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"Hard drives fail. It is not a matter of “if” but rather a matter of “when” your hard drive is going to fail." Really? I have had computers in one form or anot

"Hard drives fail. It is not a matter of “if” but rather a matter of “when” your hard drive is going to fail." Really? I have had computers in one form or another for nearly 20 years and I've never had a hard drive fail. Ever. Not once. From a 386 with 16MHz of processor speed and an EGA monitor, to my last Dell Latitude that's now 6 years old. Never had a problem. Do Apple hard drives fail at a disproportionately higher rate than PC's? I recently bought a MacBook Pro and I'm starting to get nervous about it.

texel 15y ago
If you are a heavy computer user and have never had a hard drive fail, then you are in the extreme minority. That's like living in a city for 20 years and never getting a cold.
- schrototo 15y ago
  Knocking on wood, but I've also never had a harddrive fail on me (and I personally don't know anyone who has). Though I do get a cold at least twice a year...
  - sidek 15y ago
    I have never had one fail on me either, but that is probably because I'm scared of hard drive failure and move old ones into very-low-use machines .
hoggle 15y ago
It seems you have been lucky. My 80286's 20MB HD failed back in 1993, so did my 1998 IBM 3.5" 20GB Hard Disk. Maxtor 80GB in 2003. Samsung 80GB in 2004. Seagate 160GB in 2006. Western Digital 500GB in 2010. All of these are part of my 20 or so Desktop Disks I've had had until now (pre and custom built PCs running under either some flavor of Windows, Linux or BSD) That is only for desktop hard disks, I don't even talk about 2.5" notebook hard disks which I've lost 2 both of which were less than 3 years old Seagate Momentus 80GB and 320GB (G-Shock!). I'm a happy Intel X-25M SSD fan boy now, I hope it will last longer than those consumer grade mechanical hard disks of yesteryears (at least until they wear out the flash memory or until my 07 MBP dies). After I had to replace good old SCSI disks with cheap SATA disks over the last years at my different work places I've seen how great those SCSI disks were in the first place - still it is cheaper the SATA way (as long as you have at least hot-swappable RAID 6 storage or some super expensive NAS where rebuilding isn't potentially endangering your uptime). So what I want to say is this: either you've been Gladstone Gander or I've been Donald Duck or we've been both which should be reflected in the median failover rate for mechanical (consumer grade) hard disks. Don't get nervous about your MBP, just swap the disk for a SSD and set up time machine or a rsync script. I wish I had made the decision to go for SSD much earlier as "I've wasted my hours."
calloc 15y ago
No, Apple drives don't fail at a disproportionately higher rate. They have the exact same failure rates as the rest of the industry since they use the same parts (with minor modifications apparently). I've had many hard drives fail. Just recently a Western Digital hard drive in my server that was the second drive in a mirror started having issues with the ball bearings making a high pitched whining noise, going over into no longer spinning up. This is by no means the first drive to do so to me. Hard drive failures happen, the more of them you have, the more likely they are to fail at one point or another. I've had my MacBook Pro for almost 4 years now and I haven't had the hard drive fail in it at all. I wouldn't be worried, unless you abuse your laptop while it is running most likely nothing will happen. Just make sure that you have backups, TimeMachine is excellent for that.
- tallanvor 15y ago
  I've only ever had one Mac, but it's less than 3 years old and I've had to have the drive replaced twice. --I've never had that happen on any other laptop, and I've only had one other internal drive fail in less than 5 years (the max I tend to keep them around). I have found that external drives tend to have higher failure rates - they tend to last a couple of years - but that's still better than the Mac.
  - calloc 15y ago
    Sure there are always going to be edge cases, but can you point me to documents that point out that they fail more so than other drives? My original iBook I bought in 2004 still functions with the original hard drive.
- Niten 15y ago
  To play devil's advocate, this isn't out of the question. 1) Macs do tend to run hotter than PCs, and this could decrease HDD lifespan. 2) We've seen in the past that OS-specific power management settings can be detrimental to hard drives, as with this famous Linux bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/104535 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/104535 Although I doubt it's actually the case, it's possible in principle for drives to wear differently under OS X than under Windows.

texel 15y ago

If you are a heavy computer user and have never had a hard drive fail, then you are in the extreme minority. That's like living in a city for 20 years and never getting a cold.

schrototo 15y ago
Knocking on wood, but I've also never had a harddrive fail on me (and I personally don't know anyone who has). Though I do get a cold at least twice a year...
- sidek 15y ago
  I have never had one fail on me either, but that is probably because I'm scared of hard drive failure and move old ones into very-low-use machines .

hoggle 15y ago

It seems you have been lucky. My 80286's 20MB HD failed back in 1993, so did my 1998 IBM 3.5" 20GB Hard Disk. Maxtor 80GB in 2003. Samsung 80GB in 2004. Seagate 160GB in 2006. Western Digital 500GB in 2010. All of these are part of my 20 or so Desktop Disks I've had had until now (pre and custom built PCs running under either some flavor of Windows, Linux or BSD) That is only for desktop hard disks, I don't even talk about 2.5" notebook hard disks which I've lost 2 both of which were less than 3 years old Seagate Momentus 80GB and 320GB (G-Shock!). I'm a happy Intel X-25M SSD fan boy now, I hope it will last longer than those consumer grade mechanical hard disks of yesteryears (at least until they wear out the flash memory or until my 07 MBP dies). After I had to replace good old SCSI disks with cheap SATA disks over the last years at my different work places I've seen how great those SCSI disks were in the first place - still it is cheaper the SATA way (as long as you have at least hot-swappable RAID 6 storage or some super expensive NAS where rebuilding isn't potentially endangering your uptime). So what I want to say is this: either you've been Gladstone Gander or I've been Donald Duck or we've been both which should be reflected in the median failover rate for mechanical (consumer grade) hard disks. Don't get nervous about your MBP, just swap the disk for a SSD and set up time machine or a rsync script. I wish I had made the decision to go for SSD much earlier as "I've wasted my hours."

calloc 15y ago

No, Apple drives don't fail at a disproportionately higher rate. They have the exact same failure rates as the rest of the industry since they use the same parts (with minor modifications apparently). I've had many hard drives fail. Just recently a Western Digital hard drive in my server that was the second drive in a mirror started having issues with the ball bearings making a high pitched whining noise, going over into no longer spinning up. This is by no means the first drive to do so to me. Hard drive failures happen, the more of them you have, the more likely they are to fail at one point or another. I've had my MacBook Pro for almost 4 years now and I haven't had the hard drive fail in it at all. I wouldn't be worried, unless you abuse your laptop while it is running most likely nothing will happen. Just make sure that you have backups, TimeMachine is excellent for that.

tallanvor 15y ago
I've only ever had one Mac, but it's less than 3 years old and I've had to have the drive replaced twice. --I've never had that happen on any other laptop, and I've only had one other internal drive fail in less than 5 years (the max I tend to keep them around). I have found that external drives tend to have higher failure rates - they tend to last a couple of years - but that's still better than the Mac.
- calloc 15y ago
  Sure there are always going to be edge cases, but can you point me to documents that point out that they fail more so than other drives? My original iBook I bought in 2004 still functions with the original hard drive.
Niten 15y ago
To play devil's advocate, this isn't out of the question. 1) Macs do tend to run hotter than PCs, and this could decrease HDD lifespan. 2) We've seen in the past that OS-specific power management settings can be detrimental to hard drives, as with this famous Linux bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/104535 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/104535 Although I doubt it's actually the case, it's possible in principle for drives to wear differently under OS X than under Windows.