Bitter experience tells me there is a third certainty in life beyond death and taxes: all hard drives fail eventually. I’ve lost three in 25 years.
The hard drive is your computer’s memory, where much of the software that makes it work lives and where all your files (documents, music, photos and so on) are stored.
Hard drives are more reliable than they used to be, but they still fail. , a datacentre, has over 200,000 running all the time. Last year, about one per cent of them failed, while 15 years ago it was five per cent. Now, one per cent may not seem much, but consider this: there are 49 households in our village, so I bet there are at least 100 hard drives. That means the odds are that one of them will fail each year – and that’s without burst pipes, theft and natural disasters. So take heed.
