HDDs only lasting 3-5 years? I have never heard of that "consensus". Regular desktop drives should last much longer from my experience.

You have to mentioned how many hours a day you are running it, and how many times it gets started up.

Yeah, I thought it sounded strange too. Yet this is the number I come across when googling. I think it's based on the fact that manufacturers give a 3 or 5 year warranty.

kolderman wrote on 2021-04-21, 08:46:

You have to mentioned how many hours a day you are running it, and how many times it gets started up.

Plus factors like temperature and amount of drives in the same enclosure (vibrations).

kolderman wrote on 2021-04-21, 08:46:

You have to mentioned how many hours a day you are running it, and how many times it gets started up.

Some days a few hours, others no time at all. Varies a lot. If startups put more strain on the disk, I suppose I should turn off power management (DOS) that shuts the disk down at inactivity?

Ok, 3 to 5 years if it is continuous use, perhaps. But that's a very low estimate for general desktop use.

I work in a large university and the expected lifespan of our normal office desktop computer is 5 years (and they come with warranty for that period). We buy many thousands of those computers every year (and have done for the past 20 years), we certainly don't replace thousands of hard drives every year.

I think it's variable depending on so many factors that like capacitors are difficult to say how much they'll last. Also I've seen old 540MB ide disk actually running well after every format but loosing data reading ability increasing at each scandisk but at the same time some 120MB ide disks perfectly functional. So I suppose that like cars it depends on too many factors the previous owner used them, mantained them, how much were used, for which stressing applications etc..

Doornkaat wrote on 2021-04-21, 08:50:

kolderman wrote on 2021-04-21, 08:46:

You have to mentioned how many hours a day you are running it, and how many times it gets started up.

Plus factors like temperature and amount of drives in the same enclosure (vibrations).

Or loud music/ noisy environment ... people slamming on the desk on which the computer is located, or hitting it with their feet under the desk...

Life expectancy of hard drives is a well researched problem.

There is a spike at beginning of their life and they decrease until it gets up again as the drive gets older.

However, with vintage hardware it gets more complicated as these harddrives are unlikely to be used with the same use patters as normal hard drives especially once they became vintage (typically after a longe period of being in storage). But I believe the same rules apply and more you use the drive greater the chance of failure.

I don't believe there is something in the design of old drives that would make them more durable than newer drives.

Somewhere between 1 minute and 50 years. That's why it's a lot less hassle to use a CF adapter and not these unreliable and often overpriced drives.

Backblaze has some actual statistics. Nothing decades old in there though 😁
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

mpe wrote on 2021-04-21, 09:45:

Life expectancy of hard drives is a well researched problem. […]
Show full quote

Life expectancy of hard drives is a well researched problem.

There is a spike at beginning of their life and they decrease until it gets up again as the drive gets older.

However, with vintage hardware it gets more complicated as these harddrives are unlikely to be used with the same use patters as normal hard drives especially once they became vintage (typically after a longe period of being in storage). But I believe the same rules apply and more you use the drive greater the chance of failure.

I don't believe there is something in the design of old drives that would make them more durable than newer drives.

good point about vintage hardware and it's very different use profile. I have some very old hard drives, but they are 'younger' on some ways than many server hard drives installed in the last 12 months if going by constant usage (although they have racked up many switch on / switch off events!)

some older hard drives may have been better made back when these were expensive items to replace, not sure

generally I have found hard drives to be surprisingly robust and these days, thankfully, there are various adapters to allow the use of sd, cf or other ssd should one fail in an old machine

Ancient drives under 1GB I do not own.
But different IDE drives from 1GB to 120GB that have lasted over 20 years.
WD Green 1GB drives in everyday use, that have lasted over 10 years.

I do believe that they will all fail someday, because they have mechanical parts and lubrication. And some Sub 1GB-3.2GB have failed, but other than that, the failure rate is not that high. And thank god, those earlier drives usually do not fail with a click of death, but a first bad sector somewhere or they get noisier.

There is also survivorship bias as many old hard drives that used inferior parts prone to worn out, manufacturing defects, etc. likely already failed years ago. So those surviving ones are almost always the best ones. That's why people might consider old hard drives more durable.

MTBF are some estimates, and spin up and spin down wear out a hdd more than continuous use. Smart info will shed some light on the hours used and the spin ups.

But unless we are responsible for a datafarm, all our experiences are anecdotal at best.

Most of the sub 1GB drives I have still work, but just to be sure, I've had those replaced by flash storage (DoM or CF).

My anecdotal experience with drives from the very early 1990s to today:
- Conner drives are always dead
- 1990s Samsungs are dead, one lost its magnetic field but could be revived by filling it with data multiple times
- Toshiba laptop drives from the 1990s either work or they do not, some get stuck
- Mid 2000s WDs slowly dying from bad sectors
- Did not have Seagates, Maxtor, Hitachi or Quantum drives fail yet

Schule04 wrote on 2021-04-21, 15:03:

- Did not have Seagates, Maxtor, Hitachi or Quantum drives fail yet

No maxtors ? That I find extremely hard to believe. 🤔

Or Seagate for that matter. I have a large stack of dead drives and almost all of them are Seagate.

mpe wrote on 2021-04-21, 12:08:

There is also survivorship bias as many old hard drives that used inferior parts prone to worn out, manufacturing defects, etc. likely already failed years ago. So those surviving ones are almost always the best ones. That's why people might consider old hard drives more durable.

This. I trust my old drives tremendously because they must be the best to have survived this long.

The cream will rise to the top, OHHHHH YEAHHHHH