[geeks] [JuliaSacks930 at hotmail.com: [janglo] INFO4U: My Ipod Broke My Computer]

[Lionel Peterson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Scott Howard" <scott at doc.net.au>
To: "The Geeks List" <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 5:08 AM
Subject: Re: [geeks] [JuliaSacks930 at hotmail.com: [janglo] INFO4U: My Ipod 
Broke My Computer]


> OK, but consider this for a moment...
>
> Hard disks have an MTBF of about 1 million hours  (give or take a bit).

No, more like 300,000 hours, or 34 years of 24x7x365 uptime...

> So if you go out and buy an iPod and connect it to your computer, the odds
> of the hard disk dying within the first hour are about 1 in a million.

Well, make that 1 in 300,000...

> Apply has so far sold 42 million iPods.
>
> So (on average) there are 42 people worldwide who have had their hard disk
> die within 1 hour of plugging in their iPod.
>
> Which means she's got 41 names to go!  :)

139 more names to go...

But, for every drive that lasts 300,000 hours, doesn't that mean there is 
one that fails in the first hour, and another drive that lasts 600,000 
hours?

Just an question, but can they really warrant the external contacts for that 
long? (Said another way, do we know that corrosion won't erode the 
electrical properties of the contcts in less than 34 years?) The short 
answer I guess is no, that is why drives have 1-5 year warranties ;^)

Lionel