Re: [PLUG] Hardware monitoring

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On 10 Feb, 2005, at 21:37, Mark M. Hoffman wrote:
> > My linux drives has logged 20K hours. I guess that is about right for 
> > 2
> > years. Anyone know what to expect in terms of life in hours from a 
> > drive?
>
> I personally don't count on disks to run for more than a year after 
> their
> warranty has expired.

Depends on the drives ... in my experience, clearly a case of "you get 
what you pay for."

I have SCSI drives which are way beyond their warranties -- (by 4 or 5 
years), and other FireWire drives that haven't lived as long as their 
warranty!

Put another way, SCSI drives tend to be more expensive because they are 
subject to more rigorous testing before their sale, and have claimed 
MTBF ratings well over the 1,000,000 hour range (2 years) common on 
cheaper drives.

Environment and usage patterns also are related. Drives that are 
powered up and down constantly, tend to fail much sooner than those 
that are simply powered up and left running "forever."  Drives that 
operate in a relatively constant ambient temperature environment tend 
to "live longer" than drives that live in a "normal room" environment, 
where the "heat of the day" pushes the ambient temperature into the 
high 80s or 90s.

I don't know that any of my drives are new enough to support SMART 
technology, especially since they are almost all SCSI drives, which 
doesn't really "support" SMART in the first place. Guess I'll have to 
play.


T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org
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whmagill@gmail.com

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