Backup!

Having read a story about yet another all singing, all dancing home gadget with oodles of hard-drive storage I'm lead to wonder, "What if the hard-drive crashes?". Now I know some people, especially the sales people, will tell me that hard drive failures hardly ever happen these days, but its also true that drives in the home can be subject to quite a beating. No air conditioned, temperature controlled environment for them. Now they get to sit in hot sweaty appartments inside machines with air intakes covered in pet hair and chassis' subject to regular kicks by swinging feet, not to mention beltings with the vaccuum cleaner once in a while.

Such harsh treatment at home is probably why most hard drives sold for consumer use now only have a one year warranty vs. three or more years for enterprise use. Manufacturers were just taking too much of a hit with returned drives to make a three or more year warantee viable.

So my message to consumre device manufacturers - if you sell me a set top box, home media computer or anything with a hard drive inside it, for heavenes sake give me a way to a) backup my data, and b) replace the hard drive without significant down time and data loss. Can you imagine what happens now to the average Windows Media Center or TV owner when their hard drive fails? They kiss goodbye to hundreds of ripped CDs (we hoped they were ripped and not ripped-off MP3s from Kazaaa etc!) and hundreds of hours of favourite TV shows carefully saved over months if not years. Plus they almost certainly have to return the system to the store or manufacturer to get the drive replaced and OS reinstalled.

Hard drive storage is now so cheap (around $50 for a very respectable 80GB 7200rpm drive) that conusmer appliances should come with hot swappable RAID storage, or support an external or hot swappable spare drive e.g. using eSATA or Firewire (please no extra power cords for it either) that can be used as a boot drive should the main one ever fail. Such things might add $50 to the cost of a system but really, ammortized over the lifetime of the device and considering the impact it will have when the drive eventually fails or requires upgrading - it'll be priceless.