Best way to manage hard drive wear & tear

[alberrosidus]

I've got a fairly large DVD collection that I'm trying to back up.
What is the best way to keep my hard drives working as long as possible?
The way I see it, there are two alternatives:

1) Back up a dvd. Wipe the files (I use Norton's Wipe Info function). Back up the next dvd (using the same folder for temporary files). Wipe again....

2) Back up a dvd. Delete the files. Back up the next dvd (using the same folder for temporary files). Wipe again....when my HD starts seeming too full defrag and start over.

I'm not that computer savvy so maybe my conception of this problem is based on a misunderstanding of the workings of HDs. If so please tell me.

If I use option 1, will I be continually writing and wiping from the same physical section of the HD over and over again, thus likely wearing down that portion of my HD a lot faster than the rest?
If that's the case, would option 2 spread out the wear across a greater portion of the HD?

Thanks in advance.

[alberrosidus]

bump

[jm1647]

I usually rip to the same partition of 1 of my HDDs and have done a lot of backups and not had any problems. I have also recently installed a new additional HDD and it failed in the first month of use.

[katzdvd]

Hmmm... Others on here may think differently, but I kind of agree with jm; I have beat my drives to death over the years writing to the same areas, but I have never had a HD failure. I have my drives partitioned, so the same section on the HD is sure getting a lot of write/rewrites!

In theory, may not be the best thing to do, but as I said, I haven't had one fail me yet. I would say that heat would be more of an issue. Keep things running cool. A family member has gone thru a couple of drives, but he lives in a city apt. w/ no AC, & runs the pc 24/7 thru the hottest days of summer. He also has had other component failures as well, probably heat related.

My house is nice, cool AC in the summer at usually no more than 70°

Just my .02

regards, katz

[Chewy]

keep a large free area to rip to, clean it often

when transcoding/encoding ripped files, out put to another physical hard drive on a seperate cable

[jm1647]

Like Chewy and katzdvd said....I keep a 10GB partirion to rip to, I shrink to a different HDD and keep the drives cool. I have HDDs stacked 3 high about 3/8" apart and have a 80mm fan blowing on them. The other 2HDD are across from the PSU and the PSU fan pulls air across them.

[NightTran]

or you can keep a whole drive for ripping