Damn!!

Yea, verily. 114 Years? How much????

...never looked so good...
;-)

MTBF is NOT an indicator of how long a device will last. Hard drives have a MTBF of 1.5 million hours, and they don't last anywhere near 200 years. It's an engineering statistical reference, NOT a prediction of life. Look it up on Wikipedia. And shame on the authro for not knowing that!

TWO huge questions MUST be answered before I get excited and reach for the plastic...

1.) What are the read and write speeds vs. a 2 1/2" 7200 rpm hard drive?

2.) How much?

Sounds like $1300 to me.

Now that capacities are approaching what traditional hard drives offer, these are going to start taking off. Yes, the price is still high, but it's dropping pretty quickly. Within a year or 2, traditional hard drives will become a thing of the past.

Why your hard drive doesn't last 150 years.

(There are about 8700 hours in a year, but to make this example simple, let's call it 10,000.)

Here's how MTBF works: it's an aggregate of many units based on expected life of a single unit.

Let's say you have a hard drive that is warranted to last 3 years, or 30,000 hours.

You put it in a server, and behold, it lasts 3 years. You take it out and put in a new one, and that also lasts 3 years. So you replace it with a new one, and that too.... well, you get it.

Let's say you keep doing that and finally, on the 50th unit, only two years into it's life, it breaks.

You now have 3 years or 30,000 hours per unit, times 50 units = 1,500,000.

And that's your MTBF.

So anyone who says "Wow! MTBF of 1.5 million hours! that mean this thing will last (1.5M / 10000) 150 years!" -clearly- doesn't know what they're talking about.

(MTBF is more complex than my example, including "infant mortality" and "wear out" phases; "theoretical" vs "operational" MTBF and so on, but the gist of what's here is correct.)

There have been a number of studies that have thoroughly debunked the ridiculous (for what are basically mechanical devices) MTBF claim for hard drives. The most widely reported ones were done on a large universe of servers, running 24/7. Actual unit failures occurred at a rate of 1.5 to 5% PER MONTH. That's not a real issue in the server world, where redundant RAID arrays are commonly used; there's no loss of data when a drive fails, and the sysop is notified of the failure and has to install a replacement drive. It's a MAJOR problem in most other applications, especially embedded ones!