Hardware biggest cause of HDD failure, says Freecom
Launches low-cost data recovery service
External hard drive maker Freecom has revealed that almost half of all hard drive crashes are caused by hardware failure.
While launching a new, low-cost data recovery service, Freecom said its internal estimates suggest manufacturing flaws and age together account for 49 per cent of all hard drive failures.
By contrast, human error - moving the drive when then heads are flying, dropping laptops and suchlike - only account for 28 per cent of cases.
Moving down this chart of hardware horror, we have software failure causing 14 per cent of hard drive failures. Malware is responsible for eight per cent of incidents. Natural disasters account for the remaining cases - one per cent of failures.
Freecom's solution, it said, its is off-the-shelf eponymous Data Recovery Service. Buy the package from any retailer for £24.95 and a nominated drive - external or one within a PC, of any brand, type or manufacturer - is covered for three years from the date on which the drive is registered with Freecom.
The service extends to only one incidence of drive failure - whatever the reason for it - so you will have re-insure replacement drives.
The package - described by Freecom as an insurance policy for data - covers sending the damaged drive, which be kept within its host computer; you don't have to remove it - getting the data off, and the return of the recovered information on a brand new Freecom external drive.
The old drive is destroyed and sent off for recycling. Freecom's data-recovery partner, LazaRus, will retain the recovered data, but only for 15 days in case the files being returned are lost in transit. ®
COMMENTS
No shit, Sherlock?
And in other new, cutting your head off results in a 100% probability of death, and pouring water down the back of the TV results in a 90% chance of it breaking.
Incoming shock news - failure of hardware is the biggest cause of ....errr ....hardware failure.
I would imagine ...
100% data recovery from a drive hardware failure is probably next to impossible.
Cheaper, easier and safer would be a basic backup strategy.
wow
compared to the quotes i've seen elsewhere that's a pretty good deal!
Certainly worth baring in mind when we get the odd-bod who insists on storing stuff locally. certainly more cost effective than high maintenance and troublesome client backup solutions
External drive enclosures
Often seem to fail because of the cheap, "no-brand", power supplies they use.
(and the Freecom ones I've seen didn't look very good, either.)
A title?
I think the biggest issue with drives failing is how they are treated not manufacturing issues... We get drives fail at work in laptops where they are dropped or heavily placed on desks and the users wonder why the drives fail.
I normally only buy highly rated drives myself though and I threat them well and I also RAID 1 then and use a good journalling filesystem (not NTFS) and don't seem to have many issues.
Mike
