Re: Life of CD/DVD Drives? (OT)

[Robert Pendell <shinji257 at uplink dot net>]

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Dave Korn wrote:
> On 15 May 2006 17:48, Lloeki wrote:
> 
>> On 15/05/06, Williams, Gerald S (Jerry) <gsw@agere> wrote:
>>
>>> I've had this happen several times with standalone DVD players.  It
>>> has nothing to do with amount of use or anything else AFAICT.
>>>
>> Most casual consumer IDE cd/dvd recorders are engineered to handle
>> around 1'000 recordings. MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure,
>> STFWikipedia) of anything from cars to dishwashers is a Big Secret in
>> the industry, but expect it to be just past the announced warranty,
>> especially for low-end hardware. All these values are statistical
>> though, so one might just fail at once when another might just last
>> thrice the MTBF.
> 
>   Yeh, my experiences tally with what everyone's said: if a cheap cd/dvd drive starts to conk out after only a couple of years, or even less if you've been doing lots of heavy burning sessions[*], it's not surprising.
> 
>   It's down to the increasing use of low-cost mass manufacturing techniques.  And I guess it's not so bad if a burner costs forty bucks and lasts two years, but these new low manufacturing standards seem to have been applied across the board as the prices of peripherals have fallen over the years.
> 
>   Hard-drives used to be precision-engineered instruments: the one I bought for my Amiga in 1991 worked fine until 1999 without a single lost sector... then I decided to 'upgrade' it (I had almost filled up the whole 20meg :-D LOL) with a brand new WD (IIRC), and within 6 months the whole thing had died with a bearing failure[****].  Now, I know about keeping backups, but even so, I want a HD that lasts a LONG time.  And I am not happy with the new trend that you should expect and be prepared for your drive to crash catastrophically within the 6-24 months timespan.  But that's all you can safely expect from them these days.  How would you feel if all the CDs you burned got wiped when the burner conked out?
> 
> 
>     cheers,
>       DaveK
> 

I've had a hard drive die 9 months after I got it.  It was a full 200GB
WD drive too.  It had alot of music and disc images that I either had to
relocate or redo because it so I lost alot of time over it.  Luckily I
got it at Newegg so I got a free replacement.  The replacement has been
working fine since so I think it was just a fluke.  I also have a
Seagate running in a Firewire HD enclosure that can get really hot.
Surprised that it doesn't just fry in there because there is virtually
no air circulation for that thing.  I really need to setup a raid setup
for my [private/lan] ftp server...

- --
Robert Pendell
shinji257@uplink.net

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