How long do disk drives last?
blog.backblaze.com
How long do disk drives last?
1–10 of 162 posts
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#2Do they plan on sharing any data on which vendors and models have the highest failure rates?
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#3Damn, my last two harddrives have failed in around 3 years exactly. Did I have bad luck or am I being too mean to them?
My computer is on mostly all the time and is often reading files throughout the night (for slow uploads for example). Does it make a difference how often you read/write a drive or only the spun-up time? One died suddenly without any warning in the SMART data and the other got badblocks and started to struggle reading data.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#4Here's Google's 2007 survey.
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#5Backblaze may not know because they are "a company that keeps more than 25,000 disk drives spinning all the time". After 3-5 years, you'd better have a back-up of a drive you choose to spin down. Every drive I've lost (in the last 10-15 years and ignoring two failed controllers subject to a close lightning strike) failed to start back up when I had powered the machine off for maintenance.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#6One pure storage disk I use has been alive with top S.M.A.R.T. values for over 8 years now. The one with more regular reads & writes is 5 years old now. And while I have local backups I'm now finally in the progress of uploading 800GB of (semi-) important data to backblaze. I'll probably be done in another month.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#7Not long.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#8Damn, my last two harddrives have failed in around 3 years exactly. Did I have bad luck or am I being too mean to them? My computer is on mostly all the time and is often reading files throughout the night (for slow uploads for example). Does it make a difference how often you read/write a drive or only the spun-up time? One died suddenly without any warning in the SMART data and the other got badblocks and started t…
Well, it's hard to say as two is not really an adequate sample size.
The article actually makes this point (about anecdote), but their data suggests that failure rates do rise substantially after three years.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#9It depends on the warranty period of the drive. Your hard drive manufacturer knows precisely how long the drive will last and sets their warranty period to expire right before your drive gives up the ghost.
Re: How long do disk drives last?
#10I wonder how many will die before they age out of usefulness. If you're still spinning 250Gb hard disks which are using the same power and space that a 4Tb drive could be using - it might not actually be economically sensible to keep running them.
Certainly the old 9.1Gb SCSI disks that were so popular 10 years ago are well past be justifiable to give power to now.