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Listen to the podcast: Your hard disk is
more likely to fail than you think.. 
Transcript
This is Leo Notenboom for askleo.info.
Several weeks ago Google released a paper detailing an analysis of the consumer-grade hard drives they use in their data centers. As you can imagine, Google has a lot of hard drives.
They were looking at what could be learned from hard disk failure rates.
One surprising result was that they determined that hard disks Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology, or "SMART" as it's known, could not be used to accurately predict when or if a drive was about to fail. Drives reporting SMART errors often lasted for years, while other drives were just as likely to fail without any SMART diagnostic information prior to the failure.
Much more importantly, though, are what I think are some very scary numbers about hard drive failure rates. For example, for drives older than 2 years, Google reports seeing about a 7% failure rate per year. Put another way, one out of every 14 drives will fail within a year.
That's way higher than I would have predicted.
It also makes me very nervous.
Disk drives are cheap, but the cost of replacing one can be enormous. For example, unless you're doing true full backups a sudden failure means you're going to have to reinstall and reconfigure your operating system and all the applications you had on a failed drive. If you've been backing up your data you may not experience data loss but you'll definitely lose a chunk of time for the rebuild.
And if you haven't even been backing up your data - well, you've got a serious problem.
There are several possible approaches to minimizing the risk of a hard drive failure, but for the average consumer nothing, and I mean nothing can replace a good full backup strategy.
In fact, after hearing these new statistics, it's a change I made myself. In
the past I'd been backing up my important data, of course, but not my operating
system and applications. As of earlier this week I now do a nightly backup of
the entire hard disk on my primary computer using Acronis Trueimage
Home.
Regular listeners and readers of Ask Leo! will know that I've always stressed the importance of backing up. Google's latest report only makes me even more convinced that disaster prevention isn't just a good thing, it's a requirement.
Check out the show notes for links to Google's whitepaper and to a similar study performed at Carnegie Mellon University with similar results. I've also linked to an episode of the highly recommended Security Now podcast with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte which covers this issue as well.
I'd love to hear what you think. Visit askleo.info and enter 11293 in the go to article number box to access the show notes and to leave me a comment. While you're there, browse over 1,000 technical questions and answers on the site.
Till next time, I'm Leo Notenboom, for askleo.info.
Related:
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Google's Report (pdf)
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Security Now Episode 81 - Hard Drive Unreliability
Article C2973 - March 24, 2007
I have a Panasonic CF-W2 "Toughbook" that I had to install an additional 512 RAM into just to get it to perform reasonably.
Posted by: Don Beal at March 24, 2010 5:35 PMI admit it was a couple of years old and I bought it used.
I have replaced the Hard drive twice (professionals did it)but it crashed again less than a year later.
Now no one locally wants to tackle putting in a new hard drive and no one seems to know if it may not be the Motherboard.
Panasonic will "look at it for $57.00 if I ship it to them but it is probably good money after bad.
This thing never did what it was supposed to and I think it cost somebody
@ $3800 NEW!
Yes, that hard drive will fail. But I don't bother backing up my OS. I use Fedora Core, and update the entire OS with every release of FC, about every six months. I keep all my non-OS data on an external drive, and back that up daily. My OS is running on a 30GB drive. I have no need for a huge internal drive.
Posted by: Dan at March 28, 2010 1:23 AMRe doing a nightly backup of the entire hard disk - I am puzzled as why this is better than monthly image and daily incremental, which I understood was your previos practice. I had thought that the OS would not change during the month (except for the interim updates) and that there may be some new applications, but that incremental updating would catch all of these. Apparently I am missing something here - but I am very much a learner.
01-Apr-2010
Posted by: Dean Simes at March 31, 2010 8:15 PM
Thanks for reminding me to always backup my files.With hard drives.They can crash any time and thus data can be lost.With me i opted for an online backup called safecopy online backup.I store all the backups in need with safecopy because of the efficient services they offer.
Posted by: Britti at June 8, 2010 3:08 AMUsed Acronis True Image Home 2010 on W7 though seemed to require a backup USB drive of the same size to work bcronis propriety does not like Linux so would not clone the Fedora small boot partition and took many hours to clone the rest. So bought and installed Farstone Total Recovery Pro. This exactly clones all BUT 23hrs to do a !TB.
Posted by: Norm at July 28, 2010 7:28 AM