Hard drive performance degradation over time??

I have this crazy older brother who is a photographer. He heavily uses Photo shop CS2 on his Quad core Mac Pro, and for some reason is convinced that he needs to change his hard drives regularly. He was trying to explain to me that hard drives start to wear out after a while and they dont perform as fast as a brand new one because they get fragmented and something or other beyond repair by reformatting. He also said that his pictures he works on are so important and expensive that he cant afford any hard drive to fail on him, so this makes sense to him to buy new harddrives every couple months to ensure top performance and reliability. I argued with him until i was angry trying to convince him otherwise that he was wrong and he was wasting his money, but he wont believe a word of it. I was curious as to what you guys thought. Is any of this actually true or is my brother just a lunatic?

Modern hard drives will continue to perform reliably and to new specifications for a period of three to five years at a minimum.

If he's so worried about performance and data security, he should be using enterprise-class drives in a RAID 1 or RAID 10 array and have an aggressive backup plan in place. This, in conjunction with a policy of weekly defragmenting using a professional-level product such as Diskeeper and replacing drives before their end of service life would be a reasonable approach.

yeah he said he was a raid 1 but he is still so convinced that new harddrives work faster than old ones! to him, time is money, and he thinks that he is saving himself time when he is really just wasting money!

RAID1 is hardly a "backup solution". If the data on one drive gets corrupted, that'll be copied to the second drive. If the PC gets hit by a power surge, both drives will be smoked. If his data was that important he'd have a external backup that isn't connected to the PC and not even stored at the same site to ensure it is safe.

well he is a mac user and i am pretty sure he has backup via his .mac account on the apple servers, but he also has his RAID 1 on his desktop. what would u recommend then as far as raid solutions for him?

well new generation HDD's tend to be faster...
and so do larger drives as the data is packet more dense.

But if he is "upgrading" to the same size/generation of a disk, he is wasting money.

Glad to hear he is in RAID 1 if his data is so important...

However i would recommend RAID 5 if performance and reliability are a concern. RAID 5 will be much faster in write operations for him so he should like that. As we know he can afford new drives all the time, the extra money on RAID 5 shouldnt be an issue..

Well if he's swapping out old/slow fragged hard drives with new/fast fresh hard drives then he probably will notice a difference in speed. But as for older drives degrading performance, that's grade-A BS. If you defrag your drive often then it should have the same performance as the day you got it. (Although being a MAC they probably don't need defraging because it's a UNIX based OS....not sure)

As for a solution for him. What does he need and how much money does he have? A simple solution should be to get a couple 320/500/750gb Seagates. One will go in his machine to use, the other will be a USB/Firewire backup he can perform daily/weekly backups and move it offsite if need be.

If he needs more speed you can get a couple 320gb's and set then to RAID 0. Then use a 750gb as a backup drive. If he's needs even more speed, try 2-4 150gb raptors in RAID 0. Although for that price you're looking at a 3-4 disk RAID5 SCSI array.

If he has $6000 to kill get him one of these: http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/ (Backup solution extra )

Why complain?

Snag his old hdds

What your friend is describing is fragmentation, if he doesnt defrag, of cause its gunna slow down

-_{MoW}_-Assasi said:

Why complain?

Snag his old hdds

What your friend is describing is fragmentation, if he doesnt defrag, of cause its gunna slow down

Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing. What does he do with all the old hdds? I could use another SATA drive

he said he keeps them. i dont know why, but i picture a big box in his appartment that is just packed with hds. as for defragmenting, i dont think you can defragment in OS X because it doesnt need it or something. I have a macbook pro, and i cant find anything about defragmenting or fragmentation. can anyone comment on this further? I dont want to exploit my brothers inadequate knowledge of computer storage, i just want him not to waste his money on things that arent going to make a difference, and maybe have him invest in a solution that will be long term and do exactly what he needs and doesnt burn a hole in his wallet for no good reason.

So what specifically would you guys reccomend for someone who needs really quick drives and who has very important expensive pictures on there that he cant afford to loose?

PS: Bios24, will that x serve raid edit his pictures FOR him? haha 6 grand for storage, thats more than the quad core mac pro itself!

Wait, just found out that his computer actually does cost more than the xserve raid. holy **** thats an expensive photo editor hes got...

O.C.CaTaLYsT said:

Wait, just found out that his computer actually does cost more than the xserve raid. holy **** thats an expensive photo editor hes got...

Click to expand...

Dang, well he's got more money that I have.

That makes sense that you can't defrag a Mac. Fragmentation is really only a Windows (FAT/NTFS) problem. Unix/Linux/Mac handles file systems differently and doesn't really need to be defragmented.

There are really only 2 reasons to buy a new hard drive. One is for more space, obviously. The other is speed, as newer models come out every year with more cache and faster technology. These speed increase are very slow however, and aren't really noticable. (less you're getting a raptor or something)

You should probably talk with him about how much space he needs, and how much speed he needs. There is usually a trade off with speed and space. If he really spent >$6k on a Mac then he's probably got the money for some good storage hardware.

How about a 4 disk RAID5 array over an eSATA or Fibre connection with a 1TB backup harddrive? Then he'd have the performance and redundency of RAID5, and a backup drive he can store offsite or in a fire/waterproof safe. Hell, get 2 1TB drives. One for a safety deposit box, the other to store onsite for emergency recovery. Would 1TB of storage be enough for him?

lol yeah i think 1 tb would b enough, but he tends to overdo things, such as his ~6000 computer.... he buys the latest macs whenever they come out too! He doesnt know too much about computers and hardware, i think he might have a hard time setting up this raid array that your talking about but i will talk to him and see what he says.