Maxtor DM10: should I worry about component design life = 5y

[Dance123]

Hi,

Just wondering, but what is the average life of a Maxtor HD. I intend to get the DM 10, but it only has a warranty of 1 or 3 years.

Does that really mean that there is a big chance that the drive won't be working anymore after 3 years or something? Thing is I still have an old PC here somewhere that is 10 years old and the harddisk in it is still working flawless. Am I just lucky? Is it so that nowadays harddisks won't work that long?! That's not very reassuring for something that needs to be reliable in the first place.

Should I worry about this cause I don't want to buy a harddisk that most likely is gonna die after only 3 years!!

Note: in a review over here: http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/ma ... dex.x?pg=1 they mention in the specs that the "Component design life" is 5 years. What do they mean by that?! Does that mean the average lifetime of the drive is only 5 years and that you have to replace your drive before that?!

Please advise! Thanks very much!!

[wsc]

'Component Design Life' strikes me as a phrase they pulled directly out of a press release or sales pamphlet, ie, sounds pretty much useless to me. You seem to be shocked by a hard drive lasting "only" 5 years... take a look around you. All electronic products are basically throw-away devices now. Everything from cell phones to TVs even to some extent cars (think 1st generation dodge neon)! Companies know that the way to profits is through obsolecence or shoddy products that don't last very long. Buy a drive with the longest warranty you can find, back your files up regularly, and don't worry about it so much.

[mg1394]

There's not much reason to worry about average life of a drive. For some odd reason Maxtor has started quoting "Component design life" instead of the old "MTBF", but the term, roughly, means the same thing. Also their 5 year number is quite low by their old, and others, quoted lifetimes of closer to 100,000 hours or about 10 years. Even then this really means about half of the units will have some type of failure in that time frame - not that your units won't last 10 or 20 years, if you want to use it that long. Perhaps more meaningful to you is the quoted spec. that about 1% of units in the field are returned for repair each year. This is pretty much in line with all disk drive vendors. On the other hand, you may, statistically, be one of the unlucky ones that has a drive that fails after 12 months Also, keep in mind that "warranty period" has nothing to do with the reliability of a drive - it's just a marketing and accounting position - marketing likes long warranties to make products easier to sell, and accounting hates keeping the liability of possibly replacing drives on the books any longer than possible.

Also, Maxtor is being quite odd now by offering a 3 year warranty on OEM drives, but only 1 year if it is retail packaged. Really consumer unfriendly.

[BenW]

Its no different to a car in that you get a 3 year warrenty and nothing goes wrong for 5/10 years or if you're unlucky it goes after a year

[lm]

take a look around you. All electronic products are basically throw-away devices now. Everything from cell phones to TVs even to some extent cars (think 1st generation dodge neon)!

It sucks. I'd prefer products that last for tens of years.

[Erssa]

Would you be willing to pay the premium (2-4x price) for it?

[Splinter]

Would you be willing to pay the premium (2-4x price) for it?

I'd pay 3x the price for a product that lasted 5x longer

[m0002a]

I'd pay 3x the price for a product that lasted 5x longer

If a normal disk lasted 3 years, and you bought one that lasted 15 years, the technology would be obsolete long before the 15 years was up.

That does not even include the issue of time value of money, or the fact that disk storage per gigabyte is likely to decrease over time.

[Splinter]

160gb now is 160gb in 10 years, no matter how you look at it.

I dont care what anyone says, I don't need more than terabyte of HD space. The only reason I have half a TB now is because I like having all my movies on the computer instead of burning them onto DVD.

Just because something is obsolete, doesn't mean you have to throw it away. My dad still uses a 1ghz Duron, which is well obsolete, but it does everything he needs just dandy, and it will continue to do so until the day it dies.

Technology is like an expanding chamber, and people are different phases of matter. I am not a gas, I dont feel the need to expand to fill the chamber. Just because in 10 years I'll be able to buy a 10TB hd, it doesnt mean I'll want one.

[m0002a]

160gb now is 160gb in 10 years, no matter how you look at it.

I dont care what anyone says, I don't need more than terabyte of HD space. The only reason I have half a TB now is because I like having all my movies on the computer instead of burning them onto DVD.

Just because something is obsolete, doesn't mean you have to throw it away. My dad still uses a 1ghz Duron, which is well obsolete, but it does everything he needs just dandy, and it will continue to do so until the day it dies.

Technology is like an expanding chamber, and people are different phases of matter. I am not a gas, I dont feel the need to expand to fill the chamber. Just because in 10 years I'll be able to buy a 10TB hd, it doesnt mean I'll want one.

I am not sure about your math. 1 Ghz is about 4 years old, not 15. My 3500+ idles at 1 Ghz with Cool and Quiet.

I figure that in 15 years Windows XX will take about 250 GB storage to install.

BTW: Speaking of obsolete, I think your eBay link is dead.

[tlinna]

Let's clear this up.

Component design life doesn't mean the average life time! It means that after five years (or whatever the component design life is), the wear on the drive causes the statistical failure rate to rise (compared to a relatively new HDD), and you should consider replacing it.

MTBF (Mean time between failures) is a different thing. It is a statistical number, which roughly gives the estimate of the failure rate of a relatively new drive. If MTBF is 10 years (shown in hours), it doesn't mean the average life time is 10 years either. It means that if you have ten hard disks, you can expect one to break every year on average, or more than one per year if you're using drives older than component design life. Or if you buy 120 new HDDs, you can expect replacing one failing drive every month. It's all statistics and probabilities.

A consumer can't get much out of these numbers, reliability is a matter of luck when talking about one particular drive. It can last three days or fifteen years, nobody knows. When we talk about hundreds of drives, for example in a company, MTBF and component design life numbers are more important figures, because you can make statistical estimates of how many hdd failures you're going to have in a given time.

Those numbers are given by the manufacturer, and are based on, for example, experience on previous drives (or components), burn-in testing of the new model or individual components, and theoretical estimates (guesses). It's a completely different thing if you can trust the numbers.

Hope this helps.

[mathias]

160gb now is 160gb in 10 years, no matter how you look at it.

I dont care what anyone says, I don't need more than terabyte of HD space. The only reason I have half a TB now is because I like having all my movies on the computer instead of burning them onto DVD.

That sounds so odd(since movies seem to be the main reason for making bigger hard drives). What about if you want HD movies? Or what about if movies will be made with multiple viewing angles, or something like that?

If you don't want the extra space, then get a single platter drive next time, maybe even a 2.5" one. This is SPCR after all!

I for one wouldn't mind it if all hard drives broke in exactly 4 or 5 years.

My dad still uses a 1ghz Duron, which is well obsolete, but it does everything he needs just dandy, and it will continue to do so until the day it dies.

I am not sure about your math. 1 Ghz is about 4 years old, not 15. My 3500+ idles at 1 Ghz with Cool and Quiet.

You can't make a direct comparison anyway, CPU advancement has gotten horribly bogged down, hard drives(or potential alternatives) still might have a long way to go.

I figure that in 15 years Windows XX will take about 250 GB storage to install.

But slackware 18 or gentoo 2020 will still work fine on today's machines. And just maybe microsoft will be gone.

[mathias]

Its no different to a car in that you get a 3 year warrenty and nothing goes wrong for 5/10 years or if you're unlucky it goes after a year

All electronic products are basically throw-away devices now. Everything from cell phones to TVs even to some extent cars (think 1st generation dodge neon)!

It sucks. I'd prefer products that last for tens of years.

The car analogy has a big problem with it, the whole car goes bad. Most people would think of the whole PC as "one product", at least you only have to replace one part of it. Wouldn't it be nice if cars only required replacing the gas tank?

[mellon]

The thing that is somehow missed in the replies is that the HDD should _never_ fail. Not because all electronic devices should last forever or because the same capacity will be useful 10 years from now or because the user would like to use the HDD in an old system but simply because hard disks tend to have valuable data in them.

"But surely you make backups - you are a fool if you don't!" Yes, I do backups and especially at work go to great lenghts to assure that in the network I'm responsible for component failures cannot make users (permanently) lose any data. The problem is that most home computer users don't realize that all their precious data is stored on a very fragile and unreliable storage device, and might not be savvy enough to do anything about it even if they did realize it.

It's really a shame that the one device that is reliability-wise genuinely important in the computer is nowadays a similar throw-away component as many other consumer devices. The problem is not with the technology itself, but with cutting costs and doing deceptive marketing. I've has my share of bad HDDs, most notably IBM Deathstars and the first generation of Maxtor fluidbearing drives (8/15 of the ones I have seen have failed even with extremely low use). As an aside Maxtor actually dropped the warranty of their all HDDs to one year after the fluidbearing drive debacle and most manufacturers disappointingly followed suit.

It's good to see drives with 5-year warranties again but those drives are meant for enterprises and are not widely distributed for the home users who tend to be most vulnerable to data loss through HDD failure. It's really a bit difficult to argue for disposable HDDs to someone who has lost all family photos and other material done on the computer just because he though the computer would be reliable.

[lm]

Would you be willing to pay the premium (2-4x price) for it?

Well it depends a lot on how much longer it will last versus the price premium for that. A longer lasting product has a higher resale value too.

[Splinter]

I figure that in 15 years Windows XX will take about 250 GB storage to install.

Who says I need windows XX?

in 15 years I could still be using WinXP.

[slipknottin]

You know, I remember a time when I made a comment like 'this HD has 700MB? Im never going to fill this'

Times change. Not only will HD's store more, but they maybe smaller, faster, lighter, quieter, etc etc.

Its rather foolish to believe that your never going to need any more space than 160gigs.


But IMO, you seem to be arguing just to argue. Nobody is making a hard drive that lasts for 200 years, so youll just have to make do with whats avaliable.

[Splinter]

Until hologramtic movies come out, I'm fine.

My computer can store 100 movies, every episode of southpark, family guy, futurama, the simpsons, months of music and half a dozen games.

Games are getting smaller, not bigger, as more things get turned over to on-the-fly rendering.

There ISNT anything else that can take up room on my computer. Sure, if I had 1tb or 10tb I wouldnt ever have to burn DVDs, but I'd rather have a reliable HD that lasted 10 years than to not worry about the inconvenience of finding the DVD with Back to the Future on it.

[Gholam]

In 1990, I believe we had DOS 3.3, maybe 5.0 - what can you run on it now? In 1996, my 2GB WDC drive was cutting edge - it's sitting in a drawer now, and last I checked, it was still functional - but what am I to do with it? In 2020, the current hardware will be just as obsolete as 1990 vintage 286es are now. Hardware manufacturers figured out that people are throwing away perfectly good parts due to obsolescense, and started considering that when designing reliability.

[slipknottin]

Games are getting smaller, not bigger, as more things get turned over to on-the-fly rendering.

You must be looking at some odd games. Only recently have games started coming on dvd, and actually taking up the entire disk. I have numerous new games that are at least 4 gigs in size.

[slipknottin]

In 1990, I believe we had DOS 3.3, maybe 5.0 - what can you run on it now? In 1996, my 2GB WDC drive was cutting edge - it's sitting in a drawer now, and last I checked, it was still functional - but what am I to do with it? In 2020, the current hardware will be just as obsolete as 1990 vintage 286es are now. Hardware manufacturers figured out that people are throwing away perfectly good parts due to obsolescense, and started considering that when designing reliability.

Exactly.

Not to mention that new hardware may not be compatable with an older operating system. Unless you never plan to upgrade any part of your 10 year old PC, I can imagine this may cause some issues.

[Shining Arcanine]

I figure that in 15 years Windows XX will take about 250 GB storage to install.

But slackware 18 or gentoo 2020 will still work fine on today's machines. And just maybe microsoft will be gone.

Of course it will, it is a ton of source code so even if the majority of the machines running it are 128bit, it will still compile to run on 32bit platforms. That is assuming it is still around in 2020.

Windows on the other hand won't be that backwards compatible as it can't be recompiled by the customer for a specific platform.

You know, I remember a time when I made a comment like 'this HD has 700MB? Im never going to fill this'

Times change. Not only will HD's store more, but they maybe smaller, faster, lighter, quieter, etc etc.

Its rather foolish to believe that your never going to need any more space than 160gigs.


But IMO, you seem to be arguing just to argue. Nobody is making a hard drive that lasts for 200 years, so youll just have to make do with whats avaliable.

Maybe we won't have hard drives anymore and we'll be using solid state disks based on NRAM.

[m0002a]

Who says I need windows XX? in 15 years I could still be using WinXP.

As soon as Microsoft stops fixing security holes in Win XP about 5 years from now, you will have a serious incentive to upgrade.

But I have no doubt that you will still have the obsolete eBay link in your signature 15 years from now.

[mathias]

But slackware 18 or gentoo 2020 will still work fine on today's machines. And just maybe microsoft will be gone.

Of course it will, it is a ton of source code so even if the majority of the machines running it are 128bit, it will still compile to run on 32bit platforms. That is assuming it is still around in 2020.

rather than one or two of them disappearing, I think it's more likely that there will be 4 comparable major linux distros in that niche. Furthermore, there will probably be a window manager that's light(for it's time), and as easy to use as KDE or Gnome.

Windows on the other hand won't be that backwards compatible as it can't be recompiled by the customer for a specific platform.

And yet you assume so easily that winblows will still be around?

[Splinter]

It doesnt matter if they develop multi-phasic hologramatic tertiary bilinear storage with 256-bit processors and a heated keyboard. If all I want to do on my computer is watch movies and listen to music, there is no reason for me to upgrade. Not now, not ever.


Maybe RPGs and Adventure games (do they still make those?) are bigger than ever before, but I dont play those.

[mathias]

It doesnt matter if they develop multi-phasic hologramatic tertiary bilinear storage with 256-bit processors and a heated keyboard. If all I want to do on my computer is watch movies and listen to music, there is no reason for me to upgrade. Not now, not ever.

Well then you're very much the exception, I've heard of people here actually downgrading by a lot to laptop hard-drives, and you don't want to be bothered with upgrading to a mobile or low end drive? If you want reliability so much, maybe you should instead be using magneto-optical drives?

There's plenty you could do with a multi terabyte drive. You say you won't want windows XX. With a theoretical $100, single platter 2.5 inch 2 terabyte drive drive, you could save yourself the ~$800 that Windows XX is going to cost and Ghost your current drives to part of the disk, and install Fedora/Mandrake/Suse 18.0 on another partition, and unplug your original drive in case your power company does something stupid and sends a powersurge through your computer which sets it on fire. In what format is your music? You could switch to a lossless codec if your're not using one, and 44khz might get bumped up to 96 or 192.

[tay]

No offence but this is a very useless discussion. Have a nice day!

[mathias]

No offence but this is a very useless discussion.

What does "very useless" mean? Is it supposed to mean worse than useless? It's not counterproductive yet, we haven't reached the point where Splinter calls me a MHz junkie and I allege that Splinter can't think straight over the noise of 4+ hard drive platters.

[tay]

Haha!! Thanks for the laugh

[Shining Arcanine]

But slackware 18 or gentoo 2020 will still work fine on today's machines. And just maybe microsoft will be gone.

Of course it will, it is a ton of source code so even if the majority of the machines running it are 128bit, it will still compile to run on 32bit platforms. That is assuming it is still around in 2020.

rather than one or two of them disappearing, I think it's more likely that there will be 4 comparable major linux distros in that niche. Furthermore, there will probably be a window manager that's light(for it's time), and as easy to use as KDE or Gnome.

In 2020 I doubt 128bit computing will be a niche market considering that it has been about 15 years since the transition from 16bit to 32bit and we're now transitioning to 64bit.

Windows on the other hand won't be that backwards compatible as it can't be recompiled by the customer for a specific platform.

And yet you assume so easily that winblows will still be around?

Read my post here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=63528