Hard Drive Life Expectancy

I am looking to replace a two year old Dell laptop with an Apple Mac Book. I have replaced the hard drive in the Dell three time due to failure. What is the typical life expectancy of a hard drive in an Apple laptop?

The life expectancy of any hard drive is unrelated to the computer. Here's some things to consider:
Lower priced drives come with three year warranties while the more expensive "enterprise" models come with five year warranties. Apparently drive makers think that represents the expected lives of the drives or they would provide longer warranties.
Manufacturer data suggests the drives will last upwards of 100 years, but there's certainly no evidence that any of them ever have. Google did a study that showed nearly 30 percent of all drives in service at their server farms failed annually.
If you're lucky the drives last longer than you keep the computer. I've yet to have a drive failure before I replaced the drives for other reasons. So, I guess I'm lucky.

Similar Messages

IPod Hard-drive life expectancy...

Hi all...(iPod Photo 20gb, 1st Gen)
I'm rapidly losing faith in Apple's hardware choices. About a month ago, my hard drive on my iBook packed up, after only 3 years. Not even really heavily used either, mainly internet and music. Two day's after getting the HD replaced the battery died too. So in the space of 3 days, i had manged to spend nearly £250 on repairing my laptop...and i only earn £720 p/m. Not good.
So, i was even more hacked off last night when my iPod kept freezing in my car. It's connected to an Alpine CD player with the Ai net connection thingy.
I disconnected it the first time and held down the centre button + menu. It restarted fine, but all the music/menu settings/photo's vanished! I pugged it back into the Alpine connection and it wouldn't even access the iPod. Then it froze again. So i reset once more, and as if by magic it all came back to life, including the songs! Most bizarre.
However, i notice now that my iPod is behaving rather strange. It will just freeze whenever it likes. It could be flicking through the playlist, looking at photo's or just general listening. The HD was getting a bit noisy, so i listened to it upclose. It's doing exactly the same as my laptop HD. If you move the iPod in your hand, just gentle normal day to day use movements, you can hear it clicking and moving about. If you tip it, you can hear it clicking (the HD trying to read). And at certain angles, you can physically hear it 'whirring'.
My iPod is now unuseable. Done the master restore etc etc, still knackered. Any song you play just freezes. It's just under two years old. I use the iPod daily, but no more than i'd use a mobile phone. It's not under any stress, the HD is barely a 3rd full at any one time. But obviously it's dying.
Has anybody else had this? I think it's p*ss poor, that a great product is let down again, by a cr@ppy Toshiba HD, just like my iBook. I love my iPod, i want it fixed but i can't afford to take it to a repair centre. And i certainly don't want a crappy Toshiba HD in there again. I had my laptop fitted with a Western Digital. Are there compatible HD's, can i do it myself, and is it easy??
A slowly mad turning and increasingly further skint semi annoyed Dan
G4iBook Mac OS X (10.3.9) iPod Photo 20gb with crap Toshiba HD!

I think all you need is a new battery.
I've had a 60 GB photo for a couple of years now and pretty much just use it in the car. I got that size because I also wanted an option to back essential in progress stuff up from my laptop rather than burn a cd.
I've had problems with it just stopping, having to reset etc for quite a while. I've also had it apart a few times because I got into mucking around with faulty ipods and used it to test hard drives, most of which are not in fact faulty.
A new battery has got rid of all those problems.
I've also just replaced the battery in a 20 GB photo ipod with exactly the same symptoms as yours. I did think the hard drive had packed up this time especially as it failed the ipod diagnostics - which you can access by resetting and then immediately holding down the centre and reverse buttons until you see the apple logo reverse itself. Under "i/o" you'll see HDD or hard drive or similar and in there you'll find an option to do a disc scan and a read write test. You can also get "smart" data for your drive i.e. have any sectors been reallocated which is what the drive does when sectors start to go bad.
To get back to the point, the 20 GB photo failed the hd scan, read/write test and wouldn't show any smart data at all. I thought it was definitely trashed and just decided to try a new battery on the off chance and all was fine and it passed all the tests with the new battery installed.
You can get one in a couple of days from e-bay for £7.50 or thereabouts with some much improved tools compared to a few months ago which, if your patient, you can use to open your ipod without any damage.
I can give you the name of a good supplier if you like that sells 1200 mAh batteries that fit well (some of the newer higher power batteries for the mini are a tight fit) that also comes with some decent tools with harder plastic that make it easier to get in.
Let me know if you want that info - I have no affiliation with them, just like the tools.
Cheers,
John

Increase Hard Drive life?

So I got a 27" iMac a couple months ago, which i love, but what i can't stand is the inability replace the HD, should it fail. we all know hard drives can really go at any time. Sure i've had some last 5-6+ years, but other quit after 2-3 years. As I can't swap out the hard drive down the road, I'm thinking about attempting to extend the life of my HD. If i run an external drive and put all my libraries on there, would you guys think that may increase the life of my internal drive? Thanks in advance for any comments or opinions.
these are well built machine which is why i don't mind the premium, but i think the lack of servicability limits the longevity of the machine to the weakest product (which is obviously not an apple product).

jmf007 wrote:
So I got a 27" iMac a couple months ago, which i love, but what i can't stand is the inability replace the HD, should it fail.
Whatever led you to believe it is not replaceable is not correct.
It is replaceable, though not without some difficulty. Using an external HD in an effort to extend the life of an internal component responsible for much of the iMac's performance doesn't make a lot of sense.
A major cause of drive failure is intrusion of environmental contaminants that is guaranteed to eventually occur due to thermal cycling or atmospheric pressure changes, even if you were to never use the drive. Unless you're going to use an iMac in a clean room, nothing will prevent a tiny smoke particle from eventually penetrating its case, finding its way between a platter and head, and permanently ruining it.
Use your Mac the way it's designed to be used. Hard disk failures occur, but it should be expected to last for the economic life of your Mac, which historically has been several years.

Battery / hard drive life-span of the Zen Visio

How long on average do internal lithium-ion batteries li've, specifically those found in Creative players such as the ZVM? What would be a rough number of recharges possible before the battery fails, and does the life-span of the battery depend on chronological time as well as number of recharges? Should a battery outli've a hard dri've or vice versa? Also is the life of a hard dri've potentially infinite if it is treated with care? If so, what can be done with a ZVM whose battery has died, but whose hard dri've still works?

) Li-ion batteries are good for 300-400 charge/discharge cycles.
2) Yes, Li-ion batteries deteriorate over time even if they are not used.
3) The HD should out li've your battery
4) Send the player back to Creative and they'll replace the battery for a fee. It used to be $80 USD.
You can expect the battery to last 2-3 years.
Check Out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_ion_battery and http://www.batteryuni'versity.com/
Message Edited by Krash on 06-20-2006 :33 PM

Load Cycle Count and Hard Drive Life

When I heard about issues with another platforms default power-management settings burning the life out of notebook hardrives, I decided it would be wise to check how my own MacBook Pro was doing. I installed smartctl utilities via Darwin ports and started keeping track to my drive status.
I was shocked to find that the LoadCycleCount as reported by my machine's SMART subsystem was over 500,000 of an expected 600,000 cycles in a harddrive typical life on a system that was just 18 months old of just typical use. Since then I've monitored things and haven't been able to get it to slow down - so that it's now crossed 613,000 after 8032 power-on hours and the macbook is still running - not making any weird drive noises either.
I've been making weekly backups now - but I'd still rather have a planned replacement than get caught in the middle with a downed system. Frankly, I'm bothered by how fast this drive's life has been "used up" by the default settings of OSX. Have people ever gotten a pro-active replacement approve by applecare - I have the extended warranty on my machine - but don't want to void my warranty on the whole machine just to fix this harddrive issue.

1. Yes.
2. I have used 254 for years on my HP. I don't run for extended periods on batteries, and I hate spin down / spin up delays. I have never had a problem and always use it sitting on my lap, often being set down on and picked up from a desk. I would not worry about it.

How to prolong hard drive life on a MBP i7? + Some User tips

As well as the must-do's and must-not's. I know it it is bad to have the macbook pro on the laps though I would like to know why..

You can follow the instructions here to copy your installation disc over to a USB jump drive: http://lifehacker.com/5347382/wintoflash-turns-your-windows-installation-dvd-int o-a-usb+based-installer

Powerbook G4 noisy hard drive- is it coming to an end?

I have had my powerbook for four years and it has done hard work on the road in inhospitable places for most of that time. Now that I'm back home, I've noticed that it has started to sound like a lawnmower (or is that some kind of fan inside?) and it gets very hot.
Should I be preparing for the worst, or is this normal?
Many thanks, Rose

Hello Rose,
What temperature is hot? Download and install a free widget called, iStat Pro. It will appear in the dashboard and give the operation temps of many parts of your machine. The Powerbook's normal operating temp should max out at around 65-67'C. This is normal! As for the noise: When hard drives start to fail they do get noisy. There is a very distinctive whirring sound as the drive starts up and the machine will become sluggish. There is also the high pitched screaming sound as the drive fails and stalls. However, if you think the sound is just that of noisy fans, it is much more likely to be just that. Have you ever opened the machine and cleaned it? When you do, you are sure to find a major (and slightly disgusting) build up of dust and grit around the fans making them noisy and inefficient. You can try cleaning them although, the noise may not go away because the damage has already been done to the small bearings controlling them, thus making them noisy.
Should I be preparing for the worst
Regardless of the symptoms of this event you should always be prepared for the worst when it comes to computers. All computer users should develop stringent back-up plans. I use a collection of large capacity USB flash drives (8GB) as my back-up database. As long as they are stored correctly their shelf life is much greater than that of DVD-R discs (5 years max) and much more stable than an external hard drive (life expectancy unknown and unpredictable). It may be a little more expensive to use flash drives as back-up, but can you put a price on the digital memories of the first decade of your kids' lives?

How to tell if second hard drive is going bad

Back in November added second hard drive to my G4 and installed Leopard on it. In last month incredible amount of app crashes, hangs, "force quit," etc. and the occasional kernel panic.
Did an erase and install and now seems like more of the same.
When I run old 10.3 on the original hard drive, life is just fine. To that end, I'm beginning to suspect the hardware. However, when I put the original Apple Hardware Test CD in and tried to use it (never done that before), it said it wouldn't run on this machine.
Is there a Plan B? Is there something wrong with the CD?
Thanks in advance for the help.
j

SMART - look at the bottom of the screen in DU when you click on the drive.
Lepard may be uncovering faulty or marginal memory. Each OS upgrade has put memory to use more so than previously.
Memtest is your best bet there. Or Rember which people like for GUI.
I tended in the past to wipe a drive with zeroes.
If you aren't using Disk Warrior (or TTPro) then you really don't know if your drive has directory or file errors, sadly, 3rd party is pretty much a given and must.
Intech Speedtools is another. Can do a thorough SMART test (45 minutes), test media, scan and reassign bad blocks, and stress a drive.
Disk Warrior manual hardware test will tell you one thing that helps: whether a drive has used spare blocks and how many left, meaning it might be time to zero a drive. Drives tend to fail early if they will, sometimes off the assembly line. Or down the road.
It would be nice if we could run Memtest from Apple Hardware Test. AHT does spot real obvious problems with memory, but sometimes iTunes seems to do a better job.

Fidgity Hard Drive (2STF/1/4)

A couple weeks ago I moved my iMac G5 to a new location. A week ago I started hearing some extra hard drive spinning that would stall the computer for a few seconds. Not a big deal so I figured I was overworking it and kept going.
It has gotten worse in that now the system will sometimes crash/freeze after spinning. I ran the Apple Hardware Test on it and found Error Code: 2STF/1/4:S-ATA BUS 0 - Master. Looking around the discussions it looks like other people experienced this error after their hard drives quit. I'm concerned that this is the direction mine is heading. What can/should I do to preserve data at this point and/or prolong the hard drive life? Is it really toast?
Thanks for any advice.

Welcome to discussions - If you don't have a firewire external drive, go and het one, then use SuperDuper! to clone/back up your data. If you can't get an external, at least burn your home folder to a dvd.
Have you tried booting from your install disc and running Disk Utility, then verify/repair hard drive? Try that and see if it helps.

Pm-utils-1.4.0-1: aggressive hard drive power saving (often spin-up)

[sorry, misplaced post. this issue is for package from extra repo]
Hi all,
after upgrading from pm-utils-1.3.0-2 to pm-utils-1.4.0-1 I noticed that hard drive on my laptop is stopped and spinned up again too often.
The reason for this is script introduced in pm-utils-1.4 /usr/lib/pm-utils/power.d/harddrive that activates aggressive power saving. pm-powersafe is triggered after suspend wake-up in my case.
I noticed that
# hdparm -B /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
APM_level = 1
in case when laptop runs on battery power, and
APM_level = 254
when on AC. And I'm rarely use AC
Positive effect of this aggressive hard drive power saving is really doubtful as it can shorten your hard drive life significantly and cause apps hung till spin up very often.
I don't want to bring up a big discussion here, almost the same problem was discussed by ubuntu community
"Ubuntu's Laptop Killing Bug":
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0 … 4&from=rss
Currently I manually disabled power saving on hard drive by
# hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
setting Advanced Power Management level to disabled
APM_level = off
and disabled /ur/lib/pm-utils/power.d/harddrive by resetting execution flag.
I monitored spin up cycles count by
# smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Start_Stop_Count
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4715
It grew significantly before I noticed the problem
Last edited by basilgor (2010-07-23 12:36:32)

I have
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
in /etc/rc.local to apply this after boot and
#!/bin/sh
# Use a less aggressiv hard disk power management in order to get
# rid of clicking noise which occurs when the drive is parking its heads
. "${PM_FUNCTIONS}"
case "$1" in
thaw|resume)
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
esac
exit $NA
in /etc/pm/sleep.d/00-hdd to apply it after resume from suspend, but when resuming APM is not set since recent version of pm-utils
Last edited by EVRAMP (2010-08-06 10:30:58)

How to order hard drive PCB?

hi
Two weeks ago my macbook pro's hdd suddenly started clicking and after I restarted the computer, it stops working. After a little bit of searching, I discovered that the if I change the PCB, it might work again. My question is if I have a Hitachi 500GB apple 2008 firmware hard drive, where can I order a PCB for it?
thanks alot

Mohammad Al-Mousawi wrote:
I already got a new hard drive
The thing is I have important stuff on my hdd. At least if I can make it run for 1-2 hours just to bring back my data
If I extract the disks from the hdd and replace them with another 500GB hdd disk. will it work at least for 1 hour? I know it sounds crazy but I have to do something. I know my data is there, there should be a way to get them back
Or it could only work for 5min. Any contaminants will trash the hard drive, possibly permanently. Hard drives are assembled in clean rooms because even something as small as a smoke particle can cause a hard drive failure. Unless you have access to a clean room, it is nearly impossible to physical open a hard drive and expect to be able to access the data again. (If you're really lucky or sign a deal in blood with you-know-who. )
The previous company I worked for had to send a drive for recovery. This was several years ago and it was only a 20GB hard drive, but it cost us $25,000. (Yes twenty five thousand.) This was to cover us from a multi-million dollar liability so obviously the math works out in that case.
You are normally charged a minimum fee and additional per byte recovered. So if anything, the costs to you now is likely to be higher since hard drives have gotten larger, so the bytes recovered tend to increase.
Luck be with thee!

IMac Hard Drive expectations, Are mine too high?

Hey everyone.
I have a 27" iMac i5. Its around 22 months old now and its being used as a personal PC at home.
Lately, I have been experiencing HDD related issues, It hangs, load times are poor, OS takes ages to boot (windows and OSX)
I backed up all my data to external drives and did a clean OS restore to Lion. No help, first boot with the OS was just as bad as a boot full of clutter. Loading Windows on the win partition also sometimes gives me the "cannot find OS boot disk" error which is scary.
Anyway's doing research its all sure tell-tale signs of a failing HDD and ironically last night on my Win7 partition, I got the windows error message saying my "windows detected a hard disk problem, back up all data and contact your manufacture".
Now, back on topic. Is this reasonable? a $2000+ computer suffering from a hardware fault like this when the HDD has never had more than 30% of the 1TB used in its life? (everything I keep backed up on externals.)
I was honestly expecting a few more years out of this, **** even my 5 year old Macbook has never had an issue in its life and its been bagged around more places I can think of in its lifetime. How does a computer that sits on a desk suffer for a hardware failure such as this?
From day one, I had a faulty power board inside, it caused a loud electronic buzzing noise. I did not get this fixed for aroun 9 months as tbh, it sounded normal but in the last month leading upto the replacement, it got much louder over a few days. This was replaced by Apple and I was sent on my way happy it was fixed. could this have caused something to overload?
I am a little bit bitter which I am sure you can understand, but was my expectation of this hard drive just too high? or am I in my right to be a little upset by this?
And before anyone askes, I was OS when my warranty ran out, my Macbook, iPad 3XiPhones and Mac Mini are all covered by their own Apple Care. the only thing that isnt is the iMac.. just my luck!
Edit: the old link for the power board.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2737002

Thanks guys.
Just got off the phone to Applecare.
they confirmed my drive is faulty. Im just a little upset it died like this. I have never had a drive fail before. Id rather my externals go than the internal.
Spoke to Apple, they said that he spoke to his Tech Specalist and they would not offer a free replacement. I agree is its 10 months out of warranty, but even the Apple rep I was speaking too said he would not be impressed either if it was his personal computer
Oh well. Time to look at HDD Upgrade options! Not that I am totally impressed about it.

I RECENTLY HAD THE HARD DRIVE REPLACED ON MY MACBOOK PRO 8.1 UNDER WARRENTY NOW I FIND I CANNOT INSTALL I LIFE FROM MY ORIGINAL DVDS

I RECENTLY HAD THE HARD DRIVE REPLACED ON MY MACBOOK PRO 8.1 UNDER WARRENTY NOW I FIND I CANNOT INSTALL I LIFE FROM MY ORIGINAL DVD my original os was 10.6.7 now running 10.6.8

Download & install this:
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1512

How much should I expect to pay for a new hard drive for my macro with 250

How much should I expect to pay to replace damaged hard drive?

Nowadays a 3.5" SATA drive with 1 TB of storage space is under $70.00 depending upon cache size and spindle speed. Enterprise level drives will cost more since they come with a longer warranty and have a heavier use capability. These are desktop drives.
Your profile suggests you have a laptop model. Notebook sized drives are more expensive.
Look at OWC to find suitable replacement drives and prices dependent upon what you need. It's hard to provide you the correct information because you did not tell us what type of drive needs replacing.

Battery life halved after hard drive and ram upgrade

I upgraded my hard drive to a wd 1 tb scorpion blue and upgraded the ram to 8gb. Now the battery life is less than halved. The speed has not improved or decreased , I'm happy with the drive performance, but am considering going back to the standard 4 gb ram to try and improve the battery life. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Yes that looked like the main problem, battery indicator has come back up on idle at least. It still suffers on application use, (aperture ) seems to have lost 30% during usage, but still better than after the upgrade ( used to be 3 hours now 2 hours, remaining time during importing as opposed to 1 hour after upgrade)

Hard Drive Life Expectancy

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