I would say replace the HDD drive every 5-10 years, rather than risk a failure. Because when a HDD fails it is always when you need something off of it. Also you can keep the old drive and use it as a back up drive for you new data.
@@hanionline563 I use RAID 1 as backup target. This way I decrease the likelihood of failure during a restore operation. If one drive fails I can use the other one as normal and replace the failed drive without data loss.
There's how long the drive lasts, and then there's how long the data on the drive lasts, without being refreshed. Those can be radically different things, for both hard drives and solid state. My most relevant information is that, about five years ago, I had (and still have) a collection of about 300-400 GB, in five places, one of which was an internal hard drive. That copy was the oldest. It had been there for fully NINE years, without being refreshed. I was cautiously optimistic that the drive would still work all right, as it had been accessed briefly about three years before with no trouble. But that data, sitting there for 9 years without a refresh…I was prepared for the worst. There were NO errors. I have MD5 checksums on everything, and every single one checked out. It's been five years since that time, and it's about time for another refresh. But I'm hopeful it will still be all right. Still, I keep multiple copies of everything, just in case. In my experience, data is at much more risk from your fingers, doing the wrong operations in software, than from any hardware failure. I've had just one hard drive failure, in my own equipment, in almost 40 years and maybe involving a dozen drives. That drive was used a lot. No idea why it went bad. Other than that, no problem. But despite lots of care taken, I've had many data mishaps. But no significant loss of data, other than very, very early on, in 1984, a month or two after starting work with PCs, some long-forgotten mishap with a 360 K floppy. So while you should back up your data with extreme diligence, it's more for software reasons that hardware failure. The worst data mishap I ever had probably is what happened in 1999, with Excel. Not actual data loss, but I selected a whole bunch of sheets, then did some editing, only to find that those edits were applied to ALL selected sheets. I hold grudges against programs. Major ones. That's one of them.
I have an old 320gb drive here that CrystalDiskInfo claims to have 1,428,911 Power On Hours... that's 163 years! I don't believe it because I know for a fact they didn't make hard drives that big back then. :)
Yup I've got some old hdd still kicking from windows Xp days. I've seen a SSD go bad and it's not even been 5yrs. They are not durable like HDDs in my opinion.
@@joseph354 my oldest drives are Western Digitals. Western Digitals Blue is 1TB from 09, WD black 4TB from 2014? The WD Blue outlasted a SSD from that time period, and the PC fell down a flight of steps!
I've had a few Western Digital hard drives well over 10 years with no failures. Can't say the same for Seagate drives. They seem to fail after only a few years, both internal and external USB drives.
Interesting my first seagate drive which is almost 10 years old still works, my second drive is 5 years old and has no problem at all. Also my Wd drive has some weird noises but still good. Recently i bought new 5tb wd drive to back up all my previous drives. Good day :))
I have seen drives running in Servers for more than 20 years - yes Server 2000 and 2003 (even NT 4) are still being used. From work I did a very long time ago related to "environmental stress testing" electronics has 2 peaks of failure, during the first 3 months - then at about 18 months. Failures are caused by bad soldering, bad components and/or static damage. Soldering and static damage can take years to show up, electron microscopes can show static damage - sometimes just half a conductor blown out. Mechanical drives are subject to these failures plus moving parts wearing out, breaking. Data can sometimes be retrieved from a drive with seized or sticking bearings by rocking the drive back and forth in the plane of rotation - gets the platters spinning. Mechanical shock can kill a drive instantly. Know of 1 case where a datacentre had a gas fire suppression system discharge - system had wrong nozzles - acoustic shock killed all the drives in the centre. Back in the eighties a friend of mine had a scratch disk he was using, cover off, hand spin the platters to get them started - then worked OK, and this lasted a number of years.
Tips for a long lasting hard drive: 1) Make sure that you have proper cooling. Heat kills. A light breeze should be enough. If an internal drive is in a case with a non-working fan, that can shorten the life of your hard drive. If an external drive is in a hot room, you should turn on a fan, and direct it at the drive. As long as a light breeze blows the drive's hot air away, you should be in good shape. 2) Never turn off the drive. If you leave it running 24/7/365, it will probably last longer. Of course, you will be paying for the electricity to keep it running 24/7/365. Your hard drive takes the most punishment when it is turned on. The above might be a tad difficult, because some drives go into power-saver mode, and have no option to disable it. 3) Feed your computer and hard drive (if it is external and not in the computer's case)... feed them clean power. Never connect your computer equipment directly to your wall outlet. That is dirty power. Every time anything bad happens on the power grid, your computer will be exposed to that event. Over time, even little spikes take their toll. Also, low voltages are bad. If you ever have a black-out, unplug everything. The worst power is when a black-out ends, and the power is restored. Wait 5 or 10 minutes before plugging things back in. If you use a UPS (uninterruptible power supply), your computer (and anything else plugged into the UPS) should last a very long time. Not all UPS's are the same. A cheap one is basically a bucket of batteries that kicks in when there is a blackout. That is better than nothing. The next step up is a UPS with AVR (automatic voltage regulation). Such UPS's will boost low voltage situations, and will reduce high voltage situations. Such UPS's will generally have a better joule rating (how much of a surge it can absorb and keep it from hitting your computer). High end UPS's are referred to as "on-line". This is because they actively convert your A/C power to D/C power, and then back to A/C power (a double conversion). This means that the UPS is generating its own power. As such, whatever you have plugged in to the UPS will never see anything from the power grid. Such UPS's are expensive, and consume electricity in order to do the double conversion. This would probably be overkill for most people. Data centers (such as a google, facebook, etc) use on-line UPS's to protect their huge server rooms (hospital operating rooms, too). Those UPS's, along with pallets and pallets of batteries, might cost more than your house. If you are using a power strip with surge suppression, that is probably not doing much. The part that does the suppression is a metal-oxide varistor (MOV). Most power strips have cheap MOVs, and they wear out. Each little hit that they absorb takes a bite out of the MOV. As time passes, your surge suppression stops, and you will have only a power strip (and you will not know that the strip is no longer suppressing spikes and surges). A good UPS, with AVR, will go a long way in protecting whatever you have plugged into it. And they will not break the bank. I have been using them for 25 years, for TVs, computers, and all other electronics, and have never had any equipment (that is plugged into the UPS) fail.
An excellent video, as usual, Leo! There are actually statistics about HDD life expectancy although they are usually based on data centre use. Google have published such stats before and Cloudflare publish figures annually. It’s difficult to give an exact answer as the figures depend on drive model and pattern of use, but IT admins usually assume around 3% in the first year (that “infant mortality” Leo mentions), then about 1% in the second year and a gradual climb to 3% in years 3 &4. Thereafter the risk goes a little higher but there is no definite figure for disks snuffing it. I have seen and used 15 years old drives and even older which were still functioning just fine, but generally anything over 10 is living on borrowed time. If possible, I would recommend replacing primary drives (that is, the ones built into computers) preventatively at 5-6 years. Backup drives which are only used occasionally and are not critical in any case can be used for longer. Just remember, eventually, something will give. The insulation around wires may perish, the oil in the motor may gum up, a screw or bushing may work loose. It’s better to deal with the replacement on your terms rather than to find out how long it took before the disaster occurred!
this is a good point i sort of forgot when look up drive lifespan. while the SSD / boot drive will probably never need to get bigger, eventually my hard drives will need to be larger than 10TB - what happens then is I decommission the old drive and buy two (Backups) larger capacity drives. for the boot drive, it ought to last long enough that a replacement drive is not expensive. how much are 500 GB sata SSDs anyway? 50 bucks? plus if you keep backups, the odds of you catastrophically losing everything becomes lower and lower. having two backups, one off site, is the best option.
Nice succinct video. Told me exactly what I wanted to know and informed me on how to continue my pursuit on knowledge on the principles behind data storage. I’m an electrician from England and I’m only just now after 16 years in the trade beginning to take an interest in the electronic systems behind the vast majority of products we install and maintain these days. Big Love
OMG my experience is as you mention! I had HDDs, i had bad luck with some and failed in months or over a year and others never (but as you describe passing that threshold I never thought on that) work years and years, i even change my PC and the HDD is still working.
Always pays to have multiple copies of anything important. There are drives from the 80s that still work error free, but I wouldn’t suggest relying on a harddrive for 40 years. Dvd and cd are at risk of disc rot. Best practice is to have backups on different media, and make additional backups as they age if that information is important to you.
Hard drives used to outlast computers, but my current machine is 8 years old 32k hours on the HD. I can't type / read or watch video any faster than I could 8 years ago. I'm not a gamer or a video maker, so my requirements really haven't changed much over the years. It looks like I will run this machine until the motherboard/cpu quits. I'm on my third power supply. Multiple backups are the best peace of mind you can have regardless of the age or type of drives.
My windows7 HD just died - 10years old. It was timely as i made the jump to Win11. The last backup i made came over no problem. Your computer info is the Best.
I have three Seagate BC and they are over 5 years old, still good so far. That said, I have a old WD drive in my Sateliite PVR. Its been running for 17 years 24/hrs a day and still good. Before that it was in a PC for 4 years....
A backup for your backup and another backup for your other backup :P Not sure about portable Hard Drives though I guess they are the same as regular Hard Drives inside PC's and Laptops.
@@askleonotenboom Ah ok so expect about the same life expectancy, I had to buy a Portable HDD (320GB, 298GB after formatting) because my laptop has an SSD which is 237GB which really isn't much these days.
To think my portable hardrive lasted 7 years I usually use it once every month just to check if its still working and that one time each month is also when I try to transfer some of my data from my PC
I tend to keep my old HDs when upgrading to a new machine or just a larger size drive... I figure that they are a good backup in case I ever need to go back and try to find something that I might have misplaced... Finding anything would probably be like trying to find a needle in a haystack though... I'm pretty sure that there are some drives on the back of the shelf in the closet where I store them that are just a couple hundred MBs in size... Not GBs, *MBs*... Hell, I still have stuff on 360K floppies from *way* back... If I *really* needed to, I could probably piece together a machine that could read those floppies... My first HD was an actual 5.25" full height Seagate ST-506 -- a whole *5* MB... That was a lot of space back in those days...
The answer to that question will be in hours rather than years/days/etc. I have a 1tb backup drive that's got more than 43k hours and is still rated "Good" by CrystalDiskInfo. I suspect (although I don't know) it'll last at least another 100k hours, so I'm likely good until I need to upgrade in five or six years.
@@wilhelmtaylor9863: I'm talking about using hours as your measuring unit rather than days/weeks/etc. Your drive will likely be around (and working) many years from now as long as you don't keep it connected and powered up 24/7. Does that clear things up?
@@rontarrant → It is now. Please read the first line of your first response. Most English speakers refer to "hours of life, not weeks or years" as a short duration.
I have a Seagate Video 1TB 5900RPM HD that I've used daily since 2015, it passes every test and has never failed or given me any problems, but I figure it's time to move stuff out of it and replace it before I risk losing something. I installed a new WD Blue 2TB to be my backup/storage drive and I'll be replacing the old 1TB drive with a 500GB SSD soon.
I replaced my hard drive, when my last hard drive died - it was old. My new hard drive died after a year - found out it died due to the motherboard and or power supply was dying. All backed up so didnt lose anything fortunately.
I'm curious about ssd & hhd data retention with or without regular power on cycles ..data fade/magnetic fade ..eg: hhd in a drawer vs ssd in a drawer for long periods ....
Running or stored a hhd does not rewrite your data (the OS will rewrite some file automatically, defrag for example). Only rewriting your data will renew the file, hence make backups.
i just lost my last backup due to a western digital backup drive that died today it shows up on windows but when I try to get info the drive just clicks .
I explain the need for backups to friends and relatives all the time, whever I get the chance. I show thme how to do it. I recommend them programs. I don't know _any_ of my relatives nor friends who regularly back up. And yes, there are a couple who lost that (emotionally) important files, often photos. They just resist education. Sigh.
I basically need a huge storage so that I can dump all photos and videos I capture overtime and I hate to store and pay extra to cloud services. So SSDs are a bit expensive than my need... I think an HDD will be more useful. I can plug it in tv and see any movies or 4k phone videos (can I?).... should I go for a 4tb HDD with a protective cover or a 2tb ssd?
Either. What's more important is that you back up your files. By that I mean that for EVERYTHING you have two copies on two different devices/drives/whatevers.
Heo Leo. I'm not sure if you can answer this question but iv had multiple external HDDs. I used them A LOT. They ALWAYS stop working and I loose access to them as they get slower. Normally, I can use around 30-40% of their storage until they become so slow that I cannot get anything off of them, then they fail. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I even had a 750gb hdd that stopped working when it only was using about 100gb of space. I really want to get the data off of them.
If they've failed, you might not be able to. It really depends on HOW they fail. Getting slower and slower kinda implies a surface defect, but that shouldn't happen so often. Anything unusual in how you use these disks?
@@askleonotenboom I havnt looked inside the drives. Some of them were internal drives being used as external drives. Regardless of whether they had a case, they all did the same thing. Also, it just takes forever for windows to load the drives, or they don't get recognized by windows when connecting to the USB port. (I use a hdd reader device that uses male USB if it has no case) usually the reader has a light to tell whether it worked, it turns red though.)
I purchased a used HDD and it's at his 100% (i mean, it's not damaging... It doesn't have any problems) but it says that it has 100 days of lifetime remaining... What do I do? I'm really worried
I have more fear of Windows update denying me the use of an external HD like it did when I first upgraded to Windows 10. After searching the net for help, I came to a few articles saying just go to the company that made it and download a patch. Found out there was a patch for all drives but mine. They even stated that no patch was going to be made. I still have the 2 terabyte drive with over 200,000 images on it plus other stuff, just waiting to be extracted to a drive that works on Win10. The HD was only about 4 or 5 months old. So yeah, I fear Windows upgrade over HD failure. Stored back so long now, I am not sure of the brand. Seagate I think. I have had Seagate and Winchester . And before somebody says, take it to best buy or someplace and have them extract the data, NO NO NO! I went there and few other places. They want $500 to transfer data from a perfectly working HD to another one. My drive is not broken! Windows is. If Apple was not so costly, I would say bye bye to Windows.
So boot a different computer in to a different OS -- WIndows 7, or Linux -- and copy the files. I REALLY don't understand why Win 10 would not access a specific external drive, though. I'd have to see the error when tried.
@@askleonotenboom The OS I was using before it failed at win10 was win7 and it ran great. I have since tried other machines on 7 and even vista. Still refuses to work. I do not have the error written down but I thought it just said , " Can not recognize this drive" or something like that. Maybe I will connect it again and see what it says but it is buried away last few years.. : (
Thank you very much! Doing electronic for years and I forgot that you're absolutely right. Manipulate all systems. Example: heating element for micro wave can last but if the wax capacitor above it melts on it then the heating element will be destroyed too, Ha-ha! Anything can go wrong with any component at any time. Take Care (PS. Ha-ha, BRAINSTORM!)
@@askleonotenboom I suppose you are right. I work in the photo industry and we tell people to use archival DVDs sometimes, but how long before it is impossible to get a DVD reader, and what a hassle to work with such small chunks. That being said, hopefully soon they find a consumer solution for archiving purposes.
TLDR To skip the First world BS. We all know the main viewer here is someone who doesn't want to Buy SSDs because of the Price/Life expectancy ratio. Mechanical creations need to Physically fail and as such they are easy to spot and diagnose. As well as they will deteriorate at a Steady standard pace. A.K.A, all HDDs of one Brand and model will Die Mechanically After a same time. They need to have Imperfections and flaws that realistically don't pass the QA to differ. Electronics Fail randomly because their working principle is More BS that Physics. The physical parts in electronics are also reliable. When your hard drive fails its 99.9% Electronics on it's not the mechanical parts.
A long time . . . usually. There's one BIG catch.
I would say replace the HDD drive every 5-10 years, rather than risk a failure. Because when a HDD fails it is always when you need something off of it. Also you can keep the old drive and use it as a back up drive for you new data.
Correct. Leo is correct as well.
that doesn't matter since even the new drive can die in few days or months so u need a backup or double drives
@@hanionline563Absolutely!
I backup everything and never trust any drive.
@@hanionline563 I use RAID 1 as backup target. This way I decrease the likelihood of failure during a restore operation. If one drive fails I can use the other one as normal and replace the failed drive without data loss.
@@hanionline563 you cannot recover ssd easily when it dies. Hdd can be recovered easily when it dies.
There's how long the drive lasts, and then there's how long the data on the drive lasts, without being refreshed. Those can be radically different things, for both hard drives and solid state. My most relevant information is that, about five years ago, I had (and still have) a collection of about 300-400 GB, in five places, one of which was an internal hard drive. That copy was the oldest. It had been there for fully NINE years, without being refreshed. I was cautiously optimistic that the drive would still work all right, as it had been accessed briefly about three years before with no trouble. But that data, sitting there for 9 years without a refresh…I was prepared for the worst.
There were NO errors. I have MD5 checksums on everything, and every single one checked out. It's been five years since that time, and it's about time for another refresh. But I'm hopeful it will still be all right. Still, I keep multiple copies of everything, just in case.
In my experience, data is at much more risk from your fingers, doing the wrong operations in software, than from any hardware failure. I've had just one hard drive failure, in my own equipment, in almost 40 years and maybe involving a dozen drives. That drive was used a lot. No idea why it went bad. Other than that, no problem. But despite lots of care taken, I've had many data mishaps. But no significant loss of data, other than very, very early on, in 1984, a month or two after starting work with PCs, some long-forgotten mishap with a 360 K floppy.
So while you should back up your data with extreme diligence, it's more for software reasons that hardware failure.
The worst data mishap I ever had probably is what happened in 1999, with Excel. Not actual data loss, but I selected a whole bunch of sheets, then did some editing, only to find that those edits were applied to ALL selected sheets. I hold grudges against programs. Major ones. That's one of them.
I have an old 320gb drive here that CrystalDiskInfo claims to have 1,428,911 Power On Hours... that's 163 years! I don't believe it because I know for a fact they didn't make hard drives that big back then. :)
I have a 1 TB 7200 HDD I bought in 2009, and a 5TB 7200 HDD I bought in 2015, still going strong!
In fact, my SSD from 2009/2010, died in 2015.
Yup I've got some old hdd still kicking from windows Xp days. I've seen a SSD go bad and it's not even been 5yrs. They are not durable like HDDs in my opinion.
What brand of HDD do you have?
@@joseph354 my oldest drives are Western Digitals. Western Digitals Blue is 1TB from 09, WD black 4TB from 2014? The WD Blue outlasted a SSD from that time period, and the PC fell down a flight of steps!
I'm still running a 80Gig drive in my Windows 98 machine from 1999. 26 years.
I've had a few Western Digital hard drives well over 10 years with no failures. Can't say the same for Seagate drives. They seem to fail after only a few years, both internal and external USB drives.
I had a Seagate fail under 2 years but my WD drive has been going fine for over 5 years and it even fell down once😂
My seagate failed too. No longer interest buying seagate product anymore
Interesting my first seagate drive which is almost 10 years old still works, my second drive is 5 years old and has no problem at all. Also my Wd drive has some weird noises but still good. Recently i bought new 5tb wd drive to back up all my previous drives. Good day :))
I have seen drives running in Servers for more than 20 years - yes Server 2000 and 2003 (even NT 4) are still being used. From work I did a very long time ago related to "environmental stress testing" electronics has 2 peaks of failure, during the first 3 months - then at about 18 months. Failures are caused by bad soldering, bad components and/or static damage. Soldering and static damage can take years to show up, electron microscopes can show static damage - sometimes just half a conductor blown out. Mechanical drives are subject to these failures plus moving parts wearing out, breaking. Data can sometimes be retrieved from a drive with seized or sticking bearings by rocking the drive back and forth in the plane of rotation - gets the platters spinning. Mechanical shock can kill a drive instantly. Know of 1 case where a datacentre had a gas fire suppression system discharge - system had wrong nozzles - acoustic shock killed all the drives in the centre. Back in the eighties a friend of mine had a scratch disk he was using, cover off, hand spin the platters to get them started - then worked OK, and this lasted a number of years.
Tips for a long lasting hard drive:
1) Make sure that you have proper cooling. Heat kills.
A light breeze should be enough.
If an internal drive is in a case with a non-working fan, that can shorten the life of your hard drive.
If an external drive is in a hot room, you should turn on a fan, and direct it at the drive. As long as a light breeze blows the drive's hot air away, you should be in good shape.
2) Never turn off the drive. If you leave it running 24/7/365, it will probably last longer. Of course, you will be paying for the electricity to keep it running 24/7/365.
Your hard drive takes the most punishment when it is turned on.
The above might be a tad difficult, because some drives go into power-saver mode, and have no option to disable it.
3) Feed your computer and hard drive (if it is external and not in the computer's case)... feed them clean power. Never connect your computer equipment directly to your wall outlet. That is dirty power. Every time anything bad happens on the power grid, your computer will be exposed to that event. Over time, even little spikes take their toll. Also, low voltages are bad.
If you ever have a black-out, unplug everything. The worst power is when a black-out ends, and the power is restored. Wait 5 or 10 minutes before plugging things back in.
If you use a UPS (uninterruptible power supply), your computer (and anything else plugged into the UPS) should last a very long time.
Not all UPS's are the same. A cheap one is basically a bucket of batteries that kicks in when there is a blackout. That is better than nothing.
The next step up is a UPS with AVR (automatic voltage regulation). Such UPS's will boost low voltage situations, and will reduce high voltage situations. Such UPS's will generally have a better joule rating (how much of a surge it can absorb and keep it from hitting your computer).
High end UPS's are referred to as "on-line". This is because they actively convert your A/C power to D/C power, and then back to A/C power (a double conversion). This means that the UPS is generating its own power. As such, whatever you have plugged in to the UPS will never see anything from the power grid. Such UPS's are expensive, and consume electricity in order to do the double conversion. This would probably be overkill for most people.
Data centers (such as a google, facebook, etc) use on-line UPS's to protect their huge server rooms (hospital operating rooms, too). Those UPS's, along with pallets and pallets of batteries, might cost more than your house.
If you are using a power strip with surge suppression, that is probably not doing much. The part that does the suppression is a metal-oxide varistor (MOV). Most power strips have cheap MOVs, and they wear out. Each little hit that they absorb takes a bite out of the MOV. As time passes, your surge suppression stops, and you will have only a power strip (and you will not know that the strip is no longer suppressing spikes and surges).
A good UPS, with AVR, will go a long way in protecting whatever you have plugged into it. And they will not break the bank.
I have been using them for 25 years, for TVs, computers, and all other electronics, and have never had any equipment (that is plugged into the UPS) fail.
Thanks for this
Use industry grade 3.5" drive, in dry cool env., and don't shake them, would be my 3 advices to make them last longer than we will.
The HD in my security system has been running 24-7 for right at 3 years now, still recording fine!
what brand？
@@graysony6139 Samsung. I have gone to their SSDs also with perfect results.
gotcha, thanks!
An excellent video, as usual, Leo! There are actually statistics about HDD life expectancy although they are usually based on data centre use. Google have published such stats before and Cloudflare publish figures annually. It’s difficult to give an exact answer as the figures depend on drive model and pattern of use, but IT admins usually assume around 3% in the first year (that “infant mortality” Leo mentions), then about 1% in the second year and a gradual climb to 3% in years 3 &4. Thereafter the risk goes a little higher but there is no definite figure for disks snuffing it. I have seen and used 15 years old drives and even older which were still functioning just fine, but generally anything over 10 is living on borrowed time. If possible, I would recommend replacing primary drives (that is, the ones built into computers) preventatively at 5-6 years. Backup drives which are only used occasionally and are not critical in any case can be used for longer.
Just remember, eventually, something will give. The insulation around wires may perish, the oil in the motor may gum up, a screw or bushing may work loose. It’s better to deal with the replacement on your terms rather than to find out how long it took before the disaster occurred!
this is a good point i sort of forgot when look up drive lifespan. while the SSD / boot drive will probably never need to get bigger, eventually my hard drives will need to be larger than 10TB - what happens then is I decommission the old drive and buy two (Backups) larger capacity drives.
for the boot drive, it ought to last long enough that a replacement drive is not expensive. how much are 500 GB sata SSDs anyway? 50 bucks?
plus if you keep backups, the odds of you catastrophically losing everything becomes lower and lower. having two backups, one off site, is the best option.
Nice succinct video. Told me exactly what I wanted to know and informed me on how to continue my pursuit on knowledge on the principles behind data storage. I’m an electrician from England and I’m only just now after 16 years in the trade beginning to take an interest in the electronic systems behind the vast majority of products we install and maintain these days. Big Love
OMG my experience is as you mention! I had HDDs, i had bad luck with some and failed in months or over a year and others never (but as you describe passing that threshold I never thought on that) work years and years, i even change my PC and the HDD is still working.
Always pays to have multiple copies of anything important. There are drives from the 80s that still work error free, but I wouldn’t suggest relying on a harddrive for 40 years. Dvd and cd are at risk of disc rot. Best practice is to have backups on different media, and make additional backups as they age if that information is important to you.
I've lost at least 4 drives, some of them quite quickly. It is a lottery.
Hard drives used to outlast computers, but my current machine is 8 years old 32k hours on the HD. I can't type / read or watch video any faster than I could 8 years ago. I'm not a gamer or a video maker, so my requirements really haven't changed much over the years. It looks like I will run this machine until the motherboard/cpu quits. I'm on my third power supply.
Multiple backups are the best peace of mind you can have regardless of the age or type of drives.
My windows7 HD just died - 10years old. It was timely as i made the jump to Win11. The last backup i made came over no problem. Your computer info is the Best.
i using a 6TB Westen digital from 2019 it goes on and off everyday for 12 hours and works perfect.
but i always replace my Hard Disk every 5 years.
Once you start to get CHKDSK errors, the drive is on it way out. I had a few fail.
I have three Seagate BC and they are over 5 years old, still good so far. That said, I have a old WD drive in my Sateliite PVR. Its been running for 17 years 24/hrs a day and still good. Before that it was in a PC for 4 years....
A backup for your backup and another backup for your other backup :P
Not sure about portable Hard Drives though I guess they are the same as regular Hard Drives inside PC's and Laptops.
They generally are, yes.
@@askleonotenboom Ah ok so expect about the same life expectancy, I had to buy a Portable HDD (320GB, 298GB after formatting) because my laptop has an SSD which is 237GB which really isn't much these days.
To think my portable hardrive lasted 7 years I usually use it once every month just to check if its still working and that one time each month is also when I try to transfer some of my data from my PC
I tend to keep my old HDs when upgrading to a new machine or just a larger size drive... I figure that they are a good backup in case I ever need to go back and try to find something that I might have misplaced... Finding anything would probably be like trying to find a needle in a haystack though... I'm pretty sure that there are some drives on the back of the shelf in the closet where I store them that are just a couple hundred MBs in size... Not GBs, *MBs*... Hell, I still have stuff on 360K floppies from *way* back... If I *really* needed to, I could probably piece together a machine that could read those floppies... My first HD was an actual 5.25" full height Seagate ST-506 -- a whole *5* MB... That was a lot of space back in those days...
For me the question is: What is the shelf life of a hard drive that's only rarely used for backup?
The answer to that question will be in hours rather than years/days/etc. I have a 1tb backup drive that's got more than 43k hours and is still rated "Good" by CrystalDiskInfo. I suspect (although I don't know) it'll last at least another 100k hours, so I'm likely good until I need to upgrade in five or six years.
@@rontarrant → Are you saying I can only expect "hours", not more? That doesn't sound right.
@@wilhelmtaylor9863: I'm talking about using hours as your measuring unit rather than days/weeks/etc. Your drive will likely be around (and working) many years from now as long as you don't keep it connected and powered up 24/7. Does that clear things up?
@@rontarrant → It is now. Please read the first line of your first response. Most English speakers refer to "hours of life, not weeks or years" as a short duration.
I have a Seagate Video 1TB 5900RPM HD that I've used daily since 2015, it passes every test and has never failed or given me any problems, but I figure it's time to move stuff out of it and replace it before I risk losing something. I installed a new WD Blue 2TB to be my backup/storage drive and I'll be replacing the old 1TB drive with a 500GB SSD soon.
Excellent video • Thank you Leo!
Your channel is great ..its really interesting ..more videos about hdd and ssd storage please
Last one lasted from 07sep2011 till 21jan2022. The average of most of my computer has been 7 years.
I replaced my hard drive, when my last hard drive died - it was old. My new hard drive died after a year - found out it died due to the motherboard and or power supply was dying. All backed up so didnt lose anything fortunately.
SanDisk Professional 12TB G-Drive. How are these drives compared to normal Hard drives. Can you please help with any info you have ?
I'm curious about ssd & hhd data retention with or without regular power on cycles ..data fade/magnetic fade ..eg: hhd in a drawer vs ssd in a drawer for long periods ....
Running or stored a hhd does not rewrite your data (the OS will rewrite some file automatically, defrag for example). Only rewriting your data will renew the file, hence make backups.
i just lost my last backup due to a western digital backup drive that died today it shows up on windows but when I try to get info the drive just clicks .
what do u think of helium hdd. Can they leak and fail faster than air hdds. Can they be usefull for long term storage.
I explain the need for backups to friends and relatives all the time, whever I get the chance. I show thme how to do it. I recommend them programs.
I don't know _any_ of my relatives nor friends who regularly back up. And yes, there are a couple who lost that (emotionally) important files, often photos. They just resist education. Sigh.
Crystal disk says my hhd has 38000+ hours on it.
I basically need a huge storage so that I can dump all photos and videos I capture overtime and I hate to store and pay extra to cloud services. So SSDs are a bit expensive than my need... I think an HDD will be more useful. I can plug it in tv and see any movies or 4k phone videos (can I?).... should I go for a 4tb HDD with a protective cover or a 2tb ssd?
Either. What's more important is that you back up your files. By that I mean that for EVERYTHING you have two copies on two different devices/drives/whatevers.
Heo Leo. I'm not sure if you can answer this question but iv had multiple external HDDs. I used them A LOT. They ALWAYS stop working and I loose access to them as they get slower. Normally, I can use around 30-40% of their storage until they become so slow that I cannot get anything off of them, then they fail. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. I even had a 750gb hdd that stopped working when it only was using about 100gb of space.
I really want to get the data off of them.
If they've failed, you might not be able to. It really depends on HOW they fail. Getting slower and slower kinda implies a surface defect, but that shouldn't happen so often. Anything unusual in how you use these disks?
@@askleonotenboom I havnt looked inside the drives. Some of them were internal drives being used as external drives. Regardless of whether they had a case, they all did the same thing.
Also, it just takes forever for windows to load the drives, or they don't get recognized by windows when connecting to the USB port. (I use a hdd reader device that uses male USB if it has no case) usually the reader has a light to tell whether it worked, it turns red though.)
I should check it again but I have a hard drive from 1998 and works the last time I hooked it up
I purchased a used HDD and it's at his 100% (i mean, it's not damaging... It doesn't have any problems) but it says that it has 100 days of lifetime remaining... What do I do? I'm really worried
a) BACK UP b) prepare to replace it
I have more fear of Windows update denying me the use of an external HD like it did when I first upgraded to Windows 10. After searching the net for help, I came to a few articles saying just go to the company that made it and download a patch. Found out there was a patch for all drives but mine. They even stated that no patch was going to be made. I still have the 2 terabyte drive with over 200,000 images on it plus other stuff, just waiting to be extracted to a drive that works on Win10. The HD was only about 4 or 5 months old. So yeah, I fear Windows upgrade over HD failure. Stored back so long now, I am not sure of the brand. Seagate I think. I have had Seagate and Winchester . And before somebody says, take it to best buy or someplace and have them extract the data, NO NO NO! I went there and few other places. They want $500 to transfer data from a perfectly working HD to another one. My drive is not broken! Windows is. If Apple was not so costly, I would say bye bye to Windows.
So boot a different computer in to a different OS -- WIndows 7, or Linux -- and copy the files. I REALLY don't understand why Win 10 would not access a specific external drive, though. I'd have to see the error when tried.
@@askleonotenboom The OS I was using before it failed at win10 was win7 and it ran great. I have since tried other machines on 7 and even vista. Still refuses to work. I do not have the error written down but I thought it just said , " Can not recognize this drive" or something like that. Maybe I will connect it again and see what it says but it is buried away last few years.. : (
Think long and hard for that answer you guys.. No Pun intended Leo. lol
What hard drives do you use? Is Lacie HDD good for storage for years?
How long has my Seagate Expansion drive 2 TB been attached to a television to record/playback? >>>> 11 YEARS
Thank you very much! Doing electronic for years and I forgot that you're absolutely right. Manipulate all systems. Example: heating element for micro wave can last but if the wax capacitor above it melts on it then the heating element will be destroyed too, Ha-ha! Anything can go wrong with any component at any time. Take Care (PS. Ha-ha, BRAINSTORM!)
When u say back it up does it mean that they have to put it on another hard drive?
So another words to keep both hard drive with the same things inside?
In other words, always have TWO (or more) copies of everything you care about, ideally in two completely different locations.
Nine years of using a Toshiba external hard drive, one terabyte, and it still works great.
6 years and still going strong even after falling countless times.
There has to be an answer. How long can I leave a drive in a drawer and expect that it hasn't seazed up? 30yrs, 50yrs, 100yrs?
No way to know. Depends on too many different things.
@@askleonotenboom I suppose you are right. I work in the photo industry and we tell people to use archival DVDs sometimes, but how long before it is impossible to get a DVD reader, and what a hassle to work with such small chunks. That being said, hopefully soon they find a consumer solution for archiving purposes.
Mine is 10 years old now
My backup hdd died in 3 y
👍👍 More great info............. for me. JimE
I can make a HDD for backup last longer then an SSD.
i have HDD that died jus last year.....it serve me for 10 years, i bought a new one HDD and i haven't used an SSD lol...
TLDR
To skip the First world BS.
We all know the main viewer here is someone who doesn't want to Buy SSDs because of the Price/Life expectancy ratio.
Mechanical creations need to Physically fail and as such they are easy to spot and diagnose. As well as they will deteriorate at a Steady standard pace. A.K.A, all HDDs of one Brand and model will Die Mechanically After a same time.
They need to have Imperfections and flaws that realistically don't pass the QA to differ.
Electronics Fail randomly because their working principle is More BS that Physics. The physical parts in electronics are also reliable.
When your hard drive fails its 99.9% Electronics on it's not the mechanical parts.
Hi Everyone, is 50,000 Hour HDD bad? there is nothing wrong is just happen to have 50,000 hours.
Until it fails