Hard drive longevity

At what point do you begin thinking about replacing a hard drive?

I have a WD 160 gig that has been in the system now for about 3 years. It still is humming along at this point, yet lately I've been thinking I might want a fresh one. (No guarantees of course.)

Your thoughts?

I had a Maxtor 120GB 5400RPM (got it 4.5 years ago) that worked perfectly for three years. I gave it to my friend, and it started "clicking" early this year. He doesn't seem to have the guts to just buy a new one, though.

I, personally, have never had a hard drive fail on me. I have purchased six, three are currently in my machine, and one is in a USB2.0 enclosure.

I often see 5 years as the design life of most hard drive components. So long as you're regularly backing up your data I wouldn't be overly concerned using a 3 year old hard drive.

Do you have SMART monitoring enabled for the drive in your BIOS? It is pretty good at determining when the drive will fail due to normal age related issues. As long as you follow a set backup procedure and are in no danger of loosing any critical data, then I would say let her go until she drops dead.

I have had quite a few Drives fail, and its never pretty.
Most of them were ran 24/7 though, as is the case with my computer.

I trust Hard Drives more than any other media, but that doesnt mean I trust them. lol

I have been running a 30GB WD drive as my system drive for at least 5 years, seems fine so far.
I have a 250GB Seagate SATA data drive, that is about a year old,
it mirrors to an external 200GB Seagate drive.

I recently filled the 250GB drive,
so, I took a HUGE leap just yesterday, and ordered an $1100 Raid box with 2 500GB drives to start me out.
I will add another 2 500GB drives to is shortly after.
Giving me 1.2 Terabytes of redundant RAID storage.
That means at any time, one of the 4 drives can fail,
all I have to do is replace the failed drive, and the RAID array will rebuild the data on that drive.
No data loss what so ever, as long as only one drive fails at a time.
This is a fairly safe setup, but it costs.

So, do I trust Hard Drives?
more than most other medias,
but I also want them backed up, mirrored, or some sort of redundancy.

The best thing you can do on a low budget,
is what I was doing, get a second drive, and only use it to mirror the main data drive.
That way it sees less use, and its not likely that it and the main data drive will fail at once.

~John

wow, hmm my 8gig HD was used for 8 years and fired right up the other day when i went to pull files from it. still running fine.

The 486 500meg HD I ran for ~5 years?

I'll see how long this 80gig goes now...

Every HD i've had the newer it is, the more quiet it is.. Nice thing!

Do you trust online storage?

I've had about 3-4 drives fail on me at home (work is another story ), but as long as you keep backups you're fine. Drives in my experience are rated anywhere between 4-7 years lifespan, some go longer, some go for a week!

I recently replaced my home drives with a nice Raid 5 with 4x250GB Western Digitals. Got them at Best Buy for $100 each, good price considering the same drive is now $150+.

I do suggest getting a nice external usb or firewire hard drive for backup / storage purposes, very handy to have around.

Or if you're feeling rich get yourself a TeraStation...

I slapped an ebay 6gig 2.5" notebook hd in an external USB case. I'm using that and a second HD inside my PC for backup. I jus back up my files I create and my programs that I cant download anymore or find online. The external one you can put in a firesafe box or take with you if your house was on fire and no way you coudl save it or carry your pc...

I do NOT trust online storage.
Maybe as a backup, for certain files,
but it wouldnt be good for GBs of data, and its not all that reliable.
I have had a few photos come up missing from my site, hosts can be hacked, etc.

I looked in to the Terastations also.
They are definitely the best bang for your buck, as far as $ per GB of Raid5.
But, you get what you pay for.

They are easy to setup and use.
And should be reliable, seeing how they can be set to RAID 5.
The main complaint I read about them was their slow speeds.
I think that is due to them being Software RAID.

The Teraststion sure would have been more in my budget,
but I went all out, and bought an Infrant ReadyNAS Nv.
http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS NV

Infrant invented their own type of RAID, RAID X
The best part about RAID X, is there is no need to format the RAID Array,
You can start out with 2 drive, and it automatically mirrors the drive,
add a 3rd drive, and reboot it, it automatically sets up RAID X on it, and your space doubles. (3 x 100GB drives = 100GB of actual redundant RAID storage space)
Later on, you can add a 4th drive, and your space triples. (4 x 100GB drives = 300GB)
Just like RAID 5, one drive is used for parity.

Then after you have all 4 100GB drives in, later on down the road, you can actually replace those drives with larger drives.
Just replace one drive at a time, and the system re-allocated the space.
Most other RAID 5 systems can do this, at least not as easy.

The Infrant also has a TON of other added administration features,
and has a great built in backup utility.
The USB ports are also compatible with just about any USB device, including hubs.
The Terastation only sees Printers and External Hard Drives. (and no, those external USB drives can NOT be part of the RAID 5 array)

But, all this comes at a price,
the 1TB Terastation will run you about $600
The Infrant ReadyNAS NV cost me $609...... with no drives.

~John

When backing up too, it's best to have 2 forms of backup. At least I try to. Because if something very bad happens (fire) and then your portable backup decides to go out... where are you now?

In addition to the extra internal HD, and the external usb one, I burn cds/dvd's every once and a while just for extra protection. The external/dvd/cd stuff isn't as current as the 2nd hd inside the pc, but if there is an important update, i take the time to update it.

My PC as 2 IDE HD's. both 40gig, one for back up, one for temp space and scratch disk for photoshop. My main HD is SATA 80 gig 7200rpm.

I had never had a Hard Drive fail on me till a few months ago. And I lost everything. I have since already had another drive begin showing signs of weakness. I have now lost any and all trust in HDDs. I will always have a backup drive with a copy of everything. As soon as I update my computer, I will go with a RAID MoBo to mirror everything to another internal HDD along with a external for the heck of it. I may even go as far as to stick the external drive into a fireproof box of some sort. I have seen people do it, so I might as well. I will never let it happen to me again...It was a horrible feeling. Still is.

-Cameron

My small company bought 5 new computers just over 5 years ago, each with 2 hard drives. Within 3 years almost all of the drives had failed, and this was with the drives that our supplier had the best luck with, not what he got the best deal on.

My computer at home is roughly the same age, and I was getting worried about the age of its drive so I recently put new drives in it. Since I don't trust hard drives, I put 2 drives in it so I can more easily backup.

So the short answer is that I would personally be more suspect of a drive more than 2 years old, and real suspect of a drive older than that.

I've been fooling with hard drives for a long time, and several brands had achieved pretty high quality. Unfortunately the high competition in drives for desktop machines drove them out of the market. As I understand it, the SCSI drives intended for server applications may still be higher quality, but you won't go down to OfficeDepot and buy a 250G SCSI for $80.

WD was my 500meg 486hd. I heard they went down in quailty after that, and my PII 8gig was IBM. Now my 80gig is WD, and I heard they are doing good again. Hopefully it will last. It's a nice drive. fast and quiet.

Is there any corrolation between size and relaiblity? Like would a 80gig last better than a 250gig, or a 8gig better than a 40 gig?

I used to buy drives with lifetime waranties, but they don't make those anymore. I'm not sure I want a 20mb drive replaced anyway.

This thread is a timely one for me. I just finished "fixing" two Maxtor 160 gb drives that failed in my TIVO after power failures. I'd assumed the drive heads crashed in the power outrage. It turns out that the heads were fine, but the sectors were scribbled as the power levels dropped while the drives were still valiantly trying to write. It destroyed the low level formatting of the sectors, and the TIVO reboots if it sees too many IDE errors.

A combination of the Maxblast utilty (from maxtor) and the maxllf.exe lowl-level format utility brought both drives back to usable condition.


I expect a drive to last at least 3 years IF the computer is well ventilated, has a UPS to keep the power clean and it's not abused. I don't replace them unless they show signs of trouble. Signs of trouble includes clicking noises, bearing whine or read/write errors.

I have a pair of 7 year old 4 gig IBM drives in my workstation.

On the other hand, I see laptop disks that tend to die after only a few years. I have 3 bad 1.5 inch drives in my cabinet. They die for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the lack of ventilation in the disk drive bay.

One disk attribute that is often overlooked is the start/stop cycle rating. The disks are only rated to start and stop a certain number of times. Some power saver modes can spin down your disk many times each hour. That's probably part of what kills my laptops so soon.

Like the others said, a good backup scheme is a very good idea. I back up music and pictures to DVD occasionally, and back my personaly data to tape every night (an autochanger is really neat).

Daniel

I see most all drives make it to 3 years. I see 85% make it to 5 years.

Several mfgs made some drives a few years back with only 1 year warranties. Total crap across the board. Most failed within 18 months.

Keep the drive COOL. This seems to help a good bit.

SMART has only notified me twice of impending failure. I hold little to no stock in it.


When I say all this, keep in mind what I do for a living. I'm in and out of small/large offices all day, in a variety of industries, and a variety of environments.

yeah on my new 80gig, I put it in the rack where it had air all around it. top and bottom.

However, my HD runs hotter than my CPU!! Temperature inside the case right now is 36C, and the CPU is at 32C. So you know the HD is even hotter than 36C!!! (the reason for this is fresh outside air is ducted right into the cpu fan.)

I used to do computer forensics before I retired. Over the years I had many drives fail. The biggest failures I had were all 80 Gig drives. Both Maxtor and Western Digital. It got so bad our taskforce would not buy any of the 80's. Other than them the only failed drives I came across were from bad guy computers. I think if a drive is over 4 years old it may be worth replacing since huge drives are dirt cheap now. And if you don't back up your data you are crazy.

I would trust google to keep my files.

greenlight said:

Do you trust online storage?

Click to expand...

My Dell is coming up to 3 years old now ..... so thanks to all of you for making me paranoid !!

I'm gonna order a back-up drive tomorrow !

I keep my PC in an enclosed cupboard underneath my desk with the door taken off - always seems to have the fan running and is quite warm in there ...... is this asking for trouble ??

Is it better to keep a PC on 247 - or better to turn it off every night ??

Is there any Online storage place which would keep about 500Gb safe and secure at a minimal cost ??