I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
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I have a 250GB external Seagate that is nearing 20 years old. Even made it through a house fire. Still works just fine.
I still have a working HDD from the first PC I ever built back in the mid 90’s.
I still have old IDE drives (with the ribbon cables) that still work. I still plug them in on occasion to check the data on them because they hold a copy of very old cold storage data, and even though that’s not the only copy of that particular data, as long as the drive still works and I have a means of accessing it, I’ll still use it to store copies of data. The oldest drive I have is a western digital 4GB drive.
I have some ancient Samsung spinpoints that still run…
HDDs usually die with a U pattern - they either die very quickly, or after a very, very long time. There’s plenty of working decades-old HDDs.
so if it doesnt die within the first year it will probably last close to a decade?
does desktop HDD last longer than laptops?
40mb wd had drive in an amiga 1200, still works fine… must say its not had much use in recent years. Think it was bought in 1993
2TB WD Green from 2010-2013 are still running and running. My 4 have 98000h
My 2012 Macmini with the Fusion disk setup SSD disk with HD running 24/7 still working till this day 😂
Now my 6.4tb P4610s will probably last till the heat death of the universe.
A laptop 1TB HD drive from a HP Pavilion laptop still running beyond 8 years (4 years heavy usage and 4 years left untouched), still has all the data and works great
We had an old Hitachi 9200 disk array stay up for about 12 years with maybe 1-2 disk replacements. Those were very well built systems and at the time, Hitachi companies manufactured everything in them from the drives to the paint to the screws.
My 1GB (=Pentium 100 era), 20GB, 200GB IDE disks still worked when I connected them. Some have been unpowered for decades and saved in my shed. (-5 to 35°C and 60-85% humidity) I could open every single file on them that I tested.
I have a 200MB Seagate coming from the 90s that still works fine and it was untouched from 2001 to 2019. Yes, I had to buy MANY, MANY, MANY drives in the meantime, even if that drive didn’t die.
When I started my first serious networking job, there was a syslog server in our datacentre that had been running nonstop for almost a decade. It was an ancient radiator-white supemicro 3u server with 6 SCSI disks. I decommissioned that server 7 years later. Those SCSI disks had been running nonstop for 16+ years without a single problem. The inside of the server was covered in black plastic dust from the slowly disintegrating case fans. Other than half the case fans not working, there was nothing wrong with that server.
I’ve more than once seen a scenario of a 386 or 486 box somewhere in the corner of a server closet that has been running untouched and uninterrupted since the mid-90s, performing some absolutely critical process, with no one in the company knowing exactly what it is. Everyone who could’ve possibly had a clue has retired decades ago.
The only consensus is to never touch it.
This is more common than many people imagine. And it’s a ticking timebomb.
However, it also speaks volumes of the sheer quality of old-school hardware (and software). Most modern stuff has to be replaced (/rewritten) every few years. But there is more COBOL code running untouched from 3 human generations ago that our entire societies depend on than most people would be comfortable with.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after
This machine kept working but was missing for 4 years. They traced the network cable and found it got buried behind a wall but it was still working.
I have had many individual drives last decades at work and at home the problem is that the odds for failure are the same for each individual drive but if you have more drives the odds that YOU will see a failure increase.
It is like saying what are the odds or rolling a 1 on a 6 sided die
1 16.67% 4 38.58%
So think of it like having a PC with one drive, vs having a NAS which typically has 4 drives. The more drives you have the more likely it is that you will see at least one failure during the life of the drive.
I have ssd’s still in daily use that are like 12 years old. The only hdd’s I use are externals for my data backup though.
I have four 2TB drives in a software RAID0 in my gaming rig. They were manufactured in 2011.
