I just finished replacing a hard drive in an iMac and what a fun experience that was. I took the dead drive over the the graveyard, a small storage closet, and I counted over 50 dead hard drives I replaced in the past 8 years on servers, desktops and notebooks in my office where we have an average of 10 total heavily used systems. Most failures where attributed to overheating in our high altitude environment. Our office is located in Breckenridge CO at an elevation of almost 10,000 ft.
I was able to get some replaced by manufacturers at no cost but we had to pay for the majority of them.
I have tried all manufacturers and in most cases when a machine is used excessively to process video and or transfer huge amount of data we lose the hard drive in about 1 year.
I have been searching for high altitude hard drives but I have not been able to find any that has specific high altitude design specifications. The interesting observation is that my 3rd generation 30G iPod still works. I dropped my iPod in snow while skiing, I dropped it on rocky hiking trails on the deck and once it dropped and bounced down the cement driveway leaving few nice dents in it.
Next time you decide to take your laptop with you on your ski vacation, seriously, back up your data before traveling or risk loosing your data, especially if you are in the habit of moving your notebook around while it’s turned on.
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