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Old 08-16-2015, 09:34 AM  
rowan
Too lazy to set a custom title
 
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Australia
Posts: 17,393
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinara View Post
Average consumer drives are 5 years. Enterprise drives are about 10+ (NASA & astronaut shit)

I only buy enterprise drives now direct from manufacturers.

In the early 2000s, I had 2 drives die on me in one year with my camming shit on them, and 4 websites, *poof* out of the blue. Never again.

Only go for the elite drives now, no boutique builders. Worth the extra money. Can't afford EVER for stuff to die now. Double nightly backups to external drives ever since I can remember.
You do know that 3.5" enterprise drives are usually mechanically very similar, or even 100% identical, to consumer level drives? Often the firmware is the only difference, adding extra features such as time limited RAID recovery.

Drive failure isn't the only thing to worry about...

I had a BIOS that quietly nabbed a bunch of sectors at the end of the drive to store a copy of itself (motherboard malware!), which ended up wiping out the encryption keys for several drives. The ironic thing is that I was putting them into this machine to restore data because of a drive failure in the main array, but it ultimately killed two sets of backups. Luckily I figured out what was happening before I connected my sole remaining backup.

Be paranoid. Be very paranoid.
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