How often should you replace hard drives?

Dans data has an interesting article that discusses how often your PC hard drive should be replaced. It is inevitable that every hard drive will fail eventually, the trick is catching it before that happens:

Google's study of more than a hundred thousand drives over five years is useful as much for what it says about how hard it is to figure this stuff out, as for what it actually found.

It turns out that working drives hard, or running them warmer than recommended, doesn't seem to have much of an impact on their life. And the popular idea that failures follow a "bathtub curve", in which any drive that doesn't die in the first three months is likely to live for five years, also seems to be invalid. Drives actually just slowly wear out over their lives, like other mechanical devices.

Read the article here.

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