laudablepuss wrote:

mrs. johnson wrote:

Here's the situation: I have around 160 gigs of mp3s I want to back up. I'm a little worried that my drives could go at any time. First of all, what is average failure rate of a drive? How much time do they last until it just dies of age?

What options do I have?

I've considered buying a dvd burner and just making back ups that way. Is that reliable?

the mrs.

Optical backups are cheap and effective. I don't have experience with DVD burners, but I hear they work fine. Also, you might consider a mobo with an IDE or SCSI RAID controller built in. Hard disks are pretty inexpensive and are probably your best bet to secure your data (barring your entire machine bursting into flames or something). As for failure rate of hard disks, it's got to be pretty low. Except in rare cases, every hard drive I've ever encountered has lasted at least 2 or 3 years of continuous usage. The two times that the hard disks died sooner than that, they stopped working within a few weeks of purchase due to defective parts (both were IDE and both were Western Digital).

But with that much data to protect (and assuming you have around $800 to $1000 burning a hole in your pocket -- say $450 for the mobo + 3 hard disks and $400 more for the DVD burner), I'd seriously consider both the RAID and the DVD burner both. If it were me, though, I'd have the data spread around my various machines so that no individual crash would take out the whole thing. Kinda like a chimpy SAN or something. Then I'd do optical backups in stages until it was all filed away.