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I have a 1.5 terabyte drive that I bought for backup. It has suddenly stopped working (with no warning) after just a few months. Since this happened, I have found various opinions that anything over 1 TB is still not very reliable.

Can anyone give good general information on this?

I understand that this is somewhat subjective, but I am asking for actual experience.

Thanks,

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No more reliable/unreliable than ones under 1TB.

I get through a lot of hard drives and I do get quite a few DOAs/weak ones - about 1 in 25 fail a prolonged burn in test, but it has always been about this.

A while ago, Google made a paper about their research in to drive failure, it is a little bit outdated but it still makes a very interesting read. Link here.

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    If anyone knows about hard drive failure rates, it Google.
    – Moab
    Sep 25, 2010 at 1:20
  • @Moab: Well they also run their servers about 10* above average.
    – Josh K
    Sep 25, 2010 at 3:53
  • Thanks for pointing to an interesting paper. However, it does not deal with my question, as the largest drive they reference is well under the 1TB size. However, this was interesting: "Contrarytopreviouslyreportedresults, verylittlecorrelationbetweenfailureratesa therelevatedtemperatureoractivitylevels. So, +1, but still no answer to my question. Regards,
    – Xavierjazz
    Oct 8, 2010 at 5:03

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