Hard Drive Madness - when will it end?
Each year that passes brings newer and better technology to the computer industry. Some things get smaller while others get bigger. Hard drives seem to be the only technology that is simultaneously getting better and worse at the same time. Each successive generation of hard drives is faster and higher capacity than the previous, but what is suffering is reliability. The corresponding problem is that as capacities grow, it becomes more and more challenging to backup the huge quantity of data. How can 1TB of data be backed up by the average user? I know some computer users who are still using 10-15 year old, low capacity hard drives on a daily basis; they just work the way they’re supposed to. I’ve had 3 modern hard drives fail on me in the last few months. This trend must reverse; as more and more people rely on their computers to organize their lives, we can’t tolerate catastrophic loss of our data. It’s not fair to put the burden of constant data backup and yearly hardware replacement on the average user. RAID configurations are just a band-aid over the problem. I’ve had to invest money in a mirrored arrangement of drives with an external controller box. Hard drive manufacturers (listen up Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi): I would pay more for a 120GB drive which will last for 10 years than a 500GB drive while is guaranteed to break in 1 year.
