How long can your external HD last for your Mac mini / Apple TV?

[digitalmac]

I have been using an external hard disk for my Mac mini for almost 3 years. I used this for my EyeTV recordings, iTunes movies / musics. However, I had since then 2 different hard disks broken down. The first one was a LaCie for Mac mini and the second one is a Western Digital MyBook. I thought that having an energy save feature on the WD MyBook will help preventing this kind of situation. Anyhow, it happened that soon again.

Do you have the same experiences?

 

[Alrescha]

I've been using a variety of external drives from LaCie, Newertech, and Seagate on a Powermac and minis since 2004.

The only drive which has gotten sickly was the enclosure without a fan. Your mileage may vary.

A.
(who only buys enclosures with fans now)

 

[thegoldenmackid]

Fans are def. good. Every drive is different, I've owned numerous drives and went four years before having my first drive fail; granted, that drive was only three months old.

 

[digitalmac]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7C144 Safari/528.16)

Maybe I was having no luck on my external hard disk. I was so disappointed on how frequent my previous 2 HD to breakdown. And I realized how important is to perform a routine backup.
I didn't have any backup when my first drive failed. My whole 320G worths of videos and TV shows were gone.

 

[ljonesj]

I had a drive fail but it was my own fault. It was a brown segate 500 gb external drive it was standing up like they do and i hit something that hit it and it fell over that drive died as a result so make sure to keep them out of harms way.

 

[CylonGlitch]

I've been using a variety of external drives from LaCie, Newertech, and Seagate on a Powermac and minis since 2004.

The only drive which has gotten sickly was the enclosure without a fan. Your mileage may vary.

A.
(who only buys enclosures with fans now)

My experience has been identical. I have not lost any external drives in the last 4 to 5 years except the one in an enclosure with no fans. I still use that enclosure, just without the box on it.

I have several laptop drives in external enclosures that don't have fans and they have been rock solid for the last year. Maybe they are designed to be more rugged? But I don't use them nearly as much. My other externals have been on continuously since I purchased them. Almost all of them are hooked up to my server and thus been on since I purchased them.