How Long Will My Hard Drives Really Last?
Dear Lifehacker, I know hard drives can fail, but how long will they really last? Will they last longer if I don’t use them as often?
Best regards, Desire for offspring
Dear disks for posterity! These are good questions, and you’ve asked a lot of them! Basically, you are asking how long different types of hard drives will last under normal or normal use, and then how long they will last without any use at all (for example, stored somewhere in a box). Let’s take a look at each of them. one by one.
Under normal use
Any hard drive actively used is a ticking time bomb. Let’s be honest, it’s not about the hard drive failing, but about when and how lucky you are, putting it off as long as possible. If you are really lucky, it will happen after you upgrade to the new one. If you’re unlucky, it will happen within months or years, and when it does die, we can only hope that you backed up your computer before that happens .
As far as the average lifespan of your computer’s hard drive is concerned, it mainly depends on whether it is a traditional hard drive or an SSD. Here’s a basic breakdown and life expectancy:
- Hard drives : Traditional hard drives (also known as hard drives) that you usually find in desktops and some cheaper laptops often fail earlier because they use moving parts. The average lifespan of a hard drive depends on many factors such as brand, type, size and interface, but on average, you expect it to be around four years . Online backup service Backblaze examined the drives in their infrastructure and found that about 80% of them lived for four years. Of course, this also means that 20% gave up and went out of order earlier, most of them in their third year of use. Likewise, the make of the drive you use matters . Seagate, for example, fails far more frequently than Western Digital or Hitachi drives in Backblaze benchmarks. You can check raw data across all 41,000 drives for more, but in short, keep your data backed up, watch out for SMART alerts, and keep an eye on your hard drive warranty. Most are designed for two to three years, and while your drive may last much longer, be prepared to crash afterwards.
- Solid State Drives : Solid state drives, which have become extremely popular in laptop and desktop PCs due to their faster speed, differ from each other. You can hear people say to be careful with SSDs as they have a limited number of reads and writes. In fact, consumer SSDs do last a very, very long time with normal use. The renowned SSD endurance test TechReport showed us that many of these concerns are exaggerated , and even consumer SSDs were able to survive writing and reading over 700TB of data. These discs usually come with a three to five year warranty, and manufacturers estimate that you will be writing 20-40 GB of data per day. This means that to get that 700 TB, you would need to use 40 GB every day for 17,500 days, or about 50 years. This does not mean that you should mishandle your drive, and it does not mean that the SSD will not fail due to other problems, but if you are worried that your SSD will die due to the fact that you have used too much of it , do not do this.
Of course, these are all average data. Your experience may be different, and you may end up with a great drive that lasts forever, or another that fails after a few days out of the box. This is why it is important to maintain backups of your systems. Beyond that, stick to trusted brands with solid guarantees that won’t make RMAs a nightmare for a drive that dies before its prime.
If you don’t use a hard drive at all
The other side of the coin is cold storage. If you put data on a disk and then, say, toss it in a safe or time capsule, how long will the data last before it gets worse? We’ve touched on this long-term data retention issue a bit in this guide , but if you’re talking about true cold storage – for example, if you don’t want to access it for years, perhaps decades, the numbers change a bit.
Again, things are different depending on whether you are talking about solid state drives or traditional hard drives. Here’s what you need to know:
- Hard Drives : If you’re planning on putting some data on a hard drive and throwing it in a vault or safe, you probably don’t need to worry about the data degrading on its own. Inepisode 11 of TekThing, Patrick Norton spoke to Allin Malventano of PCPer , who said that while your drive is in a climate controlled environment, the only issue to worry about is drying out the oil around the ball bearings. In short, update them every few years – which you should be doing anyway to make additional backups and switch storage methods (which we’ll come back to a little later). If your environment isn’t climate controlled, well … just make sure it’s climate controlled. A time capsule in the ground with a hard drive likely won’t survive to be dug up and read.
- Solid State Drives : Solid state drives for archival purposes are difficult to identify. SSDs are still a relatively new technology, especially when compared to magnetic media (which most companies still use for archived backups), so there isn’t much serious research into their long-term survivability in cold storage. We have the idea that solid state drives can last for a long time under voltage, but even solid state drive technology is evolving (future consumer SSDs will most likely be PCI interface, just for speed gains, like corporate SSDs for a while). and things could change again in a few years. In theory, however, assuming a climate controlled environment, the only thing you have to worry about is the slow degradation of data in the cells of the NAND drive, but this is a process that takes decades, and possibly more.
In short, if you store your hard drive offline and in a box – if it is in good condition, you will have other problems to worry about long before any data degradation on the drive is possible. Maybe you could keep them for decades, maybe longer, and then start them up and they’ll work just as well as the last power outage, and the data is right there for you to read.
More important factor: interface technology
All this talk about mechanical or physical storage life is great, but it misses the most important, most important point: technology advances fast and your hard drive could be out of date before it dies … After all, it was not so long ago that the hard disk interface standard was IDE, then SATA, then SATA II and III. When it comes to external media, long before USB 3 and Thunderbolt came along, we used parallel and serial connections. You may still be able to use some of these old drives, but many newer computers won’t be able to connect to them, so you’ll need to find the same old technology (or working converters and adapters) to get it back.
This isn’t all that important for normal hard drive use, but if you’re talking about serious long-term storage for future generations, it’s worth considering. If you think you can put some precious photos on a 1TB USB drive, put it in a safe in the bank, and give it to your kids with instructions on how to open it when you pass away, this is a gamble that (depending on whether as old, of course) by the time they get to the point where they see what’s on them, any USB devices will remain. Think about it: If someone handed you a ZIP disk today and told you that there was something important to you, how would you get to that data? Your best bet is to diversify storage methods , update data and disk formats every few years, and keep more than one type of backups whenever possible.
In any case, the physical life of your hard drive is one thing, but the practical useful life is quite another. Hopefully we’ve reached out to both of you here and you can rest assured that your discs will probably last you for a while. However, make sure you back up your data!
Regards, Lifehacker