How long do hard drives actually live for?

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

90% last 3 years

80% last 4 years

I still have a few around that are more than 4 years old. All the drives in my unRAID are still less than 3 years old though.

Probably had about 30 HDDs in 3 decades with only maybe 4 so far failing before I was ready to dispose of them.

Interesting that of the 5 SSDs I have had 2 have failed in less than 2 years. I thought they were supposed to be more reliable.

One day more than the warranty.

dang it, you beat me to it

One day more than the warranty.

mildly related ... I just had a $3000 repair on my car.  It was 800 miles and 1 month BEFORE my warranty expired.  Some analyst is getting fired ;-)

One day more than the warranty.

 

mildly related ... I just had a $3000 repair on my car.  It was 800 miles and 1 month BEFORE my warranty expired.  Some analyst is getting fired ;-)

LMAO :-D

I have one a little over 5 years old, its 1 tb. I have others 6-9 years old that are smaller but they are rarely powered on so I wouldn't count those.

I recently sold 37 hard drives on eBay (all fully working, of course). I have about 5 remaining that still work, but have errors and I've seen about 5 more die over a period of about 8 years and maybe 10 more that I have yet to look at but were working last time I checked. I have another 12 drives currently in unRAID servers and finally 1 that is about to be RMA'd. The one that is being RMA'd has a 5 year warranty which expired in October, but the replacement (refurb) drive was DOA.

So that's (approx) 59 drives working and 11 "dead". The 37 were (I think) all well over 4 years old, but if we discount the newer drives, that's 11 out of 48 dead, which is pretty much the same stats as Backblaze state -- 20% failure after 4 years.

I have several drives in my array with over 55,000 power-on hours (over 6 years).    Obviously I don't expect them to last forever ... but they're still going strong.    They get little actual use, however, and are kept very cool (never get about 35, even during parity checks) ... I suspect that contributes to their longevity.

Nope. Google proved that low temperature doesn't improve longevity. It might even be to the detriment.

It's why Facebook(?) now run their servers at higher temperatures -- they don't cool them as much in order to save money.

Ever since we started reaching the 1TB drives, I see myself upgrading drives out of service rather than removal due to failure.

Out of 10 WD EACS I had 1 fail outright and 1 start developing bad sectors.

The 80% mentioned seems about right.

I did have 10K SCSI Maxtor/Quantum drives that had power on hours roll over past 65,535 and start counting up again.

They had an additional 10,000 hours on them.  They had no special cooling other then a front vent and an exhaust fan in the back. They ran a bit warm.  I suppose I could attribute it to the supermicro case 4U design with the air shroud.  There were no CPU fans, just heatsinks with a special air shroud and a 92MM exhaust fan.

I have many IDE drives in boxes that got retired when I went to Sata.  Was planning on using some of them for offline backup but others are too small to really use.

I have many IDE drives in boxes that got retired when I went to Sata.  Was planning on using some of them for offline backup but others are too small to really use.

Ditto => I have several boxes full of older IDE drives that I should simply toss ... but I'm too much of a packrat to do it        ... and every drive I store has passed the complete set of manufacturer's diagnostics and an error-free Level 2 pass with Spinrite.

If you can spare the time and the drives are working, sell the IDE drives on FleaBay. You will get more (per GB) for an IDE drive than SATA because they are not making them any more.

Here are the drives I sold recently:

Hmmm ... I always figured it wasn't worth the bother of packing/shipping etc.  But I have about 40 old drives that would probably bring $10-20 each.  I guess the next time e-bay has a "free listing" period I may list a few.  As I noted, every drive I keep passes a very thorough set of diagnostics, so they're all working just fine.

Hmmm ... I always figured it wasn't worth the bother of packing/shipping etc.  But I have about 40 old drives that would probably bring $10-20 each.  I guess the next time e-bay has a "free listing" period I may list a few.  As I noted, every drive I keep passes a very thorough set of diagnostics, so they're all working just fine.

I don't know if the U.S. eBay works the same way, but I never used a free listing period. All eBay UK listings starting at 99p or less are free, so I start listings at 99p and they end organically at the "right" price.

Tips:

Start listings on a Thursday at around 7 to 10pm and run listings for 10 days, that way you get two weekends of lookie loos and you end at the peak time on the peak day. I didn't list similar drives at the same time, so I might have a 300GB IDE and a 320GB SATA ending at the same time, but not two 320GB SATA. I also had 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB ending at the same time (or 1/2 hour after each other) as you have different buyers.

Make sure the drives are well packed and don't forget to charge for packing if you have to buy it.

Thanks for the interesting tip on the timing -- I'll give that a try when I list them.

What I found interesting was that some of the comments mentioned that drives wouldn't last longer if the were spun down or powered off!

Remember, this is for drives constantly on-line in a server type environment. In a desktop environment, the drives will likely spend much more time spun down.

Yev from Backblaze -> That's true, but different things fail when drives are powered 100% of the time vs. when they keep coming on and off. We do power the pods off in order to do maintenance, so they do come on and off occasionally, but the majority of the time they are on line.

...and that will shorten their lifespan considerably. Drives that are constantly spun up and in a stable environment (temperature, humidity, vibration levels) will live much longer than a drive that is irregularly spun down, cooled off, spun up and warmed again.

I have a Conner that was made in the early 90s that still spins up and has no bad sectors.  Its 80MB.  Makes a noise like my coffee grinder, always has.

Have a few Maxtor 254MB drives made shortly thereafter, spin up and work just fine.

I have SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 drives that came out of workstations built almost two decades ago, all work fine.  Those disks probably spun for 5-8 years straight (Sun and SGI workstations, always on, no such thing as sleep mode back then!) 

I've had new laptop hard disks that failed inside a year (kids' computers, they like to move around with their laptops while their disks are spinning, against my advice).

Guess it all comes down to how you treat them!

Hmmm ... I always figured it wasn't worth the bother of packing/shipping etc.  But I have about 40 old drives that would probably bring $10-20 each.  I guess the next time e-bay has a "free listing" period I may list a few.  As I noted, every drive I keep passes a very thorough set of diagnostics, so they're all working just fine.

My friend made a killing on old SCSI-1 drives. 

Seems like many of the older sampler workstations required SCSI-1 drives so people would buy them at astronomical prices.

One man's garbage is another man's gold.  Certainly if the drives work, I would suggest selling them for whatever the market bids them up to.  At the very least you are keeping them out of the dumps.

Nope. Google proved that low temperature doesn't improve longevity. It might even be to the detriment.

 

It's why Facebook(?) now run their servers at higher temperatures -- they don't cool them as much in order to save money.

The source of the article http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

While Google did not find correlation between temp and failure, 35 was not defined as low in the study, nor previous environmental recommendations.

Facebook does not run servers at particular high temperatures, which is not to say they use cold air. Instead, they are following ASHRAE. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/01/29/hvac-group-says-data-centers-can-be-warmer/ Studies prior to 2009 (and still) find some "data centers" with very low temperatures, like 12C! 12C is low and puts vastly different load on a disk drive. But operating and ambient are different, blah blah blah. Google and Facebook operate multi megawatt data centers and thus have facility scale opportunities. They can have custom air handling. Are servers run at the same temp as storage? BackBlaze is a colo tenant, not so much freedom.

One last thing about such inventory studies, are disk drives getting longer or shorter lifespans? BackBlaze simply does not have the data. Their inventory is growing. The failure rate is growing. The aged drive population is shrinking. The margin of error widens. Based on the numbers provided, Backblaze may have fewer than 1,000 drives in the 3+ year sample range. Forecasting the failure rate of completely different drives from such a small sample should be done carefully.

I see an ever increasing number of NOCs over here with a target ambient of 24-25degC

I've seen some oooooold drives in my day.  About 7 years ago, I was getting the "welcome to work" tour and my new boss showed me some HP Netservers that were still in use.  They were rocking Pentium Pro processors and were from some time in the mid 90s which put them close to 10 years old when I started working there.  The last one was retired (still working) some time in 2010.  They were also good step stools.  HP knew how to build serious cases back then.