Back in 2007 Google released a study on the lifetimes of hard disk drives. They are obviously in a pretty unique position to do so since they run huge server farms that run the majority of the world's searches, emails, and other cloud-like services. Although they didn't single out any particular manufacturer or brand as being better or worse than the norm, they did say that a new disk drive has about a 2% chance of failing in a year. Drives that are over 2 or 3 years old the rate is significantly higher, over 8%. Let's take that lower probability, and run with it. So, the disk in your newish laptop has a one in 50 chance of dying this year. Doesn't sound too bad, surely? That's like shuffling a pack of cards thoroughly, placing the pack on the table, cutting, turning over the top card and it being the ace of spades. Taking it further: in our house we have several PCs, containing in all 8 newish disk drives spinning all the time. The probability that at least one of those 8 dying this year according to Google's probability is 15%. One in 7. That's in between tossing three heads in a row with a coin or throwing a six on a single die. Suddenly it doesn't seem that remote any more. (If they were older, that becomes 1 chance in 2 that at least one drive would fail.) So, when was the last time you backed up? Given that, like me, you're the free tech gopher for all your relatives' and friends' machines, when did they back up?
Julian M Bucknall, CTO
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