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MTBF – Meaure of Reliability
January 10th, 2009
Mean-Time-Between-Failure or MTBF is a term used to describe the reliability of the parts of a computer system from a technical standpoint describing reliability and is measured in hours. The higher this number the more reliable a computer part is. with respect to hard disk drives, particularly IDE drives this denotes the number of hours before it fails or parts of the electronics, motors and bearings can last without any failure. This is an older measure used by the computing industry when hard drives were still quite steeply priced with the best ones reserved fro use on servers and other high demand uses. Ide has long been replaced by the SATA standard which eliminates the thick IDE cable that blocks airflow within a computer’s casing preventing proper cooling.
The newer SATA drive uses four wires for the connections along with the four wires for the power supply making a better drive that can run cooler and faster. 7200 drives used to be a select speed reserved for servers using the SCSI standard but today this number is standard among all SATA drives. There are still some IDE drives in use which is testament to the long improvement in technology and materials making these hard drives last longer and more reliable than ever.