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re: IRS computers crashed 10 days after House committee sent letter asking...
Posted on 6/23/14 at 4:21 pm to wfeliciana
Posted on 6/23/14 at 4:21 pm to wfeliciana
quote:
Huge federal agencies, their business practices and budget implementations can't be compare to private companies
They don't have to be. This is a discussion about hardware and data retention policy. When you work for the government, they don't hand you special drives you don't see commonly used in the public sector. They are the same you and I use at home.
Hard drives have a median lifespan of about 6 years. Some last longer. Some fall well short of that. New equipment is purchased so there is sure to be a mixture of newer and older systems as time goes on. What I never see..........what I have never even heard of, is 8 drives irreparably crashing from a select few within the same time period. It defies the law of averages and logic.
2
Posted on 6/23/14 at 4:46 pm to McChowder
quote:
Hard drives have a median lifespan of about 6 years.
I've seen the Backblaze article too and there are some problems with it in this scenario.
1. Those drives were used 24/7 as part of a server environment.
2. Their data only goes for 4 years, the 5th and 6th years are estimates based on the previous 4 years.
From my personal experience with regular business users, hard drives crashing are a rare bird. Even more rare is it when the crash is so severe that data can't be recovered by specialists. With our 600-700 users, it's not uncommon for hard drives to last the entire time we have the computer (we try to rotate them out every 5 years, but often the budget ends up having us extend it to 7 years and sometimes up to 10).
Posted on 6/23/14 at 4:59 pm to McChowder
quote:
They don't have to be. This is a discussion about hardware and data retention policy. When you work for the government, they don't hand you special drives you don't see commonly used in the public sector. They are the same you and I use at home.
It seems I wasn't clear in expressing what I meant to convey. No they are not special drives, but they aren't usually as good as you and I have at home. Lower end Dells or worse that are often maxed out in capacity and used for 3 or 4 years and used more than my home laptop or PC. Couple that with ridiculous security software and being part of a system that has problems. Top that off with the fact that some agencies have people using "2nd hand" computers, e.g. those replaced by better machines by one section may be the replacement for a computer that can't be fixed (economically). As I said my experience is you can't compare to private/business users/equipment/business practices. Now, 6 crashing in one office, that is very strange, if true.
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