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| What is MTBF of a hard drive? |
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No one thinks of his or her hard drive until it crashes. Your hard drive is absolutely the most important part of your system, and you ought to be more concerned about it than you are about any other components in the PC! The hard drive must be of high quality, because a failed hard drive means the loss of your data. Below are some specific quality criteria to look at when evaluating models:
MTBF. Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is calculated by taking a series of disks and calculating how many units fail during a given period of time. If, for example, you took 1,000 hard drives, ran them for 100 hours and had one drive fail, that would give an MTBF of 100,000 hours (1,000 units x 100 hours = 100,000 MTBF hours). One failure in 300 hours would give an MTBF of 300,000 (1,000 drives x 300 hours = 300,000 MTBF hours) and so on. If most hard drives have MTBF ratings like 300,000 hours (about 34 years), you reasonably can say, "Why worry." Remember these are just engineering estimates. What you need to consider is the RTBF or Real Time Between Failure. From experience, the average hard drive is going to fail at an age of about 3-5 years, or just before you have to finish a critically important job on your computer.
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