What's your hard disk life like?

[lansalot]

After getting into some debate in another forum, I wondered what the average life expectancy of the disks of people round here are. Let's see if we can get some figures together.

Edit: hmm, is this poll showing up? It's there when I edit but I don't see it.

 

[airfoil]

no poll visible. I'd say 4 years is the average with an everyday use of about 4 hours.

 

[3chordcharlie]

I've never had one actually die, but i did have one start to make really nasty noises for about a year before i simply replaced it (it's still running in a friend's computer though). My sample is pretty small though - about 10 drives, the oldest ones still in use are about 6 years old (including the noisy one).

 

[lansalot]

My home experience so far has been 3x40gb IBMs (yes, they were all the 'Deathstar's...), one 160gb WD SATA and a 120gb IDE. All in boxes running 24x7.

The IBMs were over a year old (one at 3 weeks under the 3-year warranty - ha!), the 160 was about 8 months and the 120 - can't remember how old that was.

 

[Mark R]

Had 3 fail at home. One at about 3 months, 1 at about 6 months old, and one about 2 years old.

Had one go on a work machine too - thanks to a decent RAID installation, it was just a matter of pulling the old drive out, and sticking the new one in. No reboot, no configuring. As soon as the controller detected the drive it started recovering the array.

As an aside, I've seen some reliability statistics around - not sure quite how accurate they are, but they are consistent with the MTBF numbers published by the manufactuers:

Typical 'desktop' IDE drive: 1.5% risk of failure per year, for 1st 3 years
High-end SCSI drive: 0.5% risk of failure, per year, for 1st 5 years

 

[Fern]

Got one going strong after 10 years or so. A couple have died after 2 years. Used to be I'd trash a box after about 4 yrs, and the HDD was still going strong.

The one thats 10 years old and still going strong was in a decommissioned box that I forgot to throw away. Found it in the attic and put it back to use a couple of years ago.

 

[corkyg]

I have had one confirmed failure of a hard drive in 12 years with an exposure of about 25 of them.
If you take care of them and don't expose them to power hiccups or physical jolts when running, the odds are pretty good for a long life.

BTW, your poll shows just fine.

 

[mad38dog]

i have been using ibm(hitachi) drives since i got started in pc's in 98

right now i have 3 boxes in the house running 24/7 total of 6 drives.
3 in main box, 2 in raid0 with a backup one for important stuff
2 in daughters machine and 1 in son's box all of different kinds (ata and sata) and the only drive i ever had a problem with i bought off of ebay and ran ibm's fitness test on it before i started using it and it failed.
sent it back and received a refurbished one that is working fine.

On another note i have worked on or built other machines that had maxtor drives in them and they always seemed to be much louder than my ibm drives

 

[ChuckHsiao]

I'm using a 6 GB HD that I got in 1998. It's still working fine. I would like to recommend it except I don't know what it is cuz I'm too lazy to open up my computer and check =P

My bro gave me another HD to use a couple years ago, Western Digital, 40 GB, date on the HD is 07 NOV 2002. It burned out on me a couple weeks ago; the power thing is completely dead. This may not be the HD's fault though -- it was really that my power supply went kaput, and took out the HD in the process (but the other one survived). Now I'm looking into how to recover the data on this HD. No idea how.

Chuck Hsiao
Amptron

 

[Baked]

My promise raid card failed once. Haven't had a HD (Maxtor, Seagate, IBM, WD) failure in... forever. Ok, maybe 4 years. But that's one of those IBM GXP75s. The replacement works fine.

 

[stevem326]

I've only owned two computers for my home use. The first one had a 5,400 RPM 40GB Fujitsu hard drive in it that was still going strong after 5 years of use when I decided to buy a new PC. My current PC has a 7,200 Western Digital 120GB drive that's about two years old.

So I guess I'm 2 for 2 when it comes to hard drives

 

[fstime]

I have a 5 year old WD and Maxtor 5400 rpm hard drives.

 

[n yusef]

I had an old 6GB Maxtor fail on me about a month ago. It's so old I can't complain though. My HDD history is perfect prior to that though.

 

[bluestrobe]

I had a 120gb Maxtor die after 1.5 years, a 200gb one die after 8 months. Other than that all the HD's have lived a long time. I had a 5.1GB that I bought in 7/97 live until I sold it 3 months ago, and a few 1.5GB drives that are still going strong on my F@H machines.

 

[ssvegeta1010]

No failed drives for me. My 11 year old one is still running fine.

 

[stevty2889]

The only drives I have had fail were a couple of maxtors and quantom fireballs. None of my seagates or western digitals have failed. I still have some 250mb western digitals from the early 90's that still work fine, even if they don't have much use.

 

[Zugzwang152]

I have 3 drives working properly, all were bought new within the last year. I've had to RMA a drive twice, both were bought used on AT FS/FT and within 3 months came up with RMA codes via the manufacturer drive test utility. The replacements worked wonderfully though, but have since been sold on FS/FT.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Quantum 13.6 GB 5400 RPM. Failed in 1.5 years, bad sectors. Still usable today, but in ancient computer.

Seagate Barracuda... dunno what model but they're ATA66 bought back in 2000 (to replace dead Quantum). It has yet to fail on me. 17.2 GB.

IBM DeathStar 75GXP: Failed 2 weeks into use. RMAed, failed within 6 months and fully died in 9 months (Dec 2001). I RMAed again and only failed in Fall 2004. I passed RMA in July 2004, so that sucks. Oh well.

Hitachi 7K250 160GB: Has yet to fail. Purchased in Aug 2004.

Fujitsu 40GB 4200 RPM Laptop drive: Failed within 5 months. Returned to Dell.

Hitachi 60 GB 5400 RPM Laptop drive: Dell somehow gave me a 20GB upgrade and a speed upgrade too. Idiots. Drive has yet to fail.

I think I'm the worst HD abuser ever. LoL.

 

[Lemodular]

never had a failure in over 10 yrs. 9 personnal drives of different makes. None (of many) failed in the two different offices I worked in.

knock on wood....

 

[IEC]

I must be lucky. Have had several hard drives run for 5+ years, some 24/7.

 

[sparkyclarky]

The only hard drive that I have personally owned which has died was my 30GB Deskstar 75GXP (bought in june of 2000, died 1.5 years later with the usual symptoms). I've seen drives owned by others die, including a laptop hard drive I sold to a buddy who somehow managed to kill it a few days later (either that or it was simply a case of bad timing of death on the drive's part).

 

[imported_Lucifer]

I purchased my Powermac 9600 back in 1997. The stock SCSI hard drive still works great till this day. The stock 18gb HD in my Powermac G4 still works perfect.

The Powermac G4 is my daily use computer. I never turn it off.

 

[jadinolf]

My oldest hard drive was purchased on Nov 5, 1995 and still runs fine.

I have never lost a hard drive.

 

[BFG10K]

My drives are easily over two years old and not one of them has died.

 

[daniel1113]

All of my hard drives have worked fine without failure, including my 5 year old 75GB Deskstar... and THAT'S saying something