"Robert Morein" wrote

MTBF means NOTHING in this context. The term has
an unfortunately misleading name. Best left to
industrial engineers.

Why? It (MTBF) is a critical business factor used, among
other things, to establish insurance liability tables.

NOTE: No response to claim.

Hard drives are spec build based on managerial
accounting (cost/profit). As one Western Digital
representative put it, our drives have a ½ of 1% failure
rate. In the case of IDE types, there is no economic
advantage in producing higher quality in a highly
competitive marketplace.


Disk drives today have a one year warranty....

Wrong.

See http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5603

Old news. WD, Seagate, Hitachi, Maxtor all have 1 year
warranties on low end drives, 3 years on ATA and
5 years on SCSI (Maxtor, for example). The Maxtor
Atlas has a statistical MTTF of 1.4 million hours. That's
160 years.


and a five year design lifetime.

Please provide supporting documentation.


From http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/wd2000bb/wd2000bb.htm
Component Design Life 5 years
Warranty Period 1 year 4

Quack, quack, quack...


In my current systems, the fans are exposed to direct,
forceful ventillation from an adjacent fan.

For what purpose?--To **** you.

Hehehe... still can't get a date, Robert?


"current systems"... please define?-- ****ing machine

Live like you want to live. Noone going to stop you :-))).