How long does a HD last?

That's pretty much a how long is a piece of string question...

It depends on the technology, the way it's built, the heat, the amount of accesses the amount of time spun up...

I did see a white paper on it once that showed around the 5 year mark drives started to fail - they failed within the first 9 months or after about 4.5 years. Between those points they were more reliable.

However that was enterprise drives in enterprise circumstances. Hard drive warranties are not on the way up, they're on the way down if anything, and I've heard people worried about the green drives as they're made as cheap as possible, additionally they park their heads which could cause wear...

Maybe I could give a more helpful response if you could put your question in context?
 
One of our old pc's at work I think had around 80k hrs on the drives, 10 years old and pretty much run 24/7.
 
kirkster said:
...double half its length... ;)

I've had a pair of WD500AAKS in use every day for four or five hours since 2007. Still going strong with no errors.
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That's consistent with the white paper. If I remember correctly failure rates were not high. I think something like 80% survived 5 years. I don't remember the figures exactly though, and I've previously spent a few minutes trying to find it without success.
 
The Halk said:
That's consistent with the white paper. If I remember correctly failure rates were not high. I think something like 80% survived 5 years. I don't remember the figures exactly though, and I've previously spent a few minutes trying to find it without success.
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Indeed.
I might steer away from putting them in RAID 0 though ;)

However, I am going to rebuild that particular machine and will make a RAID 1 array out of that pair of disks.

Astounding that something so complex and fragile can last so long at that price point.
 
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