HDD life expectancy

[j_gamotin]

What is the average life of an HDD (Power on hours) I have already 2000hrs, I just want to prepare in case my HDD fails

 

[gaborbarla]

Depends from drive to drive. You can google your drive model and MTTF and it should come up with something.
It also depends on usage pattern, starting and stopping drives can cause damage, also a lot of heat on warm days can damage some drives to become less reliable. 2000 hours is really peanuts in the useful life of an average drive. I think you can safely plan for at least 2 years of always time, and I have seen many drives that went way over 10 years of usage, in fact more make it than fail. But then they becomes uselessly slow (because of technology moves on) or uselessly small. As always keep backing up important stuff, plan for a crash today and cant go wrong, but otherwise most likely your drive will keep working for many years without issues as long as it is not a portable drive. You can use HDTune to other apps to check its SMART parameters, e.g. if the drive had to reallocated blocks or exceeded maximum temperature at any time in its life. It is useful to monitor but even more useful to do regular backups.

 

[seagate_surfer]

j_gamotin, drives can fail at any moment and you need to be prepared with a good back up plan.

Basically you want:

3 copies of any data you don't want to lose.
2 different mediums it's stored on (so 2 different drives in your computer, for example).
1 copy kept offsite, to prevent against disaster.

 

[hang-the-9]

What is the average life of an HDD (Power on hours) I have already 2000hrs, I just want to prepare in case my HDD fails

Keep regular backups and you are prepared. If you wait to do a backup, the drive will fail the day before you do that backup.

 

[j_gamotin]

The default tool that the windows 7 provided does it really "remove" the bad sector ?

 

[hang-the-9]

The default tool that the windows 7 provided does it really "remove" the bad sector ?

Logically yet, it does not actually do anything to fix issues with the drive, just hides it. Like turning up the radio when your car makes funny noises.