"March 02, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Customers are replacing disk drives at rates far higher than those suggested by the estimated mean time to failure (MTTF) supplied by drive vendors, according to a study of about 100,000 drives conducted by Carnegie Mellon University" read more I've had drives go bad right out of the gate twice. I've had two that had failures besides those. Of the two that had failures during use, one was a very long time ago and the other was more because the cooling wasn't what it should have been (Dell). I started building my own after the Dell and haven't had anything go wrong with them since. (after becoming operational). I've had a at least one PC since 1990. ` ` `
The drive that I said was "too hot" was also being defragged much too often by my teenager at the time. I found that he was doing this several times a week. That might have caused extra wear right? ` ` `
I have had SMART give me some warning when a drive is about to go TU. THat said, it sounds like random failures. After all, MTBFR is the MEAN, or average, time between failures. Half the drives will fail sooner and half later.
