Originally Posted By: abacus


If your Dell is 10 years old I hope you have changed the HDD, if you haven’t then do so immediately as you are running on borrowed time. (On average in full use most HDD have roughly a 3 year life span which can be extended to about 5 years in a domestic environment)

Remember if the HDD fails, and you have not backed everything up, you have lost everything. (There are companies that can retrieve data off a failed HDD but they cost an arm & a leg)


Bill....those are really good points you made and not just for me but for others here. I'm keeping an eye on all my periphals...all but my primary drive. I forgot it doesn't go on forever.

Unfortunately, I can't even BUY a drive for it anymore...it has IDE architecture and the major manufacturers are putting out SST drives now. I have 325 Gigs on it but I wanted to replace it with a 500 GB. That's when I found out my choices were limited.

But I DO have everything backed up in case of failure in any way. I bought 5 external drives and I have a second internal drive.

Also, I found this program years ago that is incredible. It makes copies (for 24 hours) of every file I change during the day and at night I just press one button and ALL of my files that I designate get saved to any drive I choose.

What you said was so important, I'm going to repeat it again hear for those who missed it.......

On average in full use most HDD have roughly a 3 year life span which can be extended to about 5 years in a domestic environment.

Remember if the HDD fails, and you have not backed everything up, you have lost everything.