Hard disk stability vs. size
 

Lately, I've been throwing around the idea of getting a bigger slave drive for my system and I've started to look at hard drives, but I remembered something I read or heard somewhere:

"Larger hard drives tend to crash more than smaller ones."

Now, I've searched around Google and Ask.com and I haven't found anything relating the two....so, is this true or am I remembering something that I never heard in the first place?

Thanks!

I call bullshit. The only Hard Drives I've ever had die were 6-10GB Western Digitals. I've used a wide array of hard drives from 340MB to 320GB for extended periods of time (and had a brief experience with a 400GB SATA disc) and never seen any such correlation.

Well, new hard drives nowadays come with a 3 or 5 year manufacturer's warranty. If they didn't think the hard drive would last that long, they certainly wouldn't warranty it for that amount of time.

This is news to me. Perhaps you are confusing it with something else. Years back, there were issues with 10K RPM SCSI hard-drives and weren't as reliable as the 7200's. However, like Render said, vendors are more confident that their products will last and are putting 5 year warranties on them.

Technically a drive with a larger capacity has a greater possibility for a defect, but since all drives are tested before they are shipped, this is a moot point. Most drives I have used are perfectly reliable, with the exception of an infamous IBM unit, and a couple of Seagates that most probably began to fail due to excessive heat. This had nothing to do with the capacity though; one was an 80GB and the other Seagate was 300GB.

Just keep it cool and keep a backup, and you'll be fine.

More capacity -> more platters, more heads, larger motor -> more components that can fail.

In general higher density recording technology also leads to a more complex mechanical system. And we all know that the possibility that something breaks in a complex system is much higher than in a simple system.

On the other side technologies like automatic sector relocation, SMART, shock protection, etc. compensate these negative effects.

I do not think there's something to be afraid of. Size/Stability Rate is very high thank's to today's HDD ingeneering. Seagate HDDs do have Life-time warranty.