MTBF of 114 does not necessarily mean a single drive will last 114 years. It is simply the sum of uptime and downtime divided by the number of failures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF

The first problem is that generally to manufacturers MTBF does not include any stats from infant mortality and especially not the end of life figures into their equation. This means if a drive dies in their labs during testing it doesn't count because its less than a year old and obviously they do not have time to test the drives for 100, 10 or even 1 year before the disk stats are calculated.
Since MTBF is mearly a ratio of time the drive is in use to the number of failures excluding those that die prematurely, the question we need to hold manufacturers accountable for are real figures that mean something to customers.

Keep up the good work.

You have to remember that Apple (and Newegg) are not paying retail prices for the hardware. Standard markup is probably on the order of 25 to 50% which reduces the actual wholesale price of the drive to around $150/unit.

>>JD<<

Perhaps it will last longer in an apple manufactured device, due to the difference in file system and way of accessing, not to mention the lower average fragmentation and total accumulated movement of the armature to read a single file. I'd love to buy one, but just can't justify it until I see some solid reliability figures.

Keep in mind that a single ideal year is only 61,320 hours. I'ver never really seen any of the hitachi drives make it past year 5, nor would I risk my data on it. As with all important things, keep a 2nd or 3rd backup.

A little “much ado nothing” … No server class hard disk in Apples Time Capsule. You can find rants about that here (on german) and here (on english).

You don´t really need an enterprise class harddrive in the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule HD s…

Both the Barracuda and the DeskStar have IDENTICAL “Non-recoverable Error Rates” — which is another way of quoting reliability. (1 error per 1 quadrillion bits transferred.) Also, Hitachi claims 50,000 start-stop cycles, which is the same as drives rated 1.2 million hours MTBF. The DeskStar spec sheet also claims that the drive is intended for “network storage servers” and “commercial computing applications.”

By these measures, Steve Jobs clearly was not lying. On the other hand, Hitachi sells a similar drive with a longer warranty under the brand name “UltraStar.”

I agree, when you break down the price, it's still a good deal. But, I do have issues with this. I had a 1TB model on order with Amazon until I cancelled it this evening. I think I'm going to give it a few weeks to see where all this is going. NakedMac (above), has shown that almost any SATA drive will work, so I may purchase the cheaper model, and get my own bona-fide “server-class” drive and put in there. I'm sure the Hitachi is a decent drive with a good warranty, but I want a warranty that i never have to use. I intend to use it back up several Macs in my office and I really don't want any issues at all, and I want to feel confident in my backups.

Also, if you read the comments on the article, an owner of a 500G model found he did indeed have a much better drive than the 1TB model. That's just weird!

I think it's a bit deceptive to advertise the drive as something better than it really is. I love Apple and I've been a loyal fan since 1989 when I got my SE/30. But sometimes they do stuff that just makes me crazy! This is one of those things!

MTBF is not a property of a single drive; it's a measure of how many failures to expect when running a large population of drives to the end of their service life (typically 5 years). With an MTBF of one million hours, about one drive in 25 fails before the end of its service life.

About the “deathstar” comment. Several years ago, Hitachi/IBM briefly had a manufacturing issue that resulted in a large failure rate. Neither that drive, nor this newer drive using the same “deskstar” branding in its desktop configuration were intrinsically unreliable. Manufaturers whose drives are consistently unreliable exit the business fairly rapidly. (Rodime, Micropolis).