how old is too old for an HDD

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yifat

yifat

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May 10, 2012
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i just took a look at the date on my HDD's.

the one I'm using in my PC is from 2009, the backup HDD in the closet is from 2010.
I also have and older PC with another two HDD's, one of from 2006, the other - 2003.

suddenly these seem pretty old and I was thinking if it's a good time to replace them even though they still all work perfectly.

is it a bad idea to keep that old HDD as backup?
 
Harddrives last average 5 years or so if they are your main drive.
Though if its still good and fast and you have a backup, there is no need to replace it.
 
yes, 5 years seems to be the limit to expect good performance from a hard disk, but of course 6 moths has become the time to see a hard disk die fast, at least i had a couple of those

i had a 8 years old sata maxtor hdd working well untill recent years it decided to park heads suddenly, still works but surely will die soon and will kill whatever is on those platters

some hdds start to feel slow after 5 years, after completelly format them and start from clean to use them, they still feel slow, sometimes those start to be noisy, that is a symptom that should concern anyone using them, with old cpu cases, you might not hear them doing weird noises but if you suddenly hear them, time to consider a hdd replacement

crystaldiskinfo gives a good ammount of information about any hdd connected to your pc and how bad the situation is if it find anything out of ordinary to report

of course, sudden power outages or sudden head failures won't give you warnings, you just will get the ¡surprise!

older than 10 years, well, i wouldn't put any vital information that is not backed up somewhere else

the 3,2,1 rule of backups is not that appliable this days in terms of different types of media, or is in a external hdd, a internal hdd or a hdd in the cloud, but is a good suggestion anyways

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/
 
As long as the data is backed up, you should be okay.

However, sometimes replacing old hard drives that still seem to be working fine with newer and larger capacity hard drives may be a good idea especially if it gives you peace of mind. I have been contemplating purchasing a pair of 8TB hard drives to store data from several 1TB hard drives that are between 4 and 6 years old. The two 8TB HDDs would simply be setup as RAID 1 (mirror) and there will still be sufficient space to backup other data.

It simply depends on how important the data stored on the HDD is to you. For example, if the hard drives where I store all my ripped DVD movies suddenly died, I would be rather sad. However, I can re-rip and encode the movies from my DVD collection... But that would also give me a reason to continue to slowly replace my old DVDs with Blu-Rays and encode those movies to be stored on my HTPC.
 
The answer is multi-layer.

There is not a single, 100% guaranteed storage medium.

I currently backup on HD, but the stuff I really, really cannot lose, in addition to HD, I go into the trouble of burning an optical.
 
Having been a test lab admin for a storage company, I have seen the full depth of the hard drive bathtub curve. For 6 years, I curated a test lab with over 10,000 drives.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

For the first 3 months or so, the drive failure rate is pretty high. We used to get around 2-3% of drives fail on new projects within that time frame. (I had one project where every single 3TB SAS drive failed in the initial set within the first month. We had major backlash against that company. However, I can't mention who it was for fear of law suits.) Always keep your old drives and backups long enough to get past this initial failure time. A better bet is to keep new drives under stress testing for that initial 3 months before putting it into production use. That way you know it works before you start using it.

The second phase, between 3 months and ~5 years, the failure rate on drives is pretty low, like around 0.1-0.5% for enterprise drives, and I've heard less than 1% for consumer level drives. (I did have one brand of enterprise drives that had a failure rate of 50% per year during this time, so it does vary by brand. On that note, never buy Fujitsu brand 2.5" 15k SAS drives used. They are NOT reliable. Fujitsu sold their production line to Toshiba after that fiasco forced them out of the enterprise drive business. Even 46GB, 74GB, and 136GB 15k drives from Toshiba suffered from this issue because of bad design.) Through this period, most drives are almost completely without worry for operational status. There is a small chance of failure, but not much.

At the end of the curve, after about 5 years, drive reliability suffers badly, and gets worse and worse over time. It goes from ~1-3% failure rate at 5 years to ~10% at 6 years, and ~60% at 8 years for consumer level drives. Enterprise drives last longer, typically a 10% failure rate at 8 years, and 50% at 10 years. I advise not keeping any useful data on a drive over 6 years old, ever. There are drives that last longer than that, defying the odds, but do you really want to take the chance?

The biggest lesson here: keep redundancy and backup in mind, always. Use RAID and have nightly backups for any valuable data.
 
same here 😀 🙁

meanwhile feel more secure buying western digital, hitachi and toshiba

the keyword here is more, a shame ssds are small and still uncertain how will do when reaching 5 years in use
 
Why do I get the feeling old drives, ~pre 2004 or so were more reliable than the modern, high capacity drives? Still have a dozen of those pre 2004 drives (all brands) sitting around and if I plug them in, they come to life simple. Had 1 IBM failed on me during that time, which IBM admitted was a production problem. The only reason I had to replace these drives because I ran out of space and not because of failures.

Bought me a pair of (largest manufacturer, name brand I won't mention) 2TB each back in 2010, and the dang things, both failed on me after 30 months, with a 24 months warranty (of course). One came from Singapore, another from China so I can't really blame on batch problem. 100% failure. Unbelievable.
 


As technology advances storage size in the same small space, that means that each bit or byte uses less and less space. This also leads to the heads needing to be closer to the platter in order to read and write the data. The heads themselves are also smaller. So, heads crashing into the platter can happen more easily and do more damage. Also, it is more vulnerable to heat induced distortion.

So, yes, they are less reliable. It's not your imagination.
 
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