Good analysis of hard drive durability

[nic2k4]

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for


Although their drives were running 24/7 I would think it still applies to drives in a home PC, after all wear is wear. You can keep track of your drive's runtime with something like CrystalDiskInfo.

[Krispy Kritter]

Not exactly. Most failures (and wear) occur during power on. From what I've read, the number of power cycles is more important than operational hours.

[jagabo]

Most failures (and wear) occur during power on.

Of course, nobody has actually studied that.

Google reported some of their drive statistics a few years ago. I'll see if I can find it... Here it is:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.co...k_failures.pdf

[redwudz]

Few new HDDs on newer OSs and motherboards run 24/7. Most of mine shut down if I don't access them every few minutes. That's all about 'power savings'.
Just my opinion, but Backblaze is selling storage. I would probably go with the Google study for quantitative information.


I'm sure many of us have HDDs that have survived many years. And a few have HDDs that died immediately. I've had both.


Really the bottom line is if you have something you can't afford to lose stored on any media: Back it up.

[hello_hello]

I must be on a lucky streak these days, given most of my drives seem to be outliving the "4 years" mentioned in the article. Aside from one drive which died when it was a bit over 5 years old, I've still got a few drives running which must be over 6 years old and often run 24/7.
In fact aside from the one drive which died of natural causes, the only reason I've had a hard drive die in the last 6 years is when I've dropped one. Or the cat decided to stretch out on my desk and knock one off. That one wasn't running at the time so it lasted another 8 months or so (it'd be over 6 years old anyway).

I've still got a couple of 40GB drives in old PCs (they aren't used much) and even a 20GB drive in an old Pentium 3 PC which still gets used daily. Those drives must be fairly ancient.

[deadrats]

personally i have become paranoid over the years and still remember losing all my data when the matrox hdd's i had suffered from the click of death and bought the farm. i also remember the old windows OSes crashing and taking out entire hdd's with them. nowadays i buy new hard drives just about ever couple of years, always going to the next bigger size when it's available. and the stuff i really consider important i have backed up to external drives that are never connected unless i am storing or retrieving something from them.

[johns0]

Hdds are like cars,some last for years and some last for a month or less,it's the luck of the draw on how long your hdd will last,i don't worry it about and do regular image backups.

[Peppino]

I have a Seagate HDD that has my OS and programs on it, that went through a lot of wear since 2008 and it's still working good. On the other hand, I have a another Seagate HDD I bought in 2011 that I had to send back twice for replacement because they both failed. It's like cars, sometimes you get stuck with a lemon. The important thing is, and I learned this the hard way, is to do disk image backups religiously so if disaster strikes, you can restore your data to any hard drive.

[p_l]

Yup, hit or miss. I've recently had a couple of drives fail, an 8-year-old 200GB and a 2-year-old 2TB, one internal and one external. I still have older ones running fine. As just about all of us have learned the hard way, I had any important data backed up many times over in what Scotty used to call redundant systems. I just ordered a couple of 4TB to take their places and copied over the data. Then I drilled several NSA or recycling center scavenger-proof holes through the old ones with a cobalt drill bit. Cause writing to zeros (even if I were able to get any utility to even see the drives anymore) just doesn't satisfy my recently enhanced (and justified) sense of paranoia anymore.

[nic2k4]

I agree with all of you, heck I still have a 40 MB MFM drive kicking around somewhere in the basement, not counting a few < 540 MB and the 30 MB in my PS2 Model 30 (with original IBM 8513 monitor) that still works. The interesting thing about the article is the data, the first 1.5 year will weed out the lemons and after 6 years it's a 50/50 roll of the dice. Obviously, power cycles are important (must be why there's a separate listing for it in S.M.A.R.T.), but I'd be curious to see the total runtime of a failed drive with "excessive power cycles". As always, the lesson here is backup or die.