"Powell" wrote in message
...

"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.

Powell, apparently you don't understand the meaning of MTBF.
That's OK, most people don't.
There is ZERO chance that an Atlas will run for 160 years.
To understand the meaning of MTBF, read the following article:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=+M...ast.com&rnum=1

The only problem for you is the amount of knowledge you'll have to purge to
make room for this info. It may leave you with toilet training and nothing
else.