Question How long should a HDD last?

[mindless1]

MTBF figures are typically in the million or 2 hours range. A million hours is equal to 24/7 operation for 114 years.

Even if you used it for 10-15 years consistently, there's nothing that says it should fail soon. There are 30-40 year old computers that operate without issues.

MTBF only tells you about the infant mortality rate, has nothing to do with lifespan. I'd make a rough estimate that the average consumer HDD used daily (as primary storage, not asleep most of the day) doesn't last 10 years. That's getting harder to generalize about in recent years, since all the kewl kids switched to an SSD to run their OS.

 

[mindless1]

Hmm, just had another drive failure, Hitachi XL External 2TB, bought and deployed 11 years ago, online 24/7 since then. I'd long since stopped using it for storage due to age, but it had really light use back when I did, basically just filled with data and accessed a few times a month for a file or two, the first few years.

No warning on this one, just access failure then no sign of it after a reboot.

 

[igor_kavinski]

No warning on this one, just access failure then no sign of it after a reboot.

What do you do usually with a dead drive? Postmortem or just chuck it in the trash?

 

[mindless1]

If it had the only copy of some data (which neither of my recent failures did), would try w/o the enclosure, but in these cases, I just open the HDD itself, take the magnets out for another use, and put a hole through the platters on a drill press... just because the drill press is sitting right there anyway, and sometimes it's easier to just drill out the cover screws than hunt down whichever miniature screwdriver fits it.

Enclosures... I have a harder time parting with a perfectly good enclosure, but no real point to them now that drives sold in enclosures, are no more expensive than bare drives.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Had any helium drive failures?

 

[mindless1]

^ I'm not aware of any I've had, that were helium filled. I'm typically a bottom feeder, buy one of the top 4 brands based on price per capacity, when I see a great price on one not too far above $100 price point. Capacity per dollar usually seems to taper off under $150 and I have plenty of SATA ports.

 

[sdifox]

A question: I have a 3TB unopened Seagate drive coz I bought it on sale and never needed to use it. It's been 6 or 7 years. Does the platter surface coating degrade or something? What are the chances that the drive won't be able to function normally?

If it is still sealed in static bag it should be fine.

 

[igor_kavinski]

If it is still sealed in static bag it should be fine.

Hmm...makes sense. No oxygen to degrade it.

 

[Charlie98]

I've only had one HDD fail conspicuously, that was a brand new WD Red right out of the box.

I have some HDD's with over 50K hours on them and they are fine, but were retired because of the smaller capacity. Like SSD's, as larger capacity HDD's became available, and as storage needs expanded, a trusty 500GB HDD became a detriment. Now, I don't run anything smaller than 2TB... even my portables are 2TB's...

FWIW, as far as retasking an older HDD... that's fine as long as it makes sense for the PC itself. Trying to retask a too small HDD just to be using it is an exercise in futility, and one that has some serious hours on it even more.

 

[mindless1]

^ 2TB is a pretty low bar though, I've retired HDDs due to age or had them fail, in 3TB and 4TB capacity and I wasn't buying them when that was a "high" capacity, rather it was at the price:capacity break point just before higher cap drives, started disproportionately increasing in price.

I will keep old HDDs going though, just to see what happens when they fail, I mean as a redundant, 3rd+ copy of the data. Currently my oldest still 100% working (AFAIK) drive is a Samsung EcoGreen F2, 1.5TB bought in 2010. It sleeps most of the time, till I sync the data on it with other HDDs.

I bought another Samsung F2 1.5TB in 2010, within a few months of that one, but it failed long enough ago that... I don't remember the year, not in the last 5 years at least, so that's just how unpredictable it is, two of the same make/model and one has only ~60% of the lifespan of the other, if not less with each passing day.

 

[mindless1]

^ These two Samsung F2's were in same system, one above the other in the same, fan-cooled HDD rack... and IIRC until one of them failed, they were same access pattern too, due to being in a raid 1 array... never had any other oddball-capacity, 1.5TB HDDs.

 

[SPBHM]

assume that any SSD/HD is about to fail and keep backup of important files,

I've had HDs fail for no good reason and with a clean SMART more than once,
at the same time my 2 drives on this PC have accumulated a lot of hours and are working OK, one started to give smart errors (pending sectors) 5 years ago or so, but I'm still using it for less important things OK, I just make sure to check file integrity and run chkdsk when needed...

I do have HDs from the 90s that still work, but they don't have a huge amount of hours used.

both are still in used lol

 

[Zoozuu]

nice the gas light is on.

 

[Anhiel]

Depends on how often you use them and lottery. The majority sold to consumers these aren't reliable as in the past especially externals. If you want reliable ones get enterprise editions.
If it's server like usage it becomes risky after a year. I had consumer parts dying right after.
On the other hand my good old Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) drive lasted a decade. But those times are gone now.

 

[igor_kavinski]

On the other hand my good old Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) drive lasted a decade. But those times are gone now.

I used to think HGST was the best but my HGST laptop drive didn't survive about 2 years of Windows 10 + many tabbed browsing. It developed soft sectors that I was able to fix with HDD Regenerator but then a soft sector appeared in the boot partition and that was the end of that HDD in my daily driver laptop.

 

[Anhiel]

I used to think HGST was the best but my HGST laptop drive didn't survive about 2 years

Lottery is one reason but for enterprise HDD, the early production version usually fail more than a production one year later.
There also have been less good models, too, but those are less common.
If you get refurbished ones from Amazon they usually server used ones that are reaching the end of their reliable age.

 

[PingSpike]

I have a 500GB Maxtor (LOL) PATA drive in my unraid server that mostly stays in there as a joke. It was once upon a time my "big data drive". I've been expecting that to die for years now but it keeps on ticking.

I sort of use it as a dumping space drive where stuff I don't really care about goes but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if it outlives some of my newer drives.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I sort of use it as a dumping space drive where stuff I don't really care about goes but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if it outlives some of my newer drives.

Regarding data safety, it should be a law. Maybe it IS a law that I don't know about. The data you care about the most is the most likely to be lost.