How reliable are HDDs?

[Staz]

I just recently had a HDD die on me that was fairly new. It had a couple of big3 projects on it and they are all lost. Do HDDs do this often. I really want to buy a new HDD but being 16 years old I can't afford to buy them very often. Thanks heaps. What is the average lifespan of a hdd?
Thanks
Ben

[Doobie]

Staz, if your HDD isn't making some very weird noises, you can probably recover what's on it. Either way, go to the makers website and use the serial number to check to see if the warrenty is still good.

I haven't noticed age having much to do with hard drive deaths. But, hard drives die frequently enought that you should always back up your data.

Most of my hard drives are retired before they go bad so I can't get you a lifespan. But, the manufacturers claim incredible numbers, such as 100,000 hours between failures.

As for the price of hard drives are dirt cheap. A decade ago, 1Gig would have cost over thousand bucks.

[Staz]

Thanks. I will do a lot of research into recovering data from hdds. :)

[Arachnotron]

Some thoughts:

Also look at the warranty period. I have heard that for a manufacturer to make a profit, no more than 5% should be returned within the warranty period. You nowadays can get warranties from 1 year up to 5 years depending on the brand and type. If the manufacurer only wants to cover his product for 1 year, it tells you something. (that is manufacturers warranty. The reseller may change the period)

Another thing is when they die. A lot of drives die in the first 3 months. After that, the number of deaths decreases to increase again slowly with age.

Be sure to have enough ventilation around the drive. A lot of harddisks die early because people put them directly under another device, leaving insufficient room around the drive for heath to dissipate. This can kill a drive within a year. Some high rpm drives may even require active cooling.

Enable SMART support in your bios. Some types of damage will be reported by the drive before they die completely. Check your system event logs regularly for disk and atapi related warnings. Having many chkdsk runs on startup is also a sign of impending doom.

An expensive solution is to buy two drives and make a mirror set (RAID-1) out of them. This doubles the price per MB, but ensures you still have your data if one of them dies.

[mudda_t]

Be sure to have enough ventilation around the drive. A lot of harddisks die early because people put them directly under another device, leaving insufficient room around the drive for heath to dissipate. This can kill a drive within a year. Some high rpm drives may even require active cooling.
Man that is so right! I pulled a hdd (secondary) out of an old system with plenty of space and vent. Put it in a new system (secondary) and within 6 months POP! The new system had nowhere near the space and vent of the old and it just cooked.

[Staz]

I sorted it :D
I had the hdd in a removable tray.
So I tried plugging hdd directly into IDE cable.
It worked :D
I then tried other trays and some worked some didn't.
It seems my hdd is very picky.
Thanks for your advice even though my HDD is not dead :)
I learnt good tips for the future when I get another one.

[Arachnotron]

I then tried other trays and some worked some didn't.
It seems my hdd is very picky. It is not so much the drive that is picky, it is just that trays are evil things that push drives beyond their specs.

Parallel ATA has a limit on cable length. Because it is parallel, at high speeds you get problems with all the bits that belong to the same byte reaching the other end of the cable at the same time, since each bit travels through its own wire.
A normal 18" cable is already at the limit of the spec. Especially with cheap HDD trays and UDMA 133 drives, the addition of (bad) contacts will push everything beyond specs. At best, the drive will spend a lot of time in error correction and slow down (try some benchmarks with the HD in a tray and directly on a cable for comparison), at worst it will stop alltogether or corrupt data.
Corrosion of the contacts will increase the problems over time.

Above UDMA33 you should avoid HDD trays, unless they are very good quality and are connected with very short cables.

This is one of the reasons SATA was invented by the way. Because it is a serial protocol, longer cables are not a problem. If you really need a HDDtray, go SATA. (or use an external USB2 or firewire cage)