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Hard drives seem to have a useful life of @ 2+ years. If you have separate hard drives, it would seem easier to replace or upgrade. If a partitioned drive goes bad, you lose all of the partitions, right? Seems a higher risk
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depends on the drive. My dad still has a system using a 420 MB Western Digital from 1993 that is working perfectly after 10+ years of almost daily use.
And yes if a drive fails, all data will be lost. Excellent cause to invest in a DVD burner (or Zip drive or any of the other backup methods that all have their own respective merits and weaknesses) that can back up that entire 40 GB drive with relatively few disks. Particurlaly when you use DVD -/+ RW discs that function as huge floppies if need be.
One of the cardinal rules of computing applies here - always assume your media, no matter what condition, vendor, age, etc. will fail and plan accordingly by saving any vital information in a seperate and ideally entirely different location in case of fire or any other kind of catastrophe happening