Hard disk life with frequent data write and read

[John_]

Dear All,

Can you kindly advise on the effect of frequent write / read on shortening of (ordinary low-cost, 80 to 250G, office desktop PC type) hard disk life.

File size is IMAQ iamge file (300k byte)

1000 wite / read per day  for 1 day in a week   (6 days low activity, 1 day busy)

[LV_Pro]

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it should be no problem, from a life time point of view, it averages to ~150 a day over a week. Of more concern will be that you will probably start having disk fragmentation issues in a fairly short period, where continuous blocks of disk space become harder to find and the data then has to be spread over numerous locations on the drive. One end result of this is increased drive activity as the heads have to be moved all over to recover a file's data. Drives these days get a pretty good workout, with people storing thousands of MP3 music file, videos, digital camera pictures. Particularly with the MP3's they will have a lot of files that get accessed frequently. The drive, depending on O/S, will also get a lot of "random" activity, particularly if you have an indexing program such as Google desktop, running. Watch the HD light on your machine for a while and you will see it start blinking like crazy every so often when apparently nothing is running.  Of course if the files you are saving are critical they should be backed up regularly to some other drive or media.

P.M.

[unclebump]

I am looking at putting 80 of these on an engine assembly line.

http://www.simpletech.com/oem/zeus/index.php

Do you have multiple partitions on one hard drive??

Also look for a SEAGATE EE25 series drive.