Hard drive quality standards, have they gone down?

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#1 Post by **AlphaKilo470** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 5:37 pm

I just checked the technical specs for my hard drive on Toshiba's website and noticed that the life expectancy is 5 years. Currently, that drive is in my 600E and running perfect and fast as hell. At the time being, the drive is one of the nicest and fastest drives I've used to date. Still, a 5 year product life just seems short.

I had a Fujitsu 20gb hard drive that was manufactured in December of 2001 develop a ton of bad sectors overnight and to the point of not being usable this week. Last year I had a 20gb Hitachi DK series hard drive die. At the same time, my ThinkPad 760E and 380ED both have 9 year old hard drives (Toshiba 3.2gb in the 760E and an IBM 3gb in the 380ED) that haven't so much as had a corrupt file on them. The 760ED that I sent to a forum member earlier this month has a 10 year old Toshiba 2gb hard drive that also runs perfect.

Also, may I mention my neighbors circa 2000 HP laptop that had it's hard drive die after 3 years and the tech support rep told him they had a 2 year life expectancy and he was lucky to have had that much use.

I'm not sure if I'm cutting things short or not but have the quality standards on these things gone down? Since when is 5 years or less acceptable as standard product life?

#2 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 9:06 pm

While I've only had a laptop for the last 3-1/2 years, I have had a desktop PC for over 15 years, starting with a 386-25. I have had several hard drive failures over the years on both my laptop (once) and desktop PC's. Admittedly these computers are on most of the time, but if I get 5 years out of a hard drive, I feel it has served me well. I had (3) 80GB SATA Maxtor hard drives (in a desktop PC raid array) fail in less than a year for each one.

I saw someones sig recently that states something to the effect that: There are two kinds of people in this world, those that have had a hard drive fail, and those that will.

#3 Post by **AlphaKilo470** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 9:40 pm

You're true with that and because of the good deal I got on the hard drive and the performance it's been giving (going from 2mb cache to a 16mb cache and going from 4200rpm to 5400 makes a HUGE and ginormous difference), I can't give any direct complaints but nonetheless, it just doesn't seem correct that my 760E that's been through hell like none other and is just about to see it's 10th birthday has a hard drive with a better chance of seeing the year 2015 than the fairly new 40gb hard drive in my 600E.

I'm just hoping I'll have this drive longer than I had the two 20gb drives I've gone through though. Although I don't plan to still be using this same comptuer or hard drive after the end of this decade, I woud like to know there's little chance of the hard drive dying while still in full use.

leoblob · #4 Post by **leoblob** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 10:45 pm

The hard drive in my wife's TP360 started making bad noises this week and I replaced it before disaster struck. I think 12 years of continual hard use is pretty good!

As for the advertised life expectancy of hard drives, I used to work as a copywriter for Hitachi Storage Division (in the late 80s, early 90s) and all the MTBF numbers were simply made up... all the manufacturers did this. Maybe it's different now... but I do think it's pretty much random luck whether your drive lasts a long time, or it dies (too) soon...

#5 Post by **AlphaKilo470** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 11:06 pm

Well, that does explain the wierd proportion between "Product Life" and MTBF on the Toshiba website. The MTBF was much longer than the "Product Life." I am not surprised about the numbers being made up mainly because I don't imagine an exact way of telling how many years in the future a product will last when it's still brand new. Still, actually hearing that statement just cracks me up.

#6 Post by **bill bolton** » Sat Feb 25, 2006 11:59 pm

AlphaKilo470 wrote:have the quality standards on these things gone down?

Firstly, there are very significant technology differences between drives from 9 years ago and those made today. The technology changes have been necessary to achive the storage density that users demand today. So you can't realistically compare much at all from a 9 year old drive with anything from a current drive.

Secondly, in terms of quality standard, I personally haven't seen a great deal of difference over time. 2.5" hard drives generally live a tough life in mobile devices and there are a host of threats they have to cope with. On the whole it seems to me that 2.5" drives cope better with those threats today than they did even 5 years ago.

Since when is 5 years or less acceptable as standard product life?

~5 years indicated life has been pretty much a constant for hard drives of all sorts, ever since I bought my first shoebox sized, 20Mbyte, SASI interface Fujitsu drive back in the early 1980s.

Cheers,

Bill

leoblob · #7 Post by **leoblob** » Sun Feb 26, 2006 12:35 am

AlphaKilo470 wrote:... I am not surprised about the numbers being made up mainly because I don't imagine an exact way of telling how many years in the future a product will last when it's still brand new....

There are techniques known as accelerated life testing, which can "compress" the timeframe of actual testing (under unusually harsh conditions), to give an idea of life expectancy under normal operating conditions.

However, even back in the late 80s, when MTBFs were around 20,000 hours (if I remember correctly), that was equal to 10 years at 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year. What are the numbers like now...?? Got to be at least 500,000 hours (?)... that's 250 years... the numbers become meaningless IMHO.

#8 Post by **AlphaKilo470** » Sun Feb 26, 2006 12:44 am

Maybe I jumped the gun with my post when viewing in retrospect. I'd have to find all the datasheets for those 9 and 10 year old drives I have that still run to know.

I just wouldn't expect have more dead hard drives on my hands that were made after the year 2000 than before the year 2000.

I just find it sorta funny when I see a datasheet like the one for my hard drive that has 300,000 hour MTBF and under that another row called Product Life that says 5 years. Those are some pretty diverse proportions.

donking! · #9 Post by **donking!** » Sun Feb 26, 2006 4:09 am

It's my understanding that MTBF is a statistical measure of failure rates over a population of things. In this case, it is not a measure of an individual drives probable life.

MTBF for a hard drive gives a measure of how many hours of drive use were logged for a bunch of drives being tested at once, before one of them failed. So that 300,000 MTBF is spread out over many drives. Each one put in say 40,000 hours, before one of them failed.

That's why there is an apparent incongruity between the expected life of an individual drive and the MTBF measure given for it.

In fact, I read that the units of MTBF are not properly hours, but drive-hours. Or failures/drive-hours (hours added up that are logged by a number of drives being tested at once). Supposedly the units for MTBF are typically reduced to just "hours" for the express purpose of confusing people and making something seem more reliable than it is.

That said, I think it's worth mentioning here that Seagate is the only hard drive manufacturer that offers and 5-year warranty on its drives, instead of more typical 3-year one.

Hard drive quality standards, have they gone down?

Hard drive quality standards, have they gone down?

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