How Long Do Hard Drives Last? - Comments Page 2

I know this topic is about HDDs but if any of your readers are using Solid State Drives; there is a FREEware program called TweakSSD (by totalidea.com) that appears to provide some nice tweaks that can be utilized for better performance and longevity of an SSD. There is also a PAYware version which includes TRIM capabilities (but not essential and your SSD may have it included).
Regards, RandiO

When I ran the computer systems at a school many years ago we had over 100 computers and never encountered a hard drive failure. I have been running two drives on my present machine for nearly eight years with regular defragging and backups without trouble. Perhaps I have just been lucky, but as with all mechanical devices problems can occur (my car had a cam belt failure after 25,000 miles)

All my hard drives across the 12 computers I am responsible for are well ventilated and cooled by a adequate fan/s.

I would think that keeping a hard drive cool would be a huge part in determining their longevity.

Jesse

Maybe its my Irish luck, but I only ever had one HDD failure. I have 4 Desktops and 2 laptops. All except one laptop is now over 10 years old. The one failure I had was the oldest computer that failed after 10 years (3 years ago) I run them about 14 hours a day and always turn off at night. Oh, I also had a Maxtor 750 gb ext drive that failed after only 3 years. Having said all this I still backup daily and do image backups bi-weekly.

Having been responsible for several small (15 or less users) networks for the past 10 or so years I have the following to report. I have probably used every name HD out there at one time or another.
I am surprised that they are using CONSUMER class drives instead of ENTERPRISE drives. I have found that for ME (your mileage may vary) the WD RE3 & 4 ENTERPRISE class drives seem to last the longest ON AVERAGE. I have had FAR fewer "duds" in them than ANY other HD I have used. I use the Velociraptor 10k drives for my high end desktop builds. They are FAST but don't seem to last as long as the 7200 drives. I use WindowsSMART on all my machines to help monitor their health.
But HEY,,, that's just ME!!!

Cycling the power on hard drives is one of the main factors affecting life span. When I worked for a large software company, one of my groups maintained the testing labs - about 2500 PCs altogether, ranging in age from new to 5 years old. Those machines were on continuously 24/7 - except for when we had a power outage, of course.

Whenever we had an outage - whether planned or unplanned - i. e., even when the machines went through an orderly shutdown - we could count on having to replace 5 - 10 drives. Every time.

Want to extend the life of your hard drive? Never turn it off.

P. S. I also endorse Steve Gibson's product, SpinDrive. He's one of the few people who understand the fundamentally analog nature of hard drives and puts it to good use in maintaining and recovering the digital information on them.

I believe it all depends on how much it is used. My desktop is getting old but it gets turned on maybe once per week or so, so it doesn't get that much use, even then it was to be used as a shared printer host, now that we using a wireless printer, it is not needed for that function. The printer was messing up, and not recognizing the color cartridge. (It was getting old too.)

Rule of thumb for average use, 3 years.

I think this article did an excellent job of pointing out that there is simply no way to know ahead of time when a drive will fail, and that failures happen all too often.

So many incorrect assumptions about HDDs and SSDs. I'll address a few as a system builder/repairer for almost 20 years:
*The thicker cases of old drives trap heat inside them more so than thinner newer drives. You cannot use case thickness as a measure of construction, nor what is inside them. There is absolutely no advantage to a thicker HDD case, and cooling is much better with a thinner case as heat transfers more easily.
*The amount of time you use a drive is not necessarily directly related to how long they'll last. If your SSD lasts 15 years running 24/7, it may possibly be a consideration. My experience is that some drives run 24/7 for a decade without problems, and some fail after a few months when shut down daily, and visa versa.
*SSDs have as high or higher failure rates as HDDs. Search for any brand and model of SSD and you'll find failures occurring randomly - some right out of the box, some after little time, some after a few years, some heavily used, and some used sparingly.
*As with any electronics or hardware, starting and stopping causes more problems than running steadily. Unless you're a heavy gamer, your hard drive is under the most stress during startup and shutdown of the PC. That's when it generates the most heat and goes through the biggest temperature change. Upon starting, components heat up - which everyone knows will make all components expand. Cooling off causes the same components to contract. The more you stress components in this manner, the more likely a failure at some point. It may still last for decades. Consider yourself lucky if it does.
*Heat is THE most destructive force to any electronic component. Ventilation, cleaning your case fans and cooling fins, and keeping vents open to ensure sufficient air flow are very important for hard drives of any type. Smokers, systems on carpeting, and pet owners need to stay vigilant with case cleaning.
*Manufacturers invented and sold 5400RPM drives for one reason - they generate less heat, thus tend to last longer - in theory. The difference in power consumption from a 15,000, 10,000, 7200, or 5400 RPM drive is hardly noticeable on your electric bill. However the performance takes a serious hit on slower drives.
*Operating systems today tax hard drives much, much more than operating systems of the past. It's more than just luck that hard drives seemed to last longer on Windows 98, or Windows 2000, and even Windows XP. Example: Windows Vista's search feature was constantly thrashing hard drives as it accessed data files for cache and quickly accessing files - and trashed many a hard drive in weeks or months because of it (which was fixed for the most part with SP1). We had countless Vista systems brought in for repair soon after Vista was released - all for hard drive failures or corruption of the drives. The way we use computers today, the way operating systems are constantly adding more bling, and other hardware is evolving, all tax hard drives more today than they used to. So comparing what was and what is, is not a level playing field -even if your habits haven't changed.
*Mechanical hard drives have changed considerably. They used to all be single platen drives. Now most are double or triple platen drives to increase speed - and the internals have been updated accordingly. Even the motors and armatures inside have been upgraded.
*There is a difference between commercial and high performance or RAID drives. That doesn't necessarily mean that a more expensive drive will last longer, but you will get a longer warranty and "chances are better" that it will last longer.
*Defrag does not necessarily cut into the life of your hard drive, and it can make a big impact upon performance. It's very rare that a hard drive is going to fail because of too many reads/writes. It's much more likely that the motor which spins the drive will fail randomly. Many industries have been running commercial hard drives on servers for decades without reaching read/write limitations (servers are much more stressful on a hard drive than defrag and constantly read and write to drives). Defrag is not a stressful task on hard drives either. I would never recommend that someone stopped defragging their hard drive, unless it was an SSD (and only then because it's useless with Flash technology - not because it's using up reads/writes).

I'm not brand loyal when it comes to HDDs. We've had good luck and bad luck with Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, and Maxtor. We tend to go with commercial Seagate drives for customers because they're cheaper. Customers bring in drives from all manufacturers which have failed randomly.

My own system runs 4x Samsung F1 1TB drives (I believe roughly 7 years old now) in RAID 0 for data, and a Corsair Force 3 240GB SSD for the operating system (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit). It has run 24/7 for 4 years now (other than shutting down for upgrades or Windows Updates reboots) without a problem. I use Western Digital Red 2TB drives for movies and my music collection which are connected to my TV and also run 24/7.

I backup my OS with images (Acronis True Image Home 2010) on 2 separate drives, and manually delete old data files and then copy/paste my data to 2 different Seagate drives. My wife prefers Karen's Replicator to backup her data. It's all just user preference, but by all means make sure you have a decent backup system. :)

Ok here goes, Bob you sound like a sellout . . . in that, you are "selling" the idea of the cloud. There's one thing the cloud is organize all your data so everyone that wants has access. Just think how many virus we have all endured. Now we give our info away thru' the cloud. Good luck with that.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Oh no! You caught me -- a greedy sellout. In fact, a consortium of Seven Evil Cloud Service Providers agreed to pay me ONE MILLION DOLLARS for every time I mentioned the word "CLOUD" in this article about the unreliability of hard drives. Let's see... that would be... ONE MILLION... multiplied by... What?? Zero??? I forgot to use the word "CLOUD" even once? Dang it.

Back to reality, what I actually did "sell" was the idea of buying MORE hard drives, more often, and using backup software (on yet another local hard drive). Not sure where you got the idea that I was pushing everyone onto the cloud.

It seems the "Hidden" message here is "Don't rely soley on an external HDD to back up your really important stuff."

A while back I read that the data retention life of a CD R or DVD R is about ten years, after that the dye starts to bleed.

Even Paper is subject to dacay due to its acid content.

So if its really important (Photos/treasured memories etc.) don't just back it up, make multiple copies then check and refresh, often.

The HDD has evolved so much in the last 3 decades... from composite head, to thin film head and to the present GMR head. The interface has evolved from ESDI, to IDE, to PATA and to the current SATA. Even SCSI is now SAS. There are a lot of other evolutions as bit density, track density and data transfer rate increase. These step up the storage capacity and speed of the device and at the same time reduce the physical size. We will always be hungry for more storage space and speed of retrieving data.

The amazing thing is that the evolution of HDD technology has helped HDD survives the on-slaughter of other new storage technology, most notably the flash memory in the form solid state device (SDD). HDD finds its way to coexist with them by having a low cost per gigabyte storage and reasonable speed and reliability. Others like floppy drives are completely replaced by flash memory in the form of thumb drives.

How long HDD will stay, we still do not know. maybe 5 years? The reduction of cost of flash memory storage will continue to be a threat to HDD.

Traditional HDD company like Seagate Technology is not taking any chance. Seagate has made its own SSD to add on to their rotating disk HDD products line up. They call themselves the storage company, instead of HDD company to better alignment its business direction for the future.

Talking about hard disk failure... I find out for myself that even Solid State Device (SSD) has no guarantee it won't fail.

I use an SSD as my primary drive to store the OS and programs in order to enhance speed. After 2 years, it failed and system consistently hung immediately after system booted up. I had to reformat it and painstakingly re-setup windows and programs. It worked fine after that. I guess that some system data, or whatever it is, got corrupted for unknown reason.

Yes, I find out the hard way that even SSD do fail randomly. So backup or make a clone of the system drive, even if it is SSD.