How Long Does a Hard Drive Last?
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Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
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Let's get right to this question.
You had an article about the life of an SSD drives.
Now I have a 15 year old PC
with an ordinary hard drive and it's still working fine.
How long do drives like that usually last?
This is oldtimers stuff.
So yeah, I did talk about the lifespan
of SSDs in a recent article and it was very interesting.
There actually are tools that will tell you what the usage is of your SSD,
and that can sometimes directly relate to what to expect.
What kind of a lifespan to expect out of things.
So I want to talk a little bit about hard
drives because the answer is quite quite different.
As a result, some of the assumptions you might make will end up being different.
Now.
I do need to start out by saying that anything can die at any time.
Literally, any drive can fail for any number of different reasons without
warning, regardless of how long it's been in use.
That's something that you need to always be prepared for.
And of course, the way you're prepared
for that is by having an UpToDate backup, having a backup strategy.
That means that if you lose everything
on your hard drive, you could replace it and recover and get
on without too much data loss, if any, at all.
So that's important.
I don't want any of this discussion of expected life span to dissuade you
from the need for backing up and backing up regularly.
If anything, this is one of those.
What kind of things can you expect discussions?
What kind of investment is your hard drive?
How do you spend money wisely and so forth?
Now it's interesting. Hard drive.
Life expectancy
in my experience is generally years and years and years and years.
There's a cut off what I call infant mortality, right?
You put a drive into use, and if it dies in the first few months or
the first year, we sometimes refer to that as infant mortality.
Once you get past those first few months
of use, drives seem to just keep on going at least the ones that I've used.
I have lots of them.
What generally ends up happening is not that the drive dies again.
Don't get me wrong. It could.
I never want you to think
that that couldn't happen, but in general, my experience is that the machine
containing the drive actually exceeds its usable life span
and then gets decommissioned along with the drive it contains.
In other words, the drive doesn't die
throughout the useful life of the machine containing it.
That's kind of cool, right?
I mean, that's kind of a pretty reasonable expectation.
The other thing that happens, of course,
is that our expectations or our requirements end up growing over time.
And that drive that was really,
really big when we got it just doesn't feel that big anymore.
So we end up replacing it again.
It's a working drive, but we end up replacing it.
Not because it failed,
but because some characteristic of that drive, usually its size or its
speed, no longer measure up to what it is we're trying to do.
So again, my view on hard drive is that the pragmatic life expectancy
of a drive is pretty much as long as you you've got the machine again.
Once you get past what I've called infant
mortality, it's going to last for a really long time.
And it's not something I end up worrying
about at all again, with the exception of it could die at any time.
Right.
I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but the problem is, of course,
the cost of failure when that very, very random failure happens.
If you assume that your drive will never die and you don't back things up, then,
of course, a failure is going to be very, very costly.
You want to be backing up for any number of different reasons.
Now, as I've said in a prior articles, SSDs are different.
They have information on them.
First of all, SSDs wear out
The more you write to them,
they have information that can be taken from the drive that will tell you how much
they've been written to and the manufacturer will throw out.
A guarantee of this can be written to this much.
Again, a guarantee doesn't get your data back.
A guarantee doesn't mean that the drive won't fail.
All guarantee means is that you'll get
your money back, you won't get your data back.
That's why even for SSDs, you want to be backing up your information.
But a hard drive, a magnetic hard drive doesn't wear out in the same way,
and it certainly doesn't wear out, I'll say, as quickly.
Even though SSDs are lasting a really, really long time.
Now, hard drives don't wear out the same
way, and it's not caused by how they're used.
If anything, a hard drive is going to wear out because it's got some moving parts.
An SSD doesn't.
And it's the moving parts that over time, generally over a very long time.
Yeah, they're going to a little bit,
but as I've said, usually generally, that's not something that a casual user.
An average user home user needs to worry about.
Your drive will probably probably last
year machine, but keep backing it up anyway, please
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