Re: Serious problem with Linux on an old PC

Alan Adams wrote:

Replace them!

Retail IDE disks seem to have a life of around 3 years. (Older ones, e.g. <1GByte lasted longer, because when they were made they were expensive, premium items.)

Although the original report does suggest hardware failure including on-board HD electronics not just the mechanical/magentic parts I have never seen one with a 3 year life at 24/7. 5 years has been when things start to go flakey and then a bigger HD is dirt cheap and the original size is hard to find so it doen't really matter as the original machine is best used as local backup of important files for the new machine that runs four times faster for the same price as the original.

SCSI disks generally last longer, but I don't have the experience to suggest how much.

About 4 years ago there were a considerable number of 20GB disks with a manufactirung fault. The majority of them failed between 2 and 3 years old. We had 15 of them. 1 failed in its first month. 3 more failed before 2 years. 8 more (including one of the replacements) failed during the 3rd year. The vendor eventually swapped the lot.

But that was a specific manufacturing fault which was corrected.

Failure clusters can, and do, happen.



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