Tweaked for Reliability : Western Digital’s Caviar RAID Edition
 

Hard disk capacities are growing to astronomical proportions, meaning that we are storing more and more data on a single storage medium than ever before. Users can now purchase a single 200-300GB to store all of their data on for a number of years, instead of spreading data out over separate disk drives. While this is great for consumers in terms of price and performance, storing all of your system's data on a single drive also increased the risk of catastrophic failure. Anyone who has lost 100 or 200GB of data within mere seconds due to a drive failure knows that this is an extremely painful ordeal to go through.


Thus, with the latest generation of large capacity consumer level hard disks, we're seeing an increased amount of attention being paid to two factors, extended warranties and estimated time before failures. Failure time estimates are generally measured in either MTTF (Mean Time To Failure) or MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), which are commonly known as the industry standards when it comes to measuring the reliability of a hard disk drive. MTTF and MTBF rates are measured in hours, and MTTF is the more respected of the two terms, as it represents the estimated amount of time before the first disk failure. Both MTTF and MTBF are calculated based on estimations of mechanical degradation over time, but obviously, external influences like heat and physical damage to the drive can negatively affect the lifespan of a drive.

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