On Wed, 25 Dec 2013 07:44:04 -0600, The Daring Dufas
wrote:

On 12/24/2013 11:40 PM, wrote:
On Tue, 24 Dec 2013 19:39:44 -0600, philo
wrote:

On 12/24/2013 07:23 PM, wrote:


I never trust my data to less than three separate HD's.

SSD's are good in that they have no moving parts to wear out
but they do have a limited number of read/ writes.

Right now, the only one I have is on a laptop I rarely use.

The thing is, when an SSD does fail, it can do so with no
warning.

With a conventional drive there is usually some type of warning
first such as a SMART error, developing bad sectors or R/W
errors.
I've had as many "hard " failures on hard drives as "soft"
failures. Work perfectly one minute - and totally useless the
next.


Only once have I gotten on my bench a standard HD that went into
instant failure mode.

I lucked out and found an SMT cap. with a cracked solder joint and
repaired it.

The next day I gave the owner of the machine a very severe lecture
on making backups!
Of the last 5 HD failures I've had come in, 2 were "hard", one had
been slow for months, and the other one had occaisionally had access
problems, which, in hindsight, were a warning. Because it would
generally boot on the second reboot other problems were suspected -
not the drive. When it quit completely, the drive could not be
accessed even as a second drive. Not sure if a new drive would have
fixed it completely as we junked the computer.

I'm getting into solid state drives but the only mechanical hard drives
I buy are enterprise class drives designed to run 24/7. The drives cost
a little more and I haven't had any of them gronk on me. ^_^

TDD
Most I work with are enterprise too - which is why out of about42?
drives in the one office I've had 2 or 3 failures in the last 5 years.
The machines get replaced at about 7 years.