Dead hard disks in Japan
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Following on from the recent survey on dirty Japanese DVDs (which for some reason got great click-through rates from Japan Probe and News on Japan), this time let’s look at a survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research into the matter of faults with devices with internal hard disk drives. Note that despite the headline, this survey covers any problem with devices with hard disks, not just the disk drives themselves.
Demographics
Between the 5th and 8th of February 2008 1,092 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.9% of the sample was male, 17.8% in their teens, 19.4% in their twenties, 15.8% in their thirties, 16.9% in their forties, 18.3% in their fifties, and 11.8% aged sixty or older.
I’ve had a hard disk in my PC die once, but luckily I managed to salvage about 90% of the critical information, and since then I’ve been slightly better at performing backups, although with a mere CD-R, backing up a one gigabyte SD card’s-worth of photos is a bit of a pain.
Research results
From the full sample, 1,022 people, or 93.6%, had devices with an internal hard disk, and of them 951 people owned a home computer with such a disk drive. The following question was asked to these 1,022 who owned devices with hard disks.
Q1: Have you ever had an owned device with an internal hard disk die on you? (Sample size=1,022)
| Yes | 37.0% |
| No | 56.1% |
| Don’t know | 7.0% |
Of those 378 who had experienced a fault, 362 of them had encountered a problem with a computer. They were asked the following question
Q2: How long after buying the computer did the hard disk develop a fault? (Sample size=362, multiple answer)
| Votes | Percentage | |
| Within a week | 6 | 1.7% |
| Within a month | 10 | 2.8% |
| Within three months | 7 | 1.9% |
| Within six months | 12 | 3.3% |
| Within a year | 34 | 9.4% |
| Within two years | 59 | 16.3% |
| Within three years | 68 | 18.8% |
| Within five years | 83 | 22.9% |
| After five years | 33 | 3.6% |
| Never had a problem | 50 | 2.5% |
Note that in the above question 50 people had a problem with a component other than the hard disk. This all seems a bit confused to me…
Now, when asked what they did when the device broke, 27.2% just bought a replacement, then 26.5% sent the device back to the manufacturer for repair and 22.0% sent it back to the shop they bought it from for repair. In total, 169 people sent the device for repair. These 169 were asked the following question.
Q3: What happened regarding the data on the dead internal hard disk? (Sample size=169)
| All was recovered | 21.3% |
| Most was recovered | 8.3% |
| Most was lost | 8.9% |
| All was lost | 59.8% |
| Don’t know | 1.8% |
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