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