HDD life expectancy

[KIA]

I've never found SMART to be very useful. Usually when you've got a drive you know is failing even the manufacturer's own diagnostic will report the SMART data as okay. Run a full scan and all the bad sectors are detected.

No harm in monitoring it if you want to, but I wouldn't trust it. I'd rather rely on regular backups of anything important and occasionally running the manufacturer's full diagnostic.

Temperature and pending sector information is very useful.

Why are four of my drives running hotter than the others? Fan failure?
Why is one of the drives in my RAID array racking up a large number of pending sectors, is it time to change the drive?

Hard Disk Sentinel can schedule self-tests.

 

[Devrij]

One thing I've found with SSD is that when they die they just disappear. HDD tend to die a bit slower with bad sectors popping up. You get a bit of a warning. That said, I only ever had issues with OCZ drives which is no longer an issue as they are no more.

 

[zophiel]

one of my crucial drives died within 7 months. It just disappeared. Was sent off for repair but its a dead controller

 

[rene.agac]

I think it also depends on brand quite a lot. There were some Maxtor drives around 10 years ago that were cheaper than already established Seagate or WD and mine died within a year. Seagate that I used for 5 years as system drive and then another 5 for photos/movies is still in my system today running fine. My PC over the last 10 years had average use about 6+ hrs a day.

Same goes for SSD. Had Corsair that was built on OCZ tech and died in 2Years. Now Crucial 3rd year running and absolutely no signs of trouble or slow downs.

I would also expect standard drives like yours or WD green will last longer than high performance one like WD Black but I have no evidence to support it. In theory they should produce less heat and run cooler.