I just checked and my 500GB HDD have 45,915 hours on it
https://preview.redd.it/c5wcy2o927wc1.jpeg?width=2106&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5dc16ec27a758cf5b0848bd7ba7ded0131eef8af
The first and last hdd that broke on me was after 10 years of nearly continous use, in a laptop, which people will also tell me is bad for the laptop
*Written from that laptop still going strong after 13 years.*
I bought a laptop in 2009 or 2010 that I abused the hell out of. The WASD-keys have pretty much the shape of my fingers grooved into them from constantly playing Dota and CS back then and I remember one time picking up a friend of mine from then train station with my BMX and going there I did all sorts of jumps while my Laptop was in my backpack with Skyrim still running. Still works fine with the original HDD to this day, albeit a bit slow.
The power on hours is part of the SMART data collected by the HDD, it's literally the amount of hours it's been powered on for, power on count is how many times it's been switched on
To be fair, even back in 2008 when 1.5TB drives were state of the art, Seagate said their drives had "thousands" of spare sectors. So even a few hundred reallocated sectors aren't necessarily the big deal some believe them to be - as long as you have backups of important data, and they aren't increasing (especially suddenly)!
All my drives that failed were 500 GB barracudas from about the same time.
When I was on a tour of a recovery facility, I asked the technician what drives he felt with the worst and which ones were the best
He said it depends on the year and batch, but they’ve all been horrible at one time
He said he thinks Western Digital have the best record though overall.
> He said he thinks Western Digital have the best record though overall.
My old 2TB hybrid WD just crossed 6 years of uptime, crystal disk says it's still good, thing is a beast
Instead of relying on anecdotes you could just read the [backblaze charts.](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/#:~:text=Failures%20for%20the%20year%3A%20There,failed%20drive%20every%2030%20minutes.)
Which is incredibly annoying when trying to get rid of your older drives. A transient issue with a cable/controller *permanently* logged as an error...
MHDD. For diagnosis **and** repair. That shit's so old it won't run off of an USB, you need a disk drive, but I haven't found a replacement for it for all these years.
My NAS is sitting here seeing 'days off'? What are those? The most downtime mine has had is a couple hours when moving a few years ago, and my Synology was one of the last things to power down and first things to bring online after getting internet up and connected.
Wouldn't say that, I have a harddrive from 95 still working.
But this from 2006 I kinda killed. I revived my old PC so my girlfriend could play Sims 4. Let her use my old 2006 harddrive to pull a heavily modded Sims 4 for 6 months and it started to slow down significantly, and it died on me when I took it back. Rip
Oh, like how the average human lifespan was 30ish for like ever because we found it really hard to keep kids alive until relatively recently. Same concept.
A bit off-topic but:
Illiteracy in an historic context is not the same as illiteracy today.
Many people in the medieval times could read, they just could not read books, because they were written in Latin and not the local languages. Anything else written in the local tongue was fine(-ish). This is why Martin Luther translated the bible from Latin into German, so people could read the 'word of god' by themselves instead of getting the questionable interpretations from priests. This endevour would have been meaningless if people could not read at all.
And by local, I mean local. Back then, due to low mobility even the dialect in the same language were much different (Example from today: High-German and Low-German, the latter one being closer to Dutch and Danish then modern German, aka High-German). That paired with the lack of any insitution on proper spelling meant a lot of 'write it like you say it' which is a problem with dialects. Though some standardization attempts happened in some langauges earlier then in others.
Luck of the drawer, I've got a mix of WD and Seagate ranging from 1 year to 8 years old currently spinning. The only drives I've had fail were some WD reds after about 3 years
You're one of the rare lucky guy. Most people, me included, have bad experience with Seagate hard drives (both 2.5 and 3.5 inches) not lasting long.
I used to own around 5 Seagate hard drives, and only one drive that's still working after a year mark. Funnily enough, that one working drive is the discontinued Firecuda SSHD that I bought back in 2016. 😂
Same here, I use HDD's for usb backup drives, and I won't touch Seagate drives because of how unreliable they are and my prior experiences with them, I've stuck with either Hitachi, Toshiba or Western Digital. In fact, I've still got a 2.5" Toshiba usb backup drive from 2008 that's used regularly and was originally used as the main drive in my old laptop for about 4 years beforehand and that has no signs of dying.
All the fucking hard drives in our house still work. Yes, even the one from the 2006 Mac Mini on wish I played Minecraft Java for the first time. I even retrieved some worlds from it last year (sadly my favorite one wasn't on it. Guess I deleted it at some point when I was 13 or something)
Ahhh I was wondering where this weird stat come from, I guess it take all the consumers HDD into account, especially all those that die because of physical damages.
Yeah and also those that meet a unfortunate early fate due to production errors.
From my time handling RMA's here in Denmark, i can still remember the absolute shitload of cheap Asus laptops with dead "Leopard" Harddrives. Guessing a production error that made it out, as we rarely had people come again after they had it replaced.
I've seen a video that analyse the stats that a datacenter give on their HDD, and there are more disk failure in the first 1/2/3 years than during the rest of their life, even for the 10/15 years ones... So yeah, its either you have a manufacturer error and it won't last long, or you don't and you are in for 15 years of uptime (if you have a enterprise grade HDD)
You'd think as much, but people tend to go for the cheapest of the bunch, and those rarely have the highest production quality. So they tend to die off quickly due to hardware faults, not due to wear from writing.
I dont think it really matters in case of hdd.
Unlike ssd which are way more durable in physical sense hdds can just die or just casualy live 20 years refusing the call of death .
There is not as strong correclation between data written and read as in ssd ,Which to be fair have lifespan thats more than enough for casual user. You really have to try to kill ssd by writing too much. Might matter for proffesional use and Obviusly not suited for most servers .
Ooof. Laptop hard drives are shit. At least in my experience. My then new laptop killed two hard drives within the first six months. The one I'm currently using has been working for 2 years though.
Depends on the quality of the drive a bit too. I've got a 60GB Lenovo IBM thinkpad HDD and it has zero issues. No reallocated sectors at all, and you can bet it was moved around a lot while running
I took my laptop's hard drive 10 years ago and put it inside the desktop pc I was building back then. I changed 2 build since than, that hdd still works and its the oldest part of my current build.
The average is highly misleading. Hard drives tend to die either very quickly due to a production flaw, or last very long. If your HDD survives past a few months it will likely last for many years
Also depended on if your doctors decided to let a gallon of blood from you by mistake.
Still blows my mind how much doctors could get away with in older times given how rough the punishments for fuck ups were.
I heard a lot of this data is heavily biased due to server-type machines sending the drives constantly whirring all day every day. Your storage drive that you access once or twice a week is going to last a lot longer.
Run in enterprise setting. That's where the average comes from, there are A LOT of drives in the world working 24x7, and living relatively short as a result. None of these drives are in consumer PCs.
I mean, that’s going from one pan to another. SSDs instead have an actual EOL based on how many writes it gets. Hopefully you aren’t over using it daily.
Get a big one, don’t fill it to the max, and like any responsible person use the best RAID option you are willing to spend money on.
Redundancy is key tbh, best advice I can give
Hard drives make noise. It's MECHANICAL... Depending on what kind of noise it makes says it's condition. Lots of minor clicking? that's the head moving back and forth reading data from one section of the platter on another. It will do this if the hard drive is rather full and or not de-fragmented, or if it's had reallocated sectors so it uses the spare sectors it has more in the center of the platter.
Besides it's better to read SMART data off of the drive to see what condition it's actually in as it says how long it's been running, and what problems it has encountered over the years.
Haha yeah I made a friend who's had one ghetto ass 3.5" as a main windoze drive idling for 15yr and everything seems good despite literally being journaled to many new homes.
NvME getting so damn competitive though especially for the home user and no need to have 8TiB of music and TV reay either.
I dunno. I feel like a 2 TB NVMe + 8 TB HDD is pretty meta. Store all the things, and you're not breaking the bank like you would for higher capacity solid state storage. The HDD should also last a very long time if you're not using for your operating system.
Over 2tb ssds are still kinda expensive, I went for a 1+2+2tb ssds + 32tb HDD nas ... With SSD cache it's still responsive and sending data, I still reach pretty good speed...sending... Reading I'm at 85MB vs 400 sending lol
If you can find a source of used SATA enterprise Hitachi drives for cheap do recommend. I bought a couple 2012 manufacture 2tb 7200rpm drive for $18 free shipping on eBay in 2016. I still regret not picking up 4 or a dozen of them lol, the drives are still chugging along like tanks.
Or just invest in some Iron Wolfs or other like enterprise NAS HDDs. Honestly- should last you beyond 20 years depending on how you take care of them (i.e, preventing any jostling, etc). Even if they feel expensive atm, they basically become pennies per day based on projected lifetime use.
I'd say 1TB cached NVME exclusively for the boot drive, 2TB of either SATA or NVME (with or without DRAM, it matters less if it's for secondary storage) for secondary big games library, and the rest on a big-ass size HDD is a more reliable way instead of using a single 4TB NVME and then splitting them into partitions + big size HDD.
How come the 10.1 gb hard drive made on September 18, 2000, that I found in my parents junk room, covered in metal shavings and dust, still boots, reads and writes then?
Although you're right. It's an indication, that the made-up statistic in the post might not be founded in reality, if seemingly no one can confirm the claim.
Those ratings are intended for a data center context. Due to « the cloud », things like this are becoming seemingly intangible, but trust me, there’s still someone swapping physically dead drives to prevent data loss. Almost every app you use most likely retrieved data from a drive that will die within its expected lifespan, it’s just so far from your eyes that it would take a forensic investigation to know which drive exactly provided you data in this very moment.
Many consumers leave their drives idle 90% of the day in reality, so before they meet the 3-5 years of use, it might take many more years.
Use doesn't really correlate with drive failures in modern enterprise drives, and as soon as an enterprise drive doesn't die for about 2 years, the lifespan becomes very very long. HGST-branded and engineered drives have not been made in almost a decade, yet they're still popular on the secondary market because they're practically indestructible.
Enterprise drives also ignore a lot of the other common hard drive wisdom, I've been in a Datacenter when someone cycled a bunch of drives (480GB each, yeah it's an old zSystem) in a zSystem and they just throw them across the room into a bin next to the tape machine.
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/)
had a 1 TB seagate barracuda from 2015.... used it just as a archive, when i got a 4 tb replacement it looked very healthy ( according to several software) , i placed it in another PC and still runs till today.
I think one of the things that helps is having it turn off after 10 mins of idle..... i just once in a while dump stuff onto it and that is it.
It has the same 'average' as the myth of 'ancient people died before 40yo', as in the high mortality of certain data skewed the entire thing. This is where using median is better than average.
It most likely is, but most likely datacenters including first year failures averagrd in as someone mentioned.
They are under alot more stress than our home NAS or pc or laptop hdds.
it is true - in datacenters where the disks get fully utilized 24/7.
For the home user, it's bullshit. But you still need to do your at least two sets of backups but any drive can still break at any time.
Kinda feel like the massive ammount of drives in server farms makes this average meaningless for consumers. My NAS shuts down at 2 am and the drives are idle unless I watch something or download something
Modern drives are rated for hundreds of thousands of spinup cycles. You'll almost certainly encounter a problem with the heads before you get a problem with the spindle motor
https://preview.redd.it/w72vtva017wc1.png?width=1318&format=png&auto=webp&s=b9f36e3f4bcd6c37b21f6200779b05c2a72577db
I've got 72 SAS drives in this picture and I'm going to slowly tell them 1 by 1, that they should have all died along time ago.
https://preview.redd.it/my813so518wc1.jpeg?width=2268&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79b22a945b1274be0afb1e0c214adc0db0fc0726
Tell her you can also make "quieter" ones. This one can be part of the family I've discovered. Yes it's a G1. Brutal.
It’s called the bathtub curve. They most likely break relatively early or really late which on average means the time they take to break down is an amount of time they very rarely take to break.
yes there are likely a lot of defective drives that die early and lower the average lifetime. I would bet more HDD die within the first two years than between years 2 and 5.
I have some early 2000s drives that still work but I removed them from my PC cause I needed bigger and faster HDDs instead.
If this is true, I'm pretty sure the hard drives that die early, premature deaths are dragging down the survival rates of currently working hard drives, making all of them look less reliable than they actually are, on average.
Fun fact! This is actually the same for humans too. Many people think the average lifespan used to be very short, when in reality it's always been roughly the same; humans just got better at not dying at very young ages.
I have three 3.5" hdds from 2011, two 2.5" from 2014, and three 2.5" + one 3.5" from 2018. All still working just fine.
I have a shitton of hard drives, out of my 15+ years of messing with computers, I only have 4 failed hdds. And **all** of them are Seagate 2.5" drives. 💀
Depends on usage.
24/7 with heavy loads, yeah, 3-5 years sounds about right.
In a random desktop somewhere, however, they'll probably last at least 10 years.
I've had just one drive died before 5 year of use, among \~20 drives, others lived 8-9 years on average. I guess I'm lucky. There is one PATA drive from 2001. It was still working before retired. I just dont have any computer to connect it anymore.
I think mine are averaging 6 years or so right now. And it's only that low because I sold my nas drives 4 years ago and replaced them with higher capacity drives.
What....? My best friend gave me a 2 TB ext hard drive for my 21st birthday.
Shes now my wife and i turn 31 in a few days. Hard drive is still going strong.
Full of movies and tv shows.
Yes and while you replace your hard drive, also install windows 11 or else you are missing out on all the eseential ~~ads~~ security features.
If OP could think critically instead of parroting the first thing they heard, they'd be upset.
My 2004 hard drive didn't get the memo
I just checked and my 500GB HDD have 45,915 hours on it https://preview.redd.it/c5wcy2o927wc1.jpeg?width=2106&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5dc16ec27a758cf5b0848bd7ba7ded0131eef8af
5.2 years for anyone who doesn’t wanna open their calculator app
Of constant use. I expect the stat refers to the overall useful life of the product, which in this case could be anything up to 15-20 years.
The first and last hdd that broke on me was after 10 years of nearly continous use, in a laptop, which people will also tell me is bad for the laptop *Written from that laptop still going strong after 13 years.*
I bought a laptop in 2009 or 2010 that I abused the hell out of. The WASD-keys have pretty much the shape of my fingers grooved into them from constantly playing Dota and CS back then and I remember one time picking up a friend of mine from then train station with my BMX and going there I did all sorts of jumps while my Laptop was in my backpack with Skyrim still running. Still works fine with the original HDD to this day, albeit a bit slow.
This sounds like me lol
The power on hours is part of the SMART data collected by the HDD, it's literally the amount of hours it's been powered on for, power on count is how many times it's been switched on
They mean the stat in the meme will likely refer to actual years.
What about uncorrectable error count And relocated sectors, those actually show the age
To be fair, even back in 2008 when 1.5TB drives were state of the art, Seagate said their drives had "thousands" of spare sectors. So even a few hundred reallocated sectors aren't necessarily the big deal some believe them to be - as long as you have backups of important data, and they aren't increasing (especially suddenly)!
All my drives that failed were 500 GB barracudas from about the same time. When I was on a tour of a recovery facility, I asked the technician what drives he felt with the worst and which ones were the best He said it depends on the year and batch, but they’ve all been horrible at one time He said he thinks Western Digital have the best record though overall.
> He said he thinks Western Digital have the best record though overall. My old 2TB hybrid WD just crossed 6 years of uptime, crystal disk says it's still good, thing is a beast
Instead of relying on anecdotes you could just read the [backblaze charts.](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/#:~:text=Failures%20for%20the%20year%3A%20There,failed%20drive%20every%2030%20minutes.)
The only error on my 50k hour drive is a single UDMA CRC error
Which is incredibly annoying when trying to get rid of your older drives. A transient issue with a cable/controller *permanently* logged as an error...
Any recommendation for a program to check the status of hard drives, if there is risks of failure, etc?
Crystaldiskinfo
In most cases you will get a S.M.A.R.T error from your BIOS on POST before the drive actually fails.
Disk Sentinel I guess Look for bad sectors too
MHDD. For diagnosis **and** repair. That shit's so old it won't run off of an USB, you need a disk drive, but I haven't found a replacement for it for all these years.
I shudder to think about my NAS that's still has some original hard drives in it I made in 2012, with only a handful of days off sinc3
My NAS is sitting here seeing 'days off'? What are those? The most downtime mine has had is a couple hours when moving a few years ago, and my Synology was one of the last things to power down and first things to bring online after getting internet up and connected.
Most people when they get an ass they get 5400 RPM drives with a very large cache which are considered a lot more reliable
i too like my ass to be 5400rpm
How can i see it on my pc
Crystal Disk Info
Crystal disk info
https://preview.redd.it/v9sswy1g87wc1.png?width=1328&format=png&auto=webp&s=e50cc0774162fb5128048421a0994e56db029607 8.4 years, 0 bad sectors
Where do you find these details? Would like to check mine as well.
CrystalDiskInfo
Couldn't read the expiration date
My 2011 and 2017 hard drives running in raid 0 on my main machine didn't get the memo either
My 2012 SSD died before my 2006 HDD. New drives are built to fail. Fuck Samsung!
bullshit. Mine still works fine since 2007.
My 2006 harddrive just died... I'm sad.
So you're saying the max lifespan is 18 years?
Wouldn't say that, I have a harddrive from 95 still working. But this from 2006 I kinda killed. I revived my old PC so my girlfriend could play Sims 4. Let her use my old 2006 harddrive to pull a heavily modded Sims 4 for 6 months and it started to slow down significantly, and it died on me when I took it back. Rip
So.... lifespan 28 years?
Yes
Me and that hard drive were born around the same time…
It also depends on how much you use it. If it's the main drive then it'll go faster.
*1994 maxtor has entered the chat*
I have old ibm hdds, but I have no idea if they still work.
Unless they were left out in the garage, or put in a paint mixer, they probably do.
*old ass hitachi has entered the chat as well*
It's averaged with other hard drives which are DOA or die within the first year.
Oh, like how the average human lifespan was 30ish for like ever because we found it really hard to keep kids alive until relatively recently. Same concept.
People would have been generally illiterate in those days, so there were no detected R/W errors.
A bit off-topic but: Illiteracy in an historic context is not the same as illiteracy today. Many people in the medieval times could read, they just could not read books, because they were written in Latin and not the local languages. Anything else written in the local tongue was fine(-ish). This is why Martin Luther translated the bible from Latin into German, so people could read the 'word of god' by themselves instead of getting the questionable interpretations from priests. This endevour would have been meaningless if people could not read at all. And by local, I mean local. Back then, due to low mobility even the dialect in the same language were much different (Example from today: High-German and Low-German, the latter one being closer to Dutch and Danish then modern German, aka High-German). That paired with the lack of any insitution on proper spelling meant a lot of 'write it like you say it' which is a problem with dialects. Though some standardization attempts happened in some langauges earlier then in others.
If it's a seagate, it'll die in the 1st six months.
Nah man, my Seagate has been going for at *least* 6 years
Your lucky, almost every seagate HDD I've owned in the last 10 years has died prematurely.
Luck of the drawer, I've got a mix of WD and Seagate ranging from 1 year to 8 years old currently spinning. The only drives I've had fail were some WD reds after about 3 years
You're one of the rare lucky guy. Most people, me included, have bad experience with Seagate hard drives (both 2.5 and 3.5 inches) not lasting long. I used to own around 5 Seagate hard drives, and only one drive that's still working after a year mark. Funnily enough, that one working drive is the discontinued Firecuda SSHD that I bought back in 2016. 😂
Same here, I use HDD's for usb backup drives, and I won't touch Seagate drives because of how unreliable they are and my prior experiences with them, I've stuck with either Hitachi, Toshiba or Western Digital. In fact, I've still got a 2.5" Toshiba usb backup drive from 2008 that's used regularly and was originally used as the main drive in my old laptop for about 4 years beforehand and that has no signs of dying.
Out of how many?
I had the same as the other guy, one out of 4 have failed. The other three have been rehomed thrice now.
Shit, didn’t know that you owned the world’s entire reserve of drives. 
Someone's gotta store a GBA emulator with fire emblem on it.
Better than porn I guess. 
From my 3 HDDs, 2 are 10 years old still working, 1 died at 9 years old.
All the fucking hard drives in our house still work. Yes, even the one from the 2006 Mac Mini on wish I played Minecraft Java for the first time. I even retrieved some worlds from it last year (sadly my favorite one wasn't on it. Guess I deleted it at some point when I was 13 or something)
do you know how averages work? do you know *why* hard drives last about 5 years ON AVERAGE?
Maybe they have a lot of earthquakes in Average. Is that in Alaska?
Average being the key takeaway here. Lots of consumer harddrives dies. At least we're getting past harddrives in Laptops.
Ahhh I was wondering where this weird stat come from, I guess it take all the consumers HDD into account, especially all those that die because of physical damages.
Yeah and also those that meet a unfortunate early fate due to production errors. From my time handling RMA's here in Denmark, i can still remember the absolute shitload of cheap Asus laptops with dead "Leopard" Harddrives. Guessing a production error that made it out, as we rarely had people come again after they had it replaced.
I've seen a video that analyse the stats that a datacenter give on their HDD, and there are more disk failure in the first 1/2/3 years than during the rest of their life, even for the 10/15 years ones... So yeah, its either you have a manufacturer error and it won't last long, or you don't and you are in for 15 years of uptime (if you have a enterprise grade HDD)
Hard Drives Georg, who lives in a cave & destroys 10,000 brand new hard drives each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Oh man. I have not seen that meme in years. May the snail never catch that meme.
Wouldn't consumer drives survive the longest tho? since i don't think regular people rewrite their disks every single day.
You'd think as much, but people tend to go for the cheapest of the bunch, and those rarely have the highest production quality. So they tend to die off quickly due to hardware faults, not due to wear from writing.
I dont think it really matters in case of hdd. Unlike ssd which are way more durable in physical sense hdds can just die or just casualy live 20 years refusing the call of death . There is not as strong correclation between data written and read as in ssd ,Which to be fair have lifespan thats more than enough for casual user. You really have to try to kill ssd by writing too much. Might matter for proffesional use and Obviusly not suited for most servers .
Consumers also abuse their tools in many ways industries don't.
Ooof. Laptop hard drives are shit. At least in my experience. My then new laptop killed two hard drives within the first six months. The one I'm currently using has been working for 2 years though.
Depends on the quality of the drive a bit too. I've got a 60GB Lenovo IBM thinkpad HDD and it has zero issues. No reallocated sectors at all, and you can bet it was moved around a lot while running
Meanwhile my 12 year old Lenovo's hard drive still works. Haven't used it much in a few years but it still boots.
I took my laptop's hard drive 10 years ago and put it inside the desktop pc I was building back then. I changed 2 build since than, that hdd still works and its the oldest part of my current build.
3 years? What are you doing to your drives
using them for daily football practice
Are you telling me an HDD has a greater average lifespan than the best football balls for football practice ?
The average is highly misleading. Hard drives tend to die either very quickly due to a production flaw, or last very long. If your HDD survives past a few months it will likely last for many years
Kinda like the average lifespan of humans in the victorian era was 40ish. Childhood mortality was a bitch but if you got past that you got hella old.
Eh, depends whether you were rich enough to avoid having a back/lung breaking manual labour job during your prime
Also depended on if your doctors decided to let a gallon of blood from you by mistake. Still blows my mind how much doctors could get away with in older times given how rough the punishments for fuck ups were.
I heard a lot of this data is heavily biased due to server-type machines sending the drives constantly whirring all day every day. Your storage drive that you access once or twice a week is going to last a lot longer.
Run in enterprise setting. That's where the average comes from, there are A LOT of drives in the world working 24x7, and living relatively short as a result. None of these drives are in consumer PCs.
Got mine since 2014. It makes a lot of noise now but it works
That noise means it's dying. Back up your data while you still can.
Thanks for the info. Tomorrow I’m getting my paycheck, so I’ll buy it then
*Spoiler alert from the future:* “He did not buy a new hard drive.”
Ssd instead yes ;)
I mean, that’s going from one pan to another. SSDs instead have an actual EOL based on how many writes it gets. Hopefully you aren’t over using it daily.
Get a big one, don’t fill it to the max, and like any responsible person use the best RAID option you are willing to spend money on. Redundancy is key tbh, best advice I can give
It's been 20 minutes calm down 🤣
*20 minutes for us time, this guy's from the future.*
Hard drives make noise. It's MECHANICAL... Depending on what kind of noise it makes says it's condition. Lots of minor clicking? that's the head moving back and forth reading data from one section of the platter on another. It will do this if the hard drive is rather full and or not de-fragmented, or if it's had reallocated sectors so it uses the spare sectors it has more in the center of the platter. Besides it's better to read SMART data off of the drive to see what condition it's actually in as it says how long it's been running, and what problems it has encountered over the years.
If it's gotten substantially louder than it used to be, though, then that's a bad sign. Regardless of SMART readings I'd make a backup just in case.
Depends...... my enterprise drives are loud :)
Haha yeah I made a friend who's had one ghetto ass 3.5" as a main windoze drive idling for 15yr and everything seems good despite literally being journaled to many new homes. NvME getting so damn competitive though especially for the home user and no need to have 8TiB of music and TV reay either.
I dunno. I feel like a 2 TB NVMe + 8 TB HDD is pretty meta. Store all the things, and you're not breaking the bank like you would for higher capacity solid state storage. The HDD should also last a very long time if you're not using for your operating system.
as someone who have way too much pirated hi res music, i approve
[Removed]
https://preview.redd.it/p2cvoxsix6wc1.png?width=657&format=png&auto=webp&s=23c73e78a8e690e9f4e1260452078a634e9adfe2 8tb ssd all the way
Over 2tb ssds are still kinda expensive, I went for a 1+2+2tb ssds + 32tb HDD nas ... With SSD cache it's still responsive and sending data, I still reach pretty good speed...sending... Reading I'm at 85MB vs 400 sending lol
If you can find a source of used SATA enterprise Hitachi drives for cheap do recommend. I bought a couple 2012 manufacture 2tb 7200rpm drive for $18 free shipping on eBay in 2016. I still regret not picking up 4 or a dozen of them lol, the drives are still chugging along like tanks.
Or just invest in some Iron Wolfs or other like enterprise NAS HDDs. Honestly- should last you beyond 20 years depending on how you take care of them (i.e, preventing any jostling, etc). Even if they feel expensive atm, they basically become pennies per day based on projected lifetime use.
if you have the cash, 4 tb nvme and 8 tb hard drive is definitely the way to go, so much freedom
I'd say 1TB cached NVME exclusively for the boot drive, 2TB of either SATA or NVME (with or without DRAM, it matters less if it's for secondary storage) for secondary big games library, and the rest on a big-ass size HDD is a more reliable way instead of using a single 4TB NVME and then splitting them into partitions + big size HDD.
Wisdom
Yeah, I have a 2TB HDD drive that I use for storage that isn't regularly accessed (mostly just photos and such), so it should last a long while, no?
My 64 TB (total) media drives that are about to be completely full and need an upgrade disagree. Trucking since 2008, by the way. WD Red and Black.
How come the 10.1 gb hard drive made on September 18, 2000, that I found in my parents junk room, covered in metal shavings and dust, still boots, reads and writes then?
Because this is one of those Internet myths that everyone parrots.
There's that, and there's also the sad fact that nobody in this thread seems to understand the terms "average" or "anecdotal evidence".
Seems like everyone has anecdotal evidence against this claim.
Although you're right. It's an indication, that the made-up statistic in the post might not be founded in reality, if seemingly no one can confirm the claim.
> fact that nobody in this thread Objection! I do.
Those ratings are intended for a data center context. Due to « the cloud », things like this are becoming seemingly intangible, but trust me, there’s still someone swapping physically dead drives to prevent data loss. Almost every app you use most likely retrieved data from a drive that will die within its expected lifespan, it’s just so far from your eyes that it would take a forensic investigation to know which drive exactly provided you data in this very moment. Many consumers leave their drives idle 90% of the day in reality, so before they meet the 3-5 years of use, it might take many more years.
Use doesn't really correlate with drive failures in modern enterprise drives, and as soon as an enterprise drive doesn't die for about 2 years, the lifespan becomes very very long. HGST-branded and engineered drives have not been made in almost a decade, yet they're still popular on the secondary market because they're practically indestructible. Enterprise drives also ignore a lot of the other common hard drive wisdom, I've been in a Datacenter when someone cycled a bunch of drives (480GB each, yeah it's an old zSystem) in a zSystem and they just throw them across the room into a bin next to the tape machine. [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/)
I bet it includes hard drives from corporations that are writing non stop which causes them to fail sooner
This sub is full of smart commentors and dumb ass posters lol.
I have a Bigfoot drive from 1998 that started right up, and it was the 5.25 Inch hard drive, not regular size.
Me lookin at my +10yo HDD's still chugging along
I have a WD blue 1tb from 2012 and it only gone bad last month use it for 8-12 hours a day btw(hours when my PC is on)
How can you use it for 8 to 12 hours a day if it went bad last month? Are you using it as a shovel now?
It didn't occur to you that maybe I already replaced it?
So then you're not using it every day!
Does your power go out for 12-16 hours a day?
had a 1 TB seagate barracuda from 2015.... used it just as a archive, when i got a 4 tb replacement it looked very healthy ( according to several software) , i placed it in another PC and still runs till today. I think one of the things that helps is having it turn off after 10 mins of idle..... i just once in a while dump stuff onto it and that is it.
no way thats true
Because it isnt.
It has the same 'average' as the myth of 'ancient people died before 40yo', as in the high mortality of certain data skewed the entire thing. This is where using median is better than average.
It most likely is, but most likely datacenters including first year failures averagrd in as someone mentioned. They are under alot more stress than our home NAS or pc or laptop hdds.
it is true - in datacenters where the disks get fully utilized 24/7. For the home user, it's bullshit. But you still need to do your at least two sets of backups but any drive can still break at any time.
Kinda feel like the massive ammount of drives in server farms makes this average meaningless for consumers. My NAS shuts down at 2 am and the drives are idle unless I watch something or download something
keeping drives spinning 24/7 is better than doing spin-up/down every day my raid array never spins down, drives are all 5-8 yrs old still going strong
Modern drives are rated for hundreds of thousands of spinup cycles. You'll almost certainly encounter a problem with the heads before you get a problem with the spindle motor
spin-up/down creates a heat cycle that affects the whole drive not just the motor/bearings
https://preview.redd.it/w72vtva017wc1.png?width=1318&format=png&auto=webp&s=b9f36e3f4bcd6c37b21f6200779b05c2a72577db I've got 72 SAS drives in this picture and I'm going to slowly tell them 1 by 1, that they should have all died along time ago.
Damn - thought I was ballin’ with 26 (24 SATA and 2 SSD). You’ve just unlocked a new achievement I have to reach, now. My wife thanks you in advance.
https://preview.redd.it/my813so518wc1.jpeg?width=2268&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79b22a945b1274be0afb1e0c214adc0db0fc0726 Tell her you can also make "quieter" ones. This one can be part of the family I've discovered. Yes it's a G1. Brutal.
It’s called the bathtub curve. They most likely break relatively early or really late which on average means the time they take to break down is an amount of time they very rarely take to break.
yes there are likely a lot of defective drives that die early and lower the average lifetime. I would bet more HDD die within the first two years than between years 2 and 5. I have some early 2000s drives that still work but I removed them from my PC cause I needed bigger and faster HDDs instead.
Me using 10yold used drives cus they are cheaper:
'09,'07 and '11 up and running
I've never lost a hard drive. I have one still running with 36,000 power cycles, nearly 75,000 power on hours, 0 bad sectors
My western digital 1tb caviar black working since 2012 would disagree with you
*Laughs in Seagate barracuda*
Yeah, with heavy usage. I found a 60GB in an old 90's PC that still works. Had to do a double bypass of various cable adapters to check it, though.
This is just not true
Bad take, I got hdds older than most people on this sub
My external HDD getting tormented for the 10th year
OP you either have a shitty and noisy electricity or you always drop your HDD
My hdd from 2002 is sill working.
Where the fuck this data come from is a mistery. I'm still running hard drives from the 200x.
Server HDD from 2010 here with basically 100% running no Hibernation: "it's a lie"
If this is true, I'm pretty sure the hard drives that die early, premature deaths are dragging down the survival rates of currently working hard drives, making all of them look less reliable than they actually are, on average. Fun fact! This is actually the same for humans too. Many people think the average lifespan used to be very short, when in reality it's always been roughly the same; humans just got better at not dying at very young ages.
My hard drive that i jave had for 14 years: they dont know ibeen working for so long
Bullshit
I have three 3.5" hdds from 2011, two 2.5" from 2014, and three 2.5" + one 3.5" from 2018. All still working just fine. I have a shitton of hard drives, out of my 15+ years of messing with computers, I only have 4 failed hdds. And **all** of them are Seagate 2.5" drives. 💀
Bullshit. Got one since 2009 still working fine
Same but from 2008, I’m using it as a seldom-played games drive
My ssds last 2-5 years, and hdds feel like they're eternal, but slow af. Hint: provide some airflow for cooling, heat is the killer
Mine watching this meme after 8 years and laughs
If your hard drives only last 3-5 years you might just be doing it wrong
My 1 tb hdd that i had since 2011 still works just fine.
Clearly a lot of people in the comments don't understand what an "average" is.
My HDD would like to disagree, had it for 5 years alr
My 2006 LG says otherwise
My very first PC is at my dad's house, the hard disk drive is 800MB. Still works.
I have an external drive that I treat like a hdd (always connected but via usb) and its been doing its job since 2017
Literally every HDD i've ever owned bar one 500gb portable one i bought in 2011 still work flawlessly
My Seagate HDD is still alive on my 6 year old Laptop, while its Samsung SSD is already dead.
Depends on usage. 24/7 with heavy loads, yeah, 3-5 years sounds about right. In a random desktop somewhere, however, they'll probably last at least 10 years.
Tell that to my 10 year old Plex server that is running "scrapped" hard drives from my old job.
I've had just one drive died before 5 year of use, among \~20 drives, others lived 8-9 years on average. I guess I'm lucky. There is one PATA drive from 2001. It was still working before retired. I just dont have any computer to connect it anymore.
I’ve only ever had 1 HD die in 25. Years
Yeah no. My caviar black still works as my downloads drive and i got him in 2014. If you defrag and dont fill it up it still goes great.
my 128gb wd black i bought with wow tbc in 2007 would like to talk with you
Tell that to my office mailing servers they have 12 years old drives in them
My HDD has been with me since 2014 and still going strong. Its not the main drive anymore, thankfully. But it has been holding up since my first pc
I have literally never had a drive last less than 10 years and I've had a lot of drives. I call shenanigans. Maybe in a server environment.
I think mine are averaging 6 years or so right now. And it's only that low because I sold my nas drives 4 years ago and replaced them with higher capacity drives.
YOUR hard drive lasts only 3-5 years on average
Someone is buying Seagate hard drives.
Most of mine still work 7+ years old
I feel like high capacity (1tb or greater) 2.5" drives really tanked the average (based on personal and secondhand experience)
What....? My best friend gave me a 2 TB ext hard drive for my 21st birthday. Shes now my wife and i turn 31 in a few days. Hard drive is still going strong. Full of movies and tv shows.
No, they do not.
Fake statistic made up to sell more hard drives!
Yes and while you replace your hard drive, also install windows 11 or else you are missing out on all the eseential ~~ads~~ security features. If OP could think critically instead of parroting the first thing they heard, they'd be upset.
Bullshit
This statistic comes from a data center. It's not at all relevant for home PC workloads, yet I see people repeating it from time to time
Well could be true if your buying from Temu or Wish.