Comment by calloc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by calloc | Hacker News Reader

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No, Apple drives don't fail at a disproportionately higher rate. They have the exact same failure rates as the rest of the industry since they use the same parts (with minor modifications apparently).

I've had many hard drives fail. Just recently a Western Digital hard drive in my server that was the second drive in a mirror started having issues with the ball bearings making a high pitched whining noise, going over into no longer spinning up. This is by no means the first drive to do so to me. Hard drive failures happen, the more of them you have, the more likely they are to fail at one point or another.

I've had my MacBook Pro for almost 4 years now and I haven't had the hard drive fail in it at all. I wouldn't be worried, unless you abuse your laptop while it is running most likely nothing will happen. Just make sure that you have backups, TimeMachine is excellent for that.

To play devil's advocate, this isn't out of the question.

1) Macs do tend to run hotter than PCs, and this could decrease HDD lifespan.

2) We've seen in the past that OS-specific power management settings can be detrimental to hard drives, as with this famous Linux bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/104535 Although I doubt it's actually the case, it's possible in principle for drives to wear differently under OS X than under Windows.

> 1) Macs do tend to run hotter than PCs, and this could decrease HDD lifespan.

Google found that temperature didn't much matter according to their published research: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

> In the lower and middle temperature ranges, higher temperatures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that data center or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment that contains disk drives.

Non-PDF summary/discussion: http://storagemojo.com/2007/02/19/googles-disk-failure-exper...

I've only ever had one Mac, but it's less than 3 years old and I've had to have the drive replaced twice. --I've never had that happen on any other laptop, and I've only had one other internal drive fail in less than 5 years (the max I tend to keep them around). I have found that external drives tend to have higher failure rates - they tend to last a couple of years - but that's still better than the Mac.

Sure there are always going to be edge cases, but can you point me to documents that point out that they fail more so than other drives? My original iBook I bought in 2004 still functions with the original hard drive.

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