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Originally Posted by Brian Carlton
I know quite a few people that have drives that are five, six, seven years old.
You are thinking limited number of cycles or limited number of hours???
This drive is two years old now and it has already started making some "click, click, click sounds every so often (hasn't done it in over one week now). Diametricalbenz thinks I'm on borrowed time.  |
Both hours and cycles apply. The servers I tend to run 24x7, as do most office workstations. In my experience, you can cycle a computer daily, not meaning a mere reboot but enough time to let the drive and whole machine cool completely, or let it run and it will last about the same time. I've seen countless cases where office machines bought in a batch will have the drives fail within days of each other. I could tell you stories.
IDE drives (both STA and AT/E/IDE) are akin to a mid engined vehicle at the cornering limit. You get a little whiny noise that you only hardly notice and you’re in the guardrail. I suggest getting a spare drive today, configure the drive as an extended partition and back up everything. A really good shareware program is called xxcopy. I use it on a lot of computers. There is also a program called ghost that will mirror one to the other.
I too know of some drives, including one of my mail servers that has been running 24x7 for about 11 years, but i sure don't put anything important on it, and even though nothing important is on it I still have 2 separate backups of everything on it on 2 separate machines.