Hey,

I have just bought a Western Digital My Book Pro 1terabyte Dual-Drive storage System - it is on for 24 hours a day and will be for months as i convert all of my DVD's.

Is using a HDD for such a constant long duration ok? what is the life span of a HDD? i think it will be at least 1 year before my DVD's are ripped - is it ok to have HDD working constantly for 1 year?

Thanks

like all PC parts you never really know how long they will last... best to be safe, always have a backup.

Hard drives typically like best to just stay on. When they fail, it's often when spinning up or down. However, most hard drives have a life expectancy of one through five years, with one year being the cheapo consumer grade drives, and five years being the more expensive enterprise grade drives. No way knowing what drive kind is in your enclosure (I'd guess 2-3 year consumer drives).

When it can break, and stores your media, you MUST have a back-up.

Here is what WD has to say-- (emphasis added)

We no longer measure the reliability of our drives using Mean Time Between Failure (MTFB). Our current drive reliability is measured using Component Design Life (CDL) and Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). The Component Design Life of the drive is 5 years and the Annualized Failure Rate is less than 0.8%.

In a former life I managed an inventory of many 10s of thousands of desktops, laptops, servers, network devices etc. The highest failure rate bar none was in laptops; with some MB, case, drive combinations standing out as very poor. But there was no consistency, except that failure rates would go up after year 2.

Enterprise SCSI drives failed regularly, but rates were low and tended to be as expected.

Overall I would estimate that drives of all kinds begin to experience increasing failure in year 3. Thats an estimate as we tended to buy warranty packages and specific failures during warranty were not well tracked. We had very few 5 year old drives in regular service.

Buy two...
If it is important to you make a copy as all drives will fail.

Sata drives were originally designed to be utilized for about 8 hours a day with a preferred data pattern of sequential reads and writes. Their lifespan was projected at about a year. Streaming is a good fit for a sata drive but it will eventually fail. No tools can predict a hard failure.

Hey,

I have just bought a Western Digital My Book Pro 1terabyte Dual-Drive storage System - it is on for 24 hours a day and will be for months as i convert all of my DVD's.

Is using a HDD for such a constant long duration ok? what is the life span of a HDD? i think it will be at least 1 year before my DVD's are ripped - is it ok to have HDD working constantly for 1 year?

Thanks

With that amount of storage space, you might want to consider running a RAID array. You'd need at least 3 drives for the higher level RAIDs, and depending again on the RAID level, would offer various levels of data redundancy. Higher level RAID arrays can rebuild the data from a pooched hard drive, based on data on the other drives...might be what you're looking for.