how long on average do hdds last?

PorkPieCat

PorkPieCat

PorkPieCat

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right now i'm waiting on a samsung ssd, but until it gets here i'm using 2 hdds that were pulled out of an old dell, and a newer drive pulled from an old hp. the two seagate 160gb from the dell are 8 years old, the wd (320gb) from the hp is 6 or 7, with my os drive (seagate 160gb) having pulled 20742 hours and 4355 power cycles.

within those 8 years i've treated them fairly roughly, things like throwing them on the bed when cleaning my pc, or clanging them about when putting them back in the pc. in the dell they had no active cooling, and they often rattled the hell out of the entire pc due to having wobbly brackets. according to defraggler, they've got no bad sectors or errors. off the top of my head my family's gone through 11 hard drives in total without any failures, including mp3 players and laptops.

now i'm wondering, how long are hdds supposed to last? are newer drives less reliable? what's your experience with them, and so on.
 
Google did a study on hdd reliability a few years back. After the first 2 years mechanical drives have a failure rate of ~8% per year. Temperature and load have no bearing on life expectancy (until you exceed 5 years). I wouldn't trust an 8 year old drive with any valuable data. I replace mine every 3-4 years.
 
I never had a HDD failure yet in over 11 years in my own PC.

Think my lifespans of my HDD's are 8+ years, 5+ years and 2+ years and 6+ months and all are running nicely without problems.
 
sadbuttrue said:
Google did a study on hdd reliability a few years back. After the first 2 years mechanical drives have a failure rate of ~8% per year. Temperature and load have no bearing on life expectancy (until you exceed 5 years). I wouldn't trust an 8 year old drive with any valuable data. I replace mine every 3-4 years.
Click to expand...

Interesting - do you have a link for that ?
 
PorkPieCat said:
within those 8 years i've treated them fairly roughly, things like throwing them on the bed when cleaning my pc, or clanging them about when putting them back in the pc..
Click to expand...
Hardrives seem to be much much stronger then what many people believe they are...

Think of all the knocking around harddrives has to take in things like laptops , Digital Cameras, ipods, Postage etc...
 
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chaparral said:
Hardrives seem to be much much stronger then what many people believe they are...

Think of all the knocking around harddrives has to take in things like laptops , Digital Cameras, ipods, Postage etc...
Click to expand...

Tossing something onto a bed or a bit of knocking about when you install it isn't going to hurt anything, it's nothing. I do the same with GPU's and such.

In portable devices they frequently park their heads and have sensors to make this happen if there's sudden motion, they're also protected by what they're in. Shake or properly knock a drive which is operating and you'll be lucky not to kill it. A drive in a device might survive a drop but the device probably won't, and the bare drive wouldn't. Just squeeze a bare 2.5" drive or ipod when it's running and you'll kill it.
 
that google study is interesting, thanks for the response guys. i have actually backed up my most sensitive data, and though i feel my hdds could go on a bit longer i'm certainly glad an ssd is on the way
 
My own drives usually last about 6 years. Only had one fail before my usual replacement every 3-4 years, where the oldest of my two harddrives is replaced with a bigger driver than the main drive already installaed. What was the main drive then becomes the secondary drive for another 3-4 years.

If I get an SSD, that will confuse things slightly for me - I'll probably buy a massive drive to replace my existing two, and that big drive will then become the secondary and the SSD will become the primary.

Did any of that make sense? :confused::D
 
lol that made sense. if i could i'd replace all my current drives with a big secondary and use the ssd as my primary, but as it stands i'm going to keep my 3 existing drives as secondaries. will hopefully replace all of them with one big secondary hdd in time.
 
I've only ever had 1 of my hard drives fail on me, my first hard drive that I bought! 20GB Seagate.

That was about 12 years ago. I've probably bought about 30+ hard drives since then.

I still keep 3x backups mind
 
ive had tons of hard drives last ages, still got a 20GB one that was originally part of an 800MHz Duron machine, but ive had a 40GB ibm deskstar which died after about 5 years, and a 1TB western digital which died after 3 months, though WD were great about it, dealt with it directly, replaced within a week all at there postage cost, and the replacement has been running for 2 years now with no problems.
 
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