How long is your hard drive likely to last?

Access

Interesting article on lifehacker...

http://lifehacker.com/how-long-your-hard-drive-is-likely-to-last-1462918832

bonzodog2

Google did a similar study http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdf

riclad

depends on how much its used ,
on a consumer pc, i have seen drives that are 8 years old, pentium 4 pcs,
Mainly used for webbrowsing. FB ,youtube.

gerryk

I have a MicroVAX from the mid 80s. Still has the original hard drive, and it ran for pretty much 20 years, continuously.

Overheal

I also recall hearing somewhere in the last month, that memory stored on an HDD typically only has a shelf life of about 10 years.

That would have to be assumed to be about 10 years of cold storage, before the magnetic storage degrades. And would have to rely on operations like a disk defrag to refresh the drive contents

riclad

IF you have important data ,
you should have it backed up on 3 drives ,not in the same room.
a drive can fail or lose data any time,
maybe due to a problem with the pc, power supply, lightning during a thunder storm ,or other reasons.
LEAVE at least 5gig free space on a drive at all times ,if the drive is drive c in a pc .for temp files ,cacheing data .

i read drives used on servers , internet use on average fail after 3 years .
AS they may be used 24/7

coylemj

Overheal wrote: »

I also recall hearing somewhere in the last month, that memory stored on an HDD typically only has a shelf life of about 10 years.

That would have to be assumed to be about 10 years of cold storage, before the magnetic storage degrades. And would have to rely on operations like a disk defrag to refresh the drive contents

You couldn't rely on a defrag to refresh all of the data blocks on the HDD. A lot of program libraries containing stable or legacy programs which never got updated by s/w fixes & updates wouldn't need to be moved in a defrag. The only way to be sure of keeping the data intact would be a full backup & restore.

coylemj

riclad wrote: »

i read drives used on servers , internet use on average fail after 3 years .
AS they may be used 24/7

That's a bit too much of a generalisation. Statistically, if drives failed 'on average' after three years, there would be a significant number failing in the first year which does not happen.

Almost all drives on servers are spinning 24 x 7, some are built to be more robust than others. SATA drives are cheaper because they don't promise the same performance and robustness as SCSI or Fibre Channel (FC) drives.

You can also get a bad batch of disks which a few months after they leave the factory can starting suddenly failing all over the place, happened with a batch used in IBM AS/400s many years ago.

Rew

Your more likely to lose your primary and backup due to the same incident due to them being ins the same place (flood/fire/theft) then primary and backup drives failing together. Off site your backups and test them regularly. If you don't test them you don't know that your backup process is valid and working. RAID is not a backup its a convince of not having to restore your backup if a drive fails.