My own experience over the years is that one can never tell. My two current drives (40gig WD's) are old indeed (in personal computer years), but seem to be fine, other than somehow having shrunk they were ridiculously large when I bought them. A decade or more ago I had a small server running 24/7 with 5 SCSI drives they started failing after the third year of service.
One thing I am sure of, dividing advertised life of computer hardware by ten (10) is a sensible way to make purchase decisions. Of course it has only been the past five years that that made any difference, because it has only been the last few years that PC's have been powerful enough that you did not need to upgrade to the latest thing as soon as it came out just so you could use them for whatever you wanted to use them for. graywolf http://www.graywolfphoto.com http://webpages.charter.net/graywolf "Idiot Proof" <==> "Expert Proof" ----------------------------------- Digital Image Studio wrote: > An interesting read: Google's Disk Failure Experience > > http://storagemojo.com/?p=378 > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
