Hard Drive Life Expectancy

Question

Hard Drive Life Expectancy

I am looking to replace a two year old Dell laptop with an Apple Mac Book. I have replaced the hard drive in the Dell three time due to failure. What is the typical life expectancy of a hard drive in an Apple laptop?

emac 1.25 GHz 768 RAM Bad Capacitors Repaired, Mac OS X (10.3.x), 768 Ram Mercury Elite Pro external hard drive

Posted on Nov 16, 2010 8:35 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Kappy

Level 10

361,741 points

Nov 16, 2010 9:01 AM in response to Julien Antkies

The life expectancy of any hard drive is unrelated to the computer. Here's some things to consider:

Lower priced drives come with three year warranties while the more expensive "enterprise" models come with five year warranties. Apparently drive makers think that represents the expected lives of the drives or they would provide longer warranties.

Manufacturer data suggests the drives will last upwards of 100 years, but there's certainly no evidence that any of them ever have. Google did a study that showed nearly 30 percent of all drives in service at their server farms failed annually.

If you're lucky the drives last longer than you keep the computer. I've yet to have a drive failure before I replaced the drives for other reasons. So, I guess I'm lucky.

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Answer 2

varjak paw

Level 10

170,200 points

Nov 16, 2010 1:32 PM in response to Julien Antkies

Note as well that the drives in any computer all come from the same handful of manufacturers. So - setting aside any differences in brands and specific models of drive, any environmental issues and the possibility of problems with the computer's drive circuitry - the likelihood of a drive failing will be basically identical regardless of the manufacturer of the computer.

Regards.

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