Article: How long do hard drives actually last?

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. Notably, this data reflects spindle disk hard-drives, which utilize mechanical components. Platters that spin and heads that move. Solid-state drives will almost certainly last longer, which are basically bigger versions of the thumb-drives everyone is familiar with. Prices on SSD's continue to drop and in (my guess) about 2-4 years they will be the standard when you buy a new desktop or laptop.

The take-away from this article is the same advice that has been given for years by IT staff. Backup your data, and backup your backup. What this data really shows is the timeline for when you need to start replacing your internal and external (backup) drives to ensure you don't suffer ill-effects from data loss.

Backup software that I would recommend is below. It will automatically synchronize to your external HDD or file-server, so that as files on your local machine are changed, your backup is updated. This ensures you don't lose any data in the event of a disk-failure on your local machine.

_http://www.allwaysync.com/
 
I lost one H/D last year after 3 years. When I searched on internet, the answer I got is 3+ years is a good time for H/D. So got a new one. H/D needs some maintenance like defragmentation etc to run smoothly.
 
Mechanical drive failure also depends on other factors, like how much the drive is being used: server environment, or desktop PC? And if desktop use, then are you blasting it with data over and over like for video editing, or just doing web surfing and word processing?

Also, that whole power saving scheme where your OS turns your hard drive on and off all the time is not a very good idea if you want the drive to last a long time.

Finally, heat plays a big role. Your ultra-thin-and-light laptop may look cool, but does the case get a bit too warm? If it does, then your drive's life will be shortened. Same for desktops. This is why if your desktop puter has an air filter, you'll want to keep it clean. And if you have one of those lovely uber-thin desktops (iMac or all-in-one), your hard drive will not last as long. Even if a hard drive only uses usually about 9W maximum, if there is no air circulation around it, it will get HOT. This is bad.

It's generally a good idea to upgrade to a bigger, newer harddrive every couple of years, anyway. For mechanical drives, the data density per platter increases each year, so whereas before your 1TB drive had 3 platters, now it might only have 1. That means less power usage, less heat, a much quieter drive, and often faster reads/writes (the curious can search for "areal density" for more info).

In short, keep backups, and don't wait until your drive dies. 3 years of normal use is the magic number (from experience, not the article).
 
seek10 said:
I lost one H/D last year after 3 years. When I searched on internet, the answer I got is 3+ years is a good time for H/D. So got a new one. H/D needs some maintenance like defragmentation etc to run smoothly.

If you have Windows Vista or higher, it defrags the drive automatically when the puter is on, but not in use. Ark has experimented with every other defrag program known to humankind, and the conclusion was: not much difference. Some are certainly faster at defragging, though!
 
ignis.intimus said:
Solid-state drives will almost certainly last longer, which are basically bigger versions of the thumb-drives everyone is familiar with. Prices on SSD's continue to drop and in (my guess) about 2-4 years they will be the standard when you buy a new desktop or laptop.

While that's all true in theory, SSDs are also a much newer technology, so they haven't had nearly as many years (decades, even) to refine the manufacturing process for them. There's also the question of how well they wear with usage and time, as they do have a maximum write/erase cycle for their storage blocks (wear) and it's hard to say how they'll last over time, even if not being used (a HDD left sitting for a year, for example, may not spin up when you next power it on). RAM, a similar technology, still fails at various points in its life and can stop functioning over time without use. I've seen an SSD fail after a few months usage (and I've only owned a couple or few), but I've rarely had any drive failures during my time with traditional platter hard drives. Not enough extended usage for statistics, at least not on my own part, but SSDs will still fail and I think that failure rate currently is at least as high as HDDs, and my bet would be that it's still higher than HDDs and will be until the technology becomes still more refined (if this society is around for long enough to continue refining the tech) than it currently is.

Ultimately, none of our high tech storage is designed to last for any extended period of time whatsoever and, being rather technically specific, would be almost certainly completely unusable in the future even if it did last, as future humans would have to find a way to interface with it and read it. And just think of how hard it is today to still read a 3.5" floppy disk.
 
ignis.intimus said:
Solid-state drives will almost certainly last longer, which are basically bigger versions of the thumb-drives everyone is familiar with.
Not really. All solid-state disk (SSD) data storage drives use flash memory, which has a limit to the number of times it can be read and written. An SSD drive will eventually fail, and might not last as long as a high quality hard disk drive (HDD). Important data on an SSD drive must be backed up regularly.
 
Hard drive quality and longevity have been declining for several years due to fierce competition in the HDD market and manufacturers' fears of market saturation leading to planned obsolescence. It looks like hard drives are being engineered to fail after their warranties expire, and the warranty periods are shorter now, at least for consumer quality drives. On the other hand, HDDs are now ridiculously cheap.

Older server quality hard drives are quite reliable. I have several 10GB Quantum SCSI HDDs that I got for $5 each at Free Geek about 10 years ago that are still running strong without any errors detected. (SCSI is old technology now, controllers are getting harder to find, and SCSI cable are tempermental, so I don't recommend that anyone else do this, but these older drives have been extremely reliable.)

Except in very active server duty, most of the 'wear and tear' on hard drives is driven by startup, so I keep my systems running 24/7/365 insofar as possible. At times they run for months without reboots. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I haven't had a hard drive fail in over 10 years. I still run backups, however.
 
griffin said:
All solid-state disk (SSD) data storage drives use flash memory, which has a limit to the number of times it can be read and written.

I've never heard about SSD drives having any read limitations. All of the documentation I have read talks about a limitation on write/erase cycles. High-end drive makers like Intel claim you can get upwards of 100,000 write cycles on each NAND block. Plus many of the SSD controllers will spread out the writes across different NANDs, so on a large drive the data write lifetime is higher than some might think. Architecturally, there is a big difference between flash drives (EEPROM) and the new SSD drives.

Back in 2008 the product manager for Intel stated their, at the time, new SSD drive offering the X25-M was being designed for a margin of 100k write cycles across every single NAND block.

_http://blog.laptopmag.com/intel-product-manager-talks-ssds

So if you look at the NAND, the NAND we use has 100,000 cycles at the actual block level of the M series Flash. At the system level though, you don’t necessarily need that kind of flash endurance per block and the reason for that is if you have the architecture which Intel has which is 10 channel architecture and the availability of the multiple NAND packages and die, you’re able to spread across the writes and therefore you do not need that NAND endurance that is required at the block level on a single flash device. So essentially, at a system level, we’re able to have a five year useful life if you assume — let’s say an average user uses 4 to 5GB a day, but we’ve design the product to accept a margin of 100GB per day for five years and still not really run out the flash so the cycling endurance is important

100GB worth of data writes is incredibly high for a typical user situation.
 
Mr. Scott said:
seek10 said:
I lost one H/D last year after 3 years. When I searched on internet, the answer I got is 3+ years is a good time for H/D. So got a new one. H/D needs some maintenance like defragmentation etc to run smoothly.

If you have Windows Vista or higher, it defrags the drive automatically when the puter is on, but not in use. Ark has experimented with every other defrag program known to humankind, and the conclusion was: not much difference. Some are certainly faster at defragging, though!
I don't remember seeing much automatic defragmentation on my vista machine, though I remember postponing deframent no. of times. It looks Vista by default defrags on sunday 4 AM. Thank you for information of defragmentation softwares limitations. Thanks to tempation to buy little hard disk, I had some backups. I remember, old Hard disks used to last for a long time, probably we are not saving too much either at that time. This thread is a good reminder to backup.
 
I use several 2T drives for active & backups. Each SATA drives
takes a maximum of 15 partitions; 3 primaries and one primary
logical partition further sub-divided into 11 secondary logical partitions.

This allows for multiboot drives so if one drive goes kaplooey, get
a new drive, partition it with the same structure, manually "mirror"
each partition of the backup drive to the newer backup drive, swap
out the bad drive with the oldest backup drive, and the new backup
drive becomes the USB external backup drive.

It may be overkill, but it works for me! ;)
 
seek10 said:
Mr. Scott said:
seek10 said:
using two
I lost one H/D last year after 3 years. When I searched on internet, the answer I got is 3+ years is a good time for H/D. So got a new one. H/D needs some maintenance like defragmentation etc to run smoothly.

If you have Windows Vista or higher, it defrags the drive automatically when the puter is on, but not in use. Ark has experimented with every other defrag program known to humankind, and the conclusion was: not much difference. Some are certainly faster at defragging, though!

I don't remember seeing much automatic defragmentation on my vista machine, though I remember postponing deframent no. of times. It looks Vista by default defrags on sunday 4 AM. Thank you for information of defragmentation softwares limitations. Thanks to tempation to buy little hard disk, I had some backups. I remember, old Hard disks used to last for a long time, probably we are not saving too much either at that time. This thread is a good reminder to backup.

I'm running Windows 7 and wasn't aware of this, so I went to check it out. I found that one can schedule this activity according to needs which I did and thereby changed the preset values accordingly. Thank you both for pointing this out. I did already defrag daily manually using two different programs for that activity but an automated extra safety net doesn't hurt anybody I think.

As for the longevity of HD's internal or external, my experience indicates a mixed bag: the older ones I used lasted for about six years but one of the newer ones in my current laptop crashed big time within a month or so and had to be replaced (free of charge under warranty but it still took three weeks before I had it back).

Luckily I had all data backed up elsewhere because due to other failures previously, I already had learned that lesson the hard way.

First activity after installing or downloading whatever is important to you: make a new backup again of the whole lot as soon as possible since you never know when a crash may hit you. Don't postpone or procrastinate, ever!

Hope this helps a bit. :)
 
ignis.intimus said:
Interesting article, thanks for sharing. Notably, this data reflects spindle disk hard-drives, which utilize mechanical components. Platters that spin and heads that move. Solid-state drives will almost certainly last longer, which are basically bigger versions of the thumb-drives everyone is familiar with. Prices on SSD's continue to drop and in (my guess) about 2-4 years they will be the standard when you buy a new desktop or laptop.

The take-away from this article is the same advice that has been given for years by IT staff. Backup your data, and backup your backup. What this data really shows is the timeline for when you need to start replacing your internal and external (backup) drives to ensure you don't suffer ill-effects from data loss.

Backup software that I would recommend is below. It will automatically synchronize to your external HDD or file-server, so that as files on your local machine are changed, your backup is updated. This ensures you don't lose any data in the event of a disk-failure on your local machine.

_http://www.allwaysync.com/

I just installed allwaysync. Thanks ignis.intimus.

I use an external, portable drive for backups, but an additional online backup is a must in case of theft or fire. The more redundancy the better. I'll look for a free or cheap online backup.
 
I've been told by a Novell certified network administrator (or something like that) that hard drives that are refurbished after failing are more reliable than hard drives new from the factory, and that the article in the first post is "BS". Most of the failures are early failures. Most of them can be refurbished, and the failed sectors quarantined, and they will be extremely reliable from then on (until motor wear after over 6 years). He blames most of the corruption on hardware errors from sudden shutdowns and unreliable computer speed settings (most business computers are set to below spec for reliability) causing RAM corruption before the data is written to the disk.

The trick is that the refurbishing has to be very thorough, and there are few programs that can do this. He recommended SpinRite:

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Some drives are pushed to high speed and so are constantly correcting errors on the fly (Barracuda). These will be less reliable after refurb than tamer product lines designed for high reliability. I understand that hard drives should be mounted level, or else the lubrication may be uneven causing sooner motor failure.
 
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