"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.

I made no reference to "MTBF" in my post. I posted
data from the Maxtor website which included "MTTF of 1.4
million hours." You wrote "disk drives today have a one
year warranty and a five year design lifetime" which is a
gross false statement.

The "MTTF/MTBF" are, as I said, statistical calculations
and are a well know standards and used for many types
of consumer goods. And is relyed on by engineers and
business men alike for decision making purposes.
Certainly the Atlas, for example, exceeds the lowest end
warranty and “five year design lifetime.”


That's OK, most people don't.

Including you, apparently .


There is ZERO chance that an Atlas will run for 160 years.

"Zero"... I guess you never studied/passed statistics
classes in college. Zero denies the bases of mathematical
probability.

Certainly empirical experiences have more weight than
applied modeling. Do you have evidence that HDs, in
general, don’t last five years. My experience is that most
of the computers headed for the recycle still have fully
operating HDs and users who a glad to see them go
away.

This has created a business dilemma of sorts. Many
businesses struggle with allocating IT departments with
sufficient funding because of the desire to make old
technology work beyond its tax depreciation benifit.
Sometime this strategy does add to the bottom line and
other times there are real/unseen benefits to upgrading
as a method of increasing productivity (bottom line).


To understand the meaning of MTBF, read the following article:

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=+M...ast.com&rnum=1

Your refered post also has errors in logic.


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.

3rd grade metaphors, which speak more to you
than me, Robert.