Talk about luck... no sooner than I finished building my new trading rig, my old HDD had a catastrophic failure. I have had most of my files transfered, but unfortunately not all of them. That means I will have to spend some time to rebuild the information I lost. This is a friendly reminder to all... if your hdd is more than 2 years old, it is time to do a back up. If your computer has a mirror feature (RAID 1), consider spending that extra $100 for a duplicate hdd. There is nothing worst than down time in trading. I am lucky... my trading platform was transferred to the new computer last week.
More than 2 yrs old? It's always time to back up regularly, no matter how old your hd is. I just had a 1 yr old power supply blow and fry my mb, processor, and both my hd's. If I hadn't been backed up to an external drive I would have lost everything. Harold
HDD failure seems to be the commonest failure. Learned the hard way. Backups on backups now, offsite backup, even have key files needed to get me up and running again on a thumbdrive.
Anyone who doesn't back up regularly is playing with serious fire, and dare I say it, is an idiot. Hard drives, by their very design, must fail. In the tightly enclosed, high-speed, exceedingly hot environment of a hard drive casing normal lubricants can't be used as they would vaporize and land on the platters interfering with data access. So they use very hard metal pivot bearings which, because there is no lubicant, slowly and continuously wear down. That's why hard drives are rated in MTBF hours which stands for Mean Time Before Failure. In other words, they are telling you it's going to fail, and btw here's how many hours they estimate. It's not a question of IF, only a question of WHEN. Losing your hard drive when you don't have it backed up gives you one of life's nastier religious experiences.
All true. To any list of suggestions, let's add using Acronis True Image on an external hard drive. It's easy, fast, reliable, inexpensive. With it you could be back up and fully restored within 10 minutes.
Indeed. Keeping 'em cool is advisable. Most HDs have onboard SMART monitoring and diagnostics that can sometimes warn of impending disk failures. Here is a (Linux oriented) article about SMART monitoring. There is also a Windows version. No doubt there are other Win SMART monitors as well. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983
As far as I know hard drives do use lubricants and MTBF stands for "Mean time between failures" which is a pretty meaningless number although comparing two drives MTBF's rating may have some value (dont want to get off on a tangent)...however your overall point is quite valid. Hard drives are mechanical devices and will fail, its just a question of when. Network Area Storage (NAS) devices are cheap these days and make it easy to back up all of your PC's into one repository without having to shuffle external drives around - its what I use.
maybe i'm lucky (or an idiot who doesn't back up data), but in 20 years of using dozens of computers, i've never had a desktop hdd totally fail, although some have had bad sectors (that was fairly common in drives of the 80s and early 90s where you had to park their heads). laptop drives are another story. they should be backed up if you treat them rough.