Hard drive life expectancy

I am wondering what the hard drive experts here have to say on hard drive life spans. I figured the best way to prevent unwanted data loss is to replace the hard drive before it breaks. However, how to determine when a good time to replace a hard drive is the hard part.

Right now i have 2 hard drives using the IDE cable connection.

both are Wester Digital drives running at 7,200 rpms, one is 120 GB the other is 200 GB

The 200 GB is data storage and the 120 i use for all the software i use all the time.

As far as its usage in the past goes. Most of the time my computer is on. Usually because i am either downloading something or i have an ftp up.

my 120 GB drive is about 3 years old i think, and my 200 gb is 1 year old.

Can some give me a clue as to how long these drives could possible last?





Cliffs:

Use hard drives a lot, WD brand 7,200 rpm

How long is their life span

Many drives fail as a result of heat. A cool hard drive is a happy hard drive. I admire you wanting to take preventive measures but I think replacing your hard drives periodically could get expensive and impractical, and is a little extreme. Make sure your drives are running cool, and hopefully you won't catastrophically lose your data. Get motherboard monitor (google) and check the temps of your drives. If they're over 40-45C, you should really strongly consider improving airflow, or getting fans for the hard drives or something or other. My drives are all around 30C.

My case is pretty well cooled, i got two intake fans right near the harddrives. I have a temp gauge electical taped on the hard drive that reads 30.5 C. do you think this would give me a better reading then the MB monitor?

I am just want to make sure i am doing everything possible to stop hard drives from crapping out. I have had a hard drive crap out before and it sucked ass.

all hard drives will fail eventually. Moving parts simply wear out after awhile.

The best preventative measure you can take is to make regular backups of all your files, and make sure you have program disks stored together in a location you will remember.

This way if a drive fails you have backups, and will be able to reinstall everything and be up and running within a couple of hours.

do you think this would give me a better reading then the MB monitor?
No.

I'll take your 120 GB off your hands, and you can use the money I pay to help fund a new drive :) PM me for deal.

Instead of replacing hard drives just buy another 200 GB and set it up in RAID 1 configuration so it's a mirror. Yes you essentially loose 200 GB but your data is mirrored and when one HD goes down you simply replace it and are never down. The mirror will be rebuilt. Your system will warn you when a HD is failing thus knowing when you need to replace it.

I do this for my family pictures and data I don't want to loose. It's a great redundancy method for not loosing data. I still back up periodically though.