Hard Drives - Replace Yearly?

[IronMac]

On another forum, someone said that you should put money aside every year or eighteen months to replace your HD for reasons of capacity and reliability. Should this be followed or ???

[Jp!]

replace as needed if you buy a DROBO

http://www.drobo.com/

[mattkime]

I vote for ???

Google did a research paper which discovered that hard drives have a relatively high rate of failure in the first few months. It doesn't make sense to swap drives because you're on a schedule.

[Lux Interior]

[quote mattkime]Google did a research paper which discovered that hard drives have a relatively high rate of failure in the first few months. It doesn't make sense to swap drives because you're on a schedule.
I agree. Drives are always getting bigger, faster & cheaper. When I need space, I add a new drive. Once I hit four in the MDD, I would retire the oldest to a FW case.

I think you might increase the likelihood of getting a bad drive if you replace a proven drive with a new one too often.

[Silencio]

I do tend to upgrade the main drive(s) inside my computers on that schedule, more for the boost in capacity and performance than anything. The old drives get rotated out for near-line applications like Retrospect backups and whatnot.

Drobo is a neat concept. Why on earth do they not have a Firewire version? USB2 is just toooooo daaaaaarned sloooooow. We'll get similar functionality if and when ZFS shows up as a more mainstream OS, anyway.

[IronMac]

I love the idea of Drobo except that it only uses SATA drives. I'm sorry but all of the drives I have are PATA. Not to mention that it's 499.00!!!

[Andrew]

Makes zero sense to me, unless that's a hard drive industry rep writing that. All you need to do is back up. If (not when) the drive crashes, buy a new one, reload backed up data.