Larger Capacity Hard Drives live shorter?

[C_O_N]

Hi ppl
Yesterday a technician from ASUS came to my house to repair my bro's almost-dead computer. He found out that the 500GB hard drive from Western Digital has a broken disk, which shows why my bro's dead. Then he tries to sell a 250GB hard drive to my bro. The technician said that hard drives with larger capacity have shorter life spans than smaller hard drives. Here's the problem...I just bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1.5TB Hard drive a month ago. So will my 1.5TB die faster than the 250GB hard drive i used to have?

For the 1.5TB drive, I plan to fill it games and other large programs in the future~~

O_o

[gingerbee]

i highly doubt it was an asus tech cause that would be news to me. and to answer your question no HD capacity has nothing to do with life of a drive

[AkG]

Sounds like that tech had some old kit he was trying to sell. ;)

Unless you are getting in the tens of thousands, the number of platters in a given model has very little to no bearing on the longevity of the drive (statistically speaking more platters have more parts to go wrong and at low order probabilities this does kinda/sorta matter). The heavier drives have bigger kit used in them and have been engineered to withstand the added stress. While there are exceptions to every rule it sounds like you just got a bad one. AND I would question how he knew it had a broken platter. Did you hear a "Cow Bell" sound from the drive before it died? Did you drop it (especially while it was running)? Did he shake it and hear parts flopping around inside? :)~ Hell did he take it apart!? If a tech ever tried to BS me like that on 250s vs 1.5TBs I would automatically discount everything he said.

The only way I could see him saying that is if your 1.5TB was part of that fiasco Seagate had awhile back w/ bad firmware. I personally will not buy Seagate again for a long while (until they prove trust worthy again) so maybe he is as biased as me...BUT I would never say a 250 is safer than a 1.5 because a single 500gb drive had died! Seagate branded or not thats just foolish.

THAT all being said, never trust a hard drive with important data! Back it up to other drives, alternate media (DVDs at worse, tape at best), off site and then make multiple copies in dif media!

[gingerbee]

thank akg i really like the way you write very short to the point and lots of info all in 1 neat little package. ( does asus even have official tech? )

[AkG]

Thanks Gingerbee :)

My guess its some lowest bidder sub contractor who was awarded a certain area for Call To Repair warranty contract issues (or maybe just On Site warranty extension). My experience with other companies (even HP w/ 6hr CTR) is it really depends on who the guys in your area are. You can even get some real bone-headed "experts" working on expensive kit under ultra expensive contract warranty extensions.

[C_O_N]

Well I'm in Taiwan right now. Since ASUS is a Taiwanese company, they have official techs in Taiwan that personally come to ur place to fix up ur PC. I guess Asian techs would try anything to sell their products. By the way, I don't know why, ASUS allow their techs to sell computer parts.

[grinder]

i believe there has been study after study trying to link paterns of HDD failure with different features or environmental factors.

high heat (but still within the norm) still has not been linked with HDD failure (scientifically) but it is still the perception among computer users (myself included)

hard drive size? that is a new one.

In the end, i think if you purchase a consumer hard drive you are going to get random failure period, some users will be luckier than others =P. The best of the best hard drives get binned in the server pile where you can run a hard drive for over 10 years in a crazy hot environment and not have a single failure. I have 10K hitachi SCSI hard drives running solid since 1999 in an old IBM netfinity 2000 web server. And they are far from being in an ideal temperature controlled environment.

[DarKStar]

That alleged ASUS tech is full of himself - he is most likely talking from bad experiences he's had - what load of BS - a 250 GB has just about the same odds as a 500GB or any sized drives. What about the old 32 and 64GB that failed a lot back then ? Size has nothing to do.

BROKEN platter ? LOL - in Taiwanese jargon that likely means "your HD has failed"

There are a lot of factors that can contribute to shorter lifespans of a hard drive - the capacity is not one of them unless companies cut corners in quality control on higher capacity drives to keep prices low........;) One thing I did notice though, on all my Seagate 500GB single platter 7200.12, reallocated sector count keeps going up every set amount of power on hours - I think every 900 if not mistaken - but anyways, has nothing to do with capacity ...
I would hate to think what else your ASUS technician has told you :D

[gingerbee]

Originally Posted by C_O_N

Well I'm in Taiwan right now. Since ASUS is a Taiwanese company, they have official techs in Taiwan that personally come to ur place to fix up ur PC. I guess Asian techs would try anything to sell their products. By the way, I don't know why, ASUS allow their techs to sell computer parts.

so they do allow tech's in Taiwan to sell gear? cool your in Taiwan

[bissa]

is it possible that having more room on the HDD means that it has to spend a little bit longer searching for sectors? which then causes more wear on the components which would shorten HDD life expectancy