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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."
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
Maybe it's a CONSPIRACY in which they've invested ALL their manufacturing PRECISION into guaranteeing that the drives will fail precisely THREE DAYS after WARRANTY.
Consider this! You register for warranty, and you enter the purchase date, right? What if... WHAT IF... some FIRMWARE CODES in the drive pick up this transaction and STORE THE INFORMATION IN FLASH. Then then starting the day after warranty expiry the drive STARTS TO DO BAD THINGS f.e. not park properly or run just a little too slowly or maybe even there's like a secret drop of DESTRUCTION SAUCE which is released onto the platters at this time.
Anyway you see where I'm getting here? REPTILE OVERLORDS are conspiring with 9/11 truthers (yeah they're in on it! it's all a false flag operation) to destroy hard drives.
And this whole study.
Is.
SPONSORED BY A JEWISH-OWNED CORPORATION.
Yeah.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/07/02/18/0420247/google-releases-paper-on-disk-reliability
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.
No, I don't remember your name. But the memory mapped screen on a TRS80 from 1977 is from 15360 to 16383 if that helps.
I worked at an on-line service for several years way back in the late 90s and early 00s and this data is consistent with the data I collected then over perhaps an order of magnitude more units. While 25K drives may not be a lot in the scale of today's internet services it is more than enough to draw statistically valid conclusions, as opposed to that, oh, 1 drive in your desktop gaming system that failed 1 day after the warranty expired.
Who is General Failure anyway, and why does he keep trying to read my hard drive??
G-Force music visualization
Need lube to get more statements out of your ass?
For the last 4 years I've had to deal with WD RE2, RE3 and RE4 hard drives. Although they are enterprise sata hard drives, they seem to fail at a rate much worse than the consumer ones Backblaze based their report on. I see much fewer problems in the first year but they usually start dying when they reach 16000 power-on hours, with only about 40% exceeding 26000 hours.
Having said that, I count sector reallocation as a failure. In my experience, as soon as a disk has non-zero value in Reallocated_Sector_Ct and Reallocated_Event_Count, it usually fails completely within a few weeks or months.
Fortunately, WD has a tool on their website which you must run before they give you an RMA number. I managed to get its source code:
int main()
{
printf ("Disk OK, no errors found.");
return 0;
}
Who is General Failure anyway, and why does he keep trying to read my hard drive??
I'm sorry, that's classified. And the NSA categorically denies doing it.
He is Kernal Panic's superior officer.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.