My laptop's in the shop again having suffered hard disk failure, and it's ocurred to me this is the third one in under 3 years. I've been looking at how long they're supposed to last and not really managed a proper answer (6 months - 3 years) so I'm wondering if anyone out there can reccomend one that's going to last me. It's not like it gets dropped or banged or used in a really dusty environment, it's that I never switch it off...

In which case it sounds as though your power settings arent turning off the hard drive, or its overheating.

I've had many a make of hard drive over the years, after the first one failed (after 2 years) I fitted the rest with a cooler as looking at the temps they were very high, no failures since (just replaced with bigger etc.), some were 4 or 5 years old before I swapped them out.
Just swapped to SSD last month for my Win7 drive (no moving parts), expensive at the moment though

How warm should they be, and is there anything in windows that will tell me?

crystal disk info
clicky

What make drives have you tried? i tend to stick with WD drives these days. only ever been let down once, but i believe that to be down to the crappy onboard raid controller i was using on my motherboard, as i split the raid, and used them as jbod, and everything was ok with no apparent drive errors. Also would keep away from WD scorpio blue drives for laptops as they seem to have some head parking issues which can make some of your apps unresponsive until the drive spins up again

You're not in the habit of moving your laptop a lot while it's up and running, are you? They don't like even mild shocks while the heads are over the spinning disk.

One lappie I had would apparently survive 30 - 40G when turned off (according to the manual) but only 1G when the disk was running - which is very little. Rough handling while performing disk actions can cause damage.

Keeping them running is best for them, assuming that they don't get too hot. We've got 1000's of hard drives to look after at the day job and we try not to power them off as the failure rate is so high once they're powered back on.

Heat also makes a huge difference. In systems where the hard drive is in the direct path of the air flow the drives will last twice as long if not more than systems where the disks are stuck in a corner somewhere.

Chris

Make sure you switch off the head park function on WD hard disks, they park the heads automatically after 8 seconds of inactivity and apparantly this can use up your quota of head parks quite quickly. There's an update on the WD website to adjust the time from 8 seconds. Obviously parking the head saves energy so the green lobby are happy but only because they ignore the fact that then you might need to buy a totally new HD after a few months!!

No idea which it is, it comes with the laptop and gets replaced under the insurance. I'm miffed that I've lost everything, again... I've got most backed up anyway it's just the stuff I was using at the time...