scheduled hard drive replacement?

Many people like to be prepared for trouble before it happens so with that in mind and hard drives cheap these days, [aside from backing up]

Does anyone regularly replace there internal hard drive[drives] after a certain period of time like every 2-3--4 yrs or whatever regardless if it is working fine?

Now before someone posts to say that a new hard drive may for some reason crap out prematurely and ya shoulda left the old one in, well, yes but remember you took out a working one with all your info intact to re-install so no biggee if you bought a lemon .
anway,
curious to know if anyone does periodic replacement.

 

Perhaps Xpilot will respond. He alternates between two drives. In short, he performs an image backup. Removes the drive. Installs alternate drive and then restores the just completed backup to the newly connected alternate drive. So both his drives are always current and one always safe away from computer.

My current system drive is 4 years old (Western Digital 120gb SATA). The reason you have current image backups is to be prepared if and when a drive fails and it will fail when least prepared. Using a UPS can help extend the life because less current problems than direct from the wall.

 

I have increased the security in my system by actually now having three main hard drives in circulation. One is in use and the other two safe outside the computer in their caddy drawers.
Scheduled images are stored on an internal drive and these are used to refresh the main drives in turn.

I do not have a program of planned obsolesence for my hard drives. The great thing about having a pair of ready to go up to date drives is that it is possible to recover from any hard drive failure with no fuss or drama.
I have simulated failures of two main drives and my image backup drive at the same time and have been able to carry on working.
Had the breakdowns been real a trip to the computer store would soon have brought the backup security back to par.

Before I got my internal drive rack and caddies I used to keep a second copy of backup images on a USB drive. This worked but was involved a lot of manual intervention and was much slower than using internal drives.

There are as many ways to organise backups as there are for cooking eggs. The thing to remember is to have several eggs and do not keep them all in the same basket

Xpilot

 

Yep, I replace mine about every 2 years whether it needs it or not.
Since my machine is primarily for business use, I'd rather pop a fresh drive in every couple of years to make sure it's in good condition.

I also keep a spare drive formatted and ready to go, and I keep my data and Acronis image files separate. Both are backed up to 4 different hard drives, two in my box and two external that are powered off at all times.

Can't be too safe you know, expecially when it's a tax write off!

 

My opinion is the image I save with ATI can recover the disk once it fails, so why not just wait for it to fail and then do the recovery?? I made sure the recovery process worked on my current machine so when that day comes I'll be prepared.

eSATA will change the game dramatically because as far as I can tell there's no reason to have any internal drives anymore. Just clone your eSATA system drive to another eSATA drive periodically, and if the system drive fails just swap in the clone and reboot. AFAIK eSATA behaves just like internal drives (transfer speed, bootable, etc.).

 

What is "eSATA"

Is that they solid state hard drive (no moving parts) that is so limited, and unstable?

 

eSATA is for an external SATA drive. It requires an eSATA connection on the outside of your PC, usually next to the motherboard sound connections on the back of your PC. Mine looks similar to a red USB port.

 

I've known of many organizations that will do this on critical systems, especially security systems such as gate/door access systems, where down time is not tolerable. However, it's rather an extreme and costly measure if you have other means of maintaining your system goals. For example, If I'm down a day while I get a new hard drive that won't kill me on most of my machines. On the ones where it might, I use RAID 1 one the system drive to avoid any downtime. And I usually have a spare disk or two on hand, which also reduces downtime.

Btw, I find that since I stop using maxtors, I replace my PCs more often than my drives. After 3-5 years, no matter how well the drives are performing, the machine has become a sluggard as program code and OS grow fatter and fatter.