25,000-Drive Study Gives Insight On How Long Hard Drives Actually Last

MrSeb writes with this excerpt, linking to several pretty graphs: "For more than 30 years, the realm of computing has been intrinsically linked to the humble hard drive. It has been a complex and sometimes torturous relationship, but there's no denying the huge role that hard drives have played in the growth and popularization of PCs, and more recently in the rapid expansion of online and cloud storage. Given our exceedingly heavy reliance on hard drives, it's very, very weird that one piece of vital information still eludes us: How long does a hard drive last? According to some new data, gathered from 25,000 hard drives that have been spinning for four years, it turns out that hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate."

Comments

Re:Um..

[alen]

over the last 20 years i've used almost every brand of hard drive and have had all the brands fail at least once. every single brand has had quality issues at one time or another

20% failure rate in 3 years is LOW?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate.

You call a 20% failure rate in 3 years LOW? My career rate is closer to 5% over 5 years - who keeps buying all those crappy hard drives?

Re:20% failure rate in 3 years is LOW?

[houstonbofh]

>> hard drives actually have a surprisingly low failure rate.

You call a 20% failure rate in 3 years LOW? My career rate is closer to 5% over 5 years - who keeps buying all those crappy hard drives?

They do have a slightly more harsh environment than your desktop. On for 24/7 to start... And in a box with a lot of other vibrating drives for another.

Re:20% failure rate in 3 years is LOW?

[the_other_chewey]

Careful. These are consumer grade drives. In other words, they're meant for use by typical consumers, where the disk spends 99.9999% of its time track following and running in a relatively low power state.

That would amount to about 32 seconds of activity per year.
There's more drive activity than that in a single Windows boot.
Stop making up numbers.

Only four years?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Four years isn't long enough. Come back to us when you reach 6 or 8 years. The study looked at drives during the warranty period (WD drives have 5 year warranty).

Also the information they presented doesn't show that low of a failure rate.

Useless study

[slashmydots]

This study was completely useless. WHAT BRAND WERE THEY?! Hitachis and Fujitsus have a higher failure rate by a factor of about ten than a top of the line Seagate drive.

Re:Brands/temperatures/power cycling

[jhumkey]

Only my personal experience but as for "power cycling" . . . I follow one basic rule.

If you turn it off every night (when you go home from work) . . . it'll work fine, and last five years . . . then you're in the danger zone.
If you LEAVE IT ON for weeks at a time and NEVER turn it off . . . it'll work fine, and last five years . . . then you're in the danger zone.
What you NEVER want to do is . . . run it for a year (like at a factory plant) then turn it off for a week vacation. You're toast. (In my limited experience of 28 years) . . . if you turn it off that week . . . there is a 75% chance . . . it'll never turn on again.

I don't know if the "grease" settles, or the metal binds . . . I just know if its been on a year . . . don't turn it off for more than an hour or two if you want it to continue to work.

Next step

[jones_supa]

Run the test longer and show us the data for span of 10 years. Additionally, reveal the brands and models of the disks. Thanks.

Re:A study by BackBlaze

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

These are the same stupid fucks that use rubber bands around hard drives in their "SAN" storage.

Given that anything remotely serious is based on the premise that you can't trust your hard drives, is a strategy that makes your HDDs incrementally less trustworthy; but much cheaper, actually 'stupid'?

I wouldn't want to use BackBlaze's 'Pods' on a small scale; because part of their low cost is achieved by moving all the redundancy, fault tolerance, etc. into software (and, for a small shop, paying a bit more for fancy hardware that handles that, along with backups, is cheaper than having a software guru on hand); but on a large scale, making the amount of 'overhead' (ie. dollars worth of hardware purchased to support each disk) as low as possible, and just using software (with its high up-front cost; but zero cost to copy an arbitrary number of times) seems pretty reasonable.

Now, if their arrangement was so dodgy that it was actively murdering drives, that'd be another story; but its thermals and electrical supply are good enough that the drives inside get to fail, or not, the same as though they were in any other enclosure, and these enclosures are crazy cheap, so why not?

My experience

[Hamsterdan]

With my limited sample of hard drives (around 50 around the years), what I've found so far. The drives range from 1.2GB to 1TB models, SCSI/IDE/SATA

*ALL* but 1 or 2 of my Maxtors either died or sounded like a bandsaw pretty soon

My Seagates are all dead save 1 or 2

My WD seem fine, albeit some are noisy, but my two 1TB green pulled from external cases are pretty much about dead.

I've had only 1 out of 10 SCSI drive die so far.

So my experience so is Maxtor was crap, when Seagate bought them it lowered Seagate's reliability. And since *ALL* the drives I've pulled from enclosures are dead, I'm guessing they are selling their crappiest drives to other manufacturers.

The problem is they are not trying to make better drives, they are trying to make *bigger* drives. Fuck a 4TB drive, gimme a reliable 1TB.

All my obsolete hard drives were dismantled and recycled, and from what I saw, the more recent the drive, the cheaper it's made (and less reliable)

I should've kept statistics while dismantling them.