Odds of HD failure?

I'm about to buy an external HD (or two). I have approx. 800 GB of data accumulated over many years and it's very precious to me.


My question is what's the likelihood of an external HD failing, that is, of some error ocurring and me losing all the data inside of it? Keep in mind that i won't be using it much at all, it's just to store my data. I don't know whether i buy one or two 1.5TB external HDs.

Do you think that the additional cost of one external HD compensates for the risk minimization, or the risk of such a crash ocurring where i lose all my data is negligible, especially since i won't use it much?

 

Well, hard drives are mechanical and as such they will fail sooner or later. It's always better to have your stuff in two places if you're not really willing to burn that to Blu-ray or you have the patience of a saint to get it on some 200 DVDs. :eek

 

Also, drives are controlled by an electronics board, they fail too - adding a drive to an external case often adds an extra layer of electronics to compound the issue.

If you need one external backup solution, then you'll probably need 2 - the second to store away from the physical location of your computer and main backup.

 

As the others have stated, hard drives do indeed fail. There doesn't appear to be anything consistent in failure rates or times. I have had brand new hard drives die in under 8 months, and last week I saw some 4gb Quantum BigFoot drives clunking along working perfectly, these BigFoot HDs are about 10-12 years old (or more). But I think you can figure on getting at least 4-5 years from a hard drive, and in most cases when a drive fails, the data can still be recovered. If you're unable to recover the data yourself using software methods, there are professional data recovery services that have extremely high success rates (but they can be VERY expensive). So, using 2 drives is probably a good idea. Make 2 identical copies of the data. Keep one copy on site, and the other in a safe place. Then once or twice a month, you can update the the drive that isn't on site as new data is added to the on-site unit. This scenario should keep you well covered as you'll have a 2nd 'fail safe' drive which will not be in use often, which lowers the chance of failure.