How often do you replace hard drives?

iviv · 3 Sep 2018 at 09:30

I was just tidying up my case and noticed that one of my HDDs had a manufacture date of 2009 on it, so it's probably been running in there for a good 7 years at this point. Anything important I already have backed up on the cloud, so if the drive dies I wouldn't lose anything vital, though it would be a pain to replace everything in there.

On the one hand, it makes sense to get a replacement drive now and just copy everything over while it works, but equally it could also go another few years without dying, so it would be a waste to replace it now.

So, how often do you replace working drives? Or do you just work them all to death before replacing?

Thekwango · 3 Sep 2018 at 09:33

iviv said:
work them all to death before replacing

APM · 3 Sep 2018 at 16:29

When they break or show signs of breaking but it's a pain remembering to run health checks on them all regularly.

iviv · 3 Sep 2018 at 16:41

What health checks can you use, and how accurate are they? It always seemed to me that a drive would generally just up and die without much warning.

Armageus · 3 Sep 2018 at 16:42

When my raid controller emails me

Jonnybmac · 3 Sep 2018 at 17:00

Only replaced my hard drives before because motherboards stopped supporting IDE. Then upgraded to SSD because it was faster, then just upgraded my storage drive to a 2TB cause it was cheap and was sick of having 1x 1TB and 3x 250Gb's. So I've removed the 250s and just have a 1TB & 2TB.

Also bought a second SSD that I use for my OS and demoted my previous one to games - both only 256GB.

I've only ever had one HDD die before, so I would provably just run them to the death before i replace, or likely a storage issue where its cheap enough to buy one drive that covers the storage of 3/4 i currently use.

Rroff · 3 Sep 2018 at 17:08

Not very often - I've noticed that in NAS type use, etc. (close together, relatively high usage) general purpose consumer HDDs tend to start throwing up minor errors around 5.7 years oddly quite specific while the same drives in a say gaming PC (light to moderate usage with good airflow) tend to get around 10 years before the same kind of stuff like reallocated sectors starts happening.

Minusorange · 3 Sep 2018 at 20:29

I usually replace when I find a good deal on something

I have a 10+ year old Hitachi Deskstar with 53,618 power on hours (works out to 6.1 years) still living in my rig that I use just for virtual machines because it's old and I don't care if the VM data is lost, it was technically replaced ages (and that replacement replaced too) ago but while it works, why not keep using it ?

iviv · 3 Sep 2018 at 20:49

Well, I just installed crystaldiskinfo. Weirdly my OS SSD has unknown health status, and one of my HDDs just shows no stats whatsoever. It recognises that the drive exists, but health and temp are both unknown. And my primary gaming drive has almost 56k hours, I think that's the 9 year old one now.

David Bisset · 4 Sep 2018 at 08:15

As others have said - when it dies. Predicting death isn't an exact science so why waste money when it may last ages yet?

Glanza · 4 Sep 2018 at 09:39

Till they start showing the signs of failing or I need more space.

Maundie · 4 Sep 2018 at 11:33

Only when either a failure or upgrade is needed

Skorpion · 8 Sep 2018 at 08:02

As above, until they fail

Iron-man · 8 Sep 2018 at 14:04

when they fail or you could be ditching a good drive for nothing