Hard drive life expectancy - archiving

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hi!

I would like to ask how can i preserve my hdds to increase their life expectancy (if this possible...) cause i have tons of gigas of multimedia on them! I know i can also backup them for cds and dvds but there is always a chance of doing this, right?

How many years could they last if they are well preserved????

So, is there any suggestion ? I have a 2 fan akasa thing on each hdd and dont know if this will help or not.

I have got WDJ, Seagates, Maxtor and Hitachi.

Thanks!
 
You shouldn't rely on any HD life expectancy estimates. If you have sensitive data then you should consider every hard drive as something that will fail tomorrow (and that's exactly how it is - your brand new HD may die tomorrow no matter the "life expectancy"). Make a RAID array out of your disks and backup often. If you have a lot of data then you may consider a tape device for backups - a 200GB tape for some $30 is a lot cheaper and faster than a pile of DVD-R discs.

You could go and look up the MTBF statistics for your specific hard drives (good luck). MTBF is almost never quoted by HD makers for consumer devices for obvious reasons so you should pretend to be a corporate customer :)
 
Something commonly called bit rot might corrupt data on disks stored for years, or even sooner. If you fully scandisked them once every few months you might get away with it. Best backup plan for your need is to burn it to cd/dvd. Those will hold data securely for like 100 years or more unless they get damaged physicaly.
 
Life expectancy of a burned CD is 7 years.

Its a good idea to every few years reburn and check your archives.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back