Re: HD errors

In news:oveos4lfl47am4dk4etfuevedkt0tdn9bp@xxxxxxx,
Star@*.* typed on Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:43:50 +1000:
On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:11:37 -0500, "BillW50" <BillW50@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Ron! Hard drives are designed to last on average, about 32 years
MTBF. Although one of the things that shortens of life of them is by
moving them while the hard drive is still spinning. What happens is
the head crashes against the platters a lot. This causes bad spots
in the platter and the head will also become unusable in time.

The secret to making a laptop hard drive last a longtime is to only
turn it on and not to move it like a desktop. Although what good is
that right? That is almost as bad as using a desktop, right? You bet
it is! As what good is portable when you can't use it as a portable?

Well now you can use your portable laptop as a portable with Solid
State Drives (SSD). Have you looked into these yet? I use them all
of the time nowadays. As you can beat them, kick them, bang them,
and drop them, all while being accessed and they just don't care.
Truly a *must* if you want portability on the go.

Hi Bill!

There have been many discussions about HDD failures due to movement.
I was on the side of the (If it moves you will crash the heads) group.
Apple put sensors in their laptops to sense the movement and park the
heads. I also went to several HDD manuf sites and checked the specs
and found the HDD were rated at 300G's or better. After reading this
info I just keep the movement of my laptop to less than 300G's

Art

Hi Art! Yes I know about the sensors that Apple uses. Also I also know
about the 300G specs. Although let me ask you how many Gs is a drop to
the floor? And what direction is the spec rated at? Lay a drive down on
the table and a lot of side to side movement won't hurt a thing.
Although change it to up to down movement and this is very hard on the
drive.

Ever see that youtube video of a hard drive laptop compared to a SSD
one? They mounted both laptops on a thing that looked like a paint
shaker. They played a movie from the drives and started the shaker. The
hard drive failed in seconds. The SSD one worked flawlessly. So how many
Gs was that? And I would love to see a similar test with an Apple with
sensors. As just because it has sensors and parks the heads, doesn't
mean it actually works in every case.

--
Bill
Asus EEE PC 701G4 ~ 2GB RAM ~ 16GB-SDHC
Windows XP SP2



.

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