The MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) Leads to Huge Price Differences for Hard Drives
Let’s say you want to upgrade your computer and buy a 1000 GB (1 TB) hard-disk. Searching on an online shop you might find the next offers for two Samsung 1 TB hard-disks:
At first sight you may think that the guys from the online shop have done a mistake and the price for the second HDD is too big. Both the chosen 1 TB hard-disks have the same manufacturer (Samsung), the same spindle speed (7200 rpm), the same interface (Serial ATA/300) and even their names are pretty similar (HD103UJ and HE103UJ).
So, is it an error or the prices are right? Well, the prices are right. The difference between these two hard drives is the MTBF (mean time between failures).
This means the HE103UJ is part of the SpinPoint F1 RAID Class series, which are primarily created for the Enterprise market area, while the HD103UJ is part of the Desktop class. The hard-disks from the Enterprise class have a much longer lifetime than the usual hard-drives. More precisely, they have a MTBF of 1.2 million hours (actually, POH, which means Power-On Hours). This means that, in theory, such a HDD can run for 1.2 million hours without any problem. With 1.2 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high-capacity drive.
Because of the much higher MTBF, such a HDD of the Enterprise class is very important in some specific fields, such as web servers, where the reliability is much more important than the price.
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