How to increase Hard-Disk LifeSpan

hard driveoverwritevirtual-memory

1) What factors affect the life of a hard disk?

2) Does frequent writing on the disk reduce its life?

3) What is the average life span of a hard disk under normal condition?

4) Does less writing and more reading actions taking on the hard disk increase its life?

5) What way the virtual memory ( file paging ) on the disk effect its life ?

6) Is there any particular hard disk especially built for the excessive writing ?

Best Answer

Google actually did a big study on this. It is available here:

Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

From this report:

One of our key findings has been the lack of a consistent pattern of higher failure rates for higher temperature drives or for those drives at higher utilization levels. Such correlations have been repeatedly highlighted by previous studies, but we are unable to confirm them by observing our population.

[…]

Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller population studies that suggest that some of the SMART parameters are well-correlated with higher failure probabilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives with no such errors. First errors in reallocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabilities.

Biggest thing to do, really, is to keep those drives cool. Heat does a LOT more damage then just reading/writing.

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