Acronis shorten HDD life span?

THe two drives that I had acronis making weekly and daily backups to have died on me. Others I have get defragmented very badly. Is writing large amounts of data to a disk shorten the lifespan?

 

Like all computer components (and me and you and most other things) disk drives have a nominal lifespan (check your disk manufacturer's website).
Warranty for disk drives is often 3 years so chances are a disk will die after 3 years and 1 day!
I would have thought that disk drives used for backups would not get a lot of activity so I'd expect them to last a lot longer than 3 years.
If you need to recover those backup disks (and validate/recover data on other disks before they die too) then you might be interested in a utility called Spinrite from http://grc.com/default.htm.

 

Well thats just crazy, I have HDD's that have lasted 6 years and up. As soon as acronis starts burning to them they die in around a year or so. I guess I will go back to burning dvd's for backup.

 

Don't! 'Cause then you're DVD drive will die!

 

Repeat after me: "Correlation is not causation"

 

There is no relationship between Acronis and your HD problems. Writing large amounts of data does not affect drive longevity. How long a drive lasts will depend on many factors but typical lifespan is of the order of 50,000 start/stop cycles. Temperature is a factor you should consider so make sure you have sufficient cooling inside your case. Remember that all electro machanical devices have a finite lifespan particularly the motor and servo. Drive electronics and heads should outlast the mechanical parts as should the disk itself.

You didn't say what type or make of disk you have had fail on you? Are they SCSI, ATA or SATA? Which manufacturer produced them? Did you use the disks for anything else other than backup with Acronis?

Also, what symptoms did you experience with the drives when they failed? Did the motor fail or did the heads crash?

 

So you wait until a disk is more than 6 years old before you start using them for backups?

It's a bit like waiting until you're 80 years old before you start running marathons - Not a winning strategy!

 

If they happened to be Maxtor 40 Gig HardDrives, that is the problem. I had two of them die on me and have come across several people having the same problem.

I have been an electronics technician and computer builder/repairer for forty years and I have no experience that would convince me that TI could be the cause of HD failure.

 

Ever since I installed TI I've noticed increased sun spot activity

//sarcasm

 

tsu: