It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven’t noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven’t noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.
Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?
If you don’t have backups then yes you should be worried.
Same goes for any storage.
of any age. brand new disks fail too.
There are only. 2 kinds of people:
- Those who have lost data
- Those who will lose data.
Plan accordingly
Always make sure that important files and folders are backed up at least twice! Even when drives are new, they can and do fail at random without warning. My HDD’s are the better half of a decade old and I had no issue with them at all until last year. They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
I’ve not responded to the majority of comments in this thread because I’d have nothing to add except “thanks”, but here:
They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
Er why haven’t you bought new drives at that point??
I’m gonna buy a new computer when this one inevitably refuses to boot up 🤷♀️ there’s more age related issues besides just the HDD’s at this point so it’ll be less hassle to start over.
I’ve not responded to the majority of comments in this thread because I’d have nothing to add except “thanks”, but here:
They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
Er why haven’t you bought new drives at that point??
I’ve not responded to the majority of comments in this thread because I’d have nothing to add except “thanks”, but here:
They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
Er why haven’t you bought new drives at that point??
Hdd can live a long and happy life, but absolutely don’t trust a single drive ever, independently of how rugged, old or expensive it is.
My main hard drive lasted 5 years with 1 year of power on hours, working fine and suddenly failed. It was a good fail because I was able to get all the data from it, but it took almost one month for how slow it was.
Always assume your data storage is going to die tomorrow and be ready to replace it.
Always assume your data is in N-1 places at all times.
Any drive can and will fail at any time, no matter how well it was working yesterday.
I’ve had people in with their entire PhD and years of research on one single drive, with no backup - just gone.
If your data is only in one place, it will be in zero places soon enough.
Disposable or replaceable data - which honestly is going to be 90% of your stuff - meh.
But anything that you need and couldn’t replace, that shit needs backing up to AT LEAST one other place.
As for the rest - drives can fail slowly, or they can fail fast. When they fail slowly, you start getting a couple of disk errors here and there, and you may just be able to order one in time to replace it.
When they fail fast, they just drop like a heart attack.
There’s no way to know in advance. If your data is safe, then you’ll either be out a few days while a replacement arrives, or you’ll be just about able to copy stuff across. At that age, I wouldn’t trust it farther than I could spit it. It could work fine for years more, but the moment you rely on it for something important, it’ll give out on you.
- Follow the 3 - 2 - 1 backup rule.
- You can use SMART to see the health of your drive.
As others have said, you don’t have to be concerned about anything if you keep good backups. Disk storage at this time is very cheap compared to what it used to be, you could probably find a 5200 RPM 5 TB disk for ~100 dollars USD, or even better, two 2 TB disks which you could configure with software RAID.
The majority of HDD failures happen in the first 1-2 years (see Backblaze data). I have a NAS that has the same 5 drives running since 2013 and in all that time those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total.
That said I assume that any drive can fail at any time and anything I don’t want to lose has 2 backup copies, e.g. stuff I am working on on my PC gets copied to that NAS, that in turn backs it up online.
those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total
This is actually a good thing for longevity. Start up and stopping is the hardest part of a drive’s life. So you will see more failures on a personal PC that you turn off every night than a server drive running 24/7. Laptop drives will typically fare the worst as they may be power cycled many times a day, often fully stop when idle for power saving and get shaken much more than other drives.
i have a 1tb hdd that i’ve taken with me over a few different pcs now, it’s 10 years old and whined about dying to me like 7 years ago.
I only use it for backup stuff, but it’s still going strong. Mostly I leave it just chilling like the old veteran it is.
Who knows. A few years ago my main drive (seagate 1TiB 10kRPM) exploded in use. It was only 4 years old. The company I sent it to for recovery told me all was left of the disks was dust. I live my life thinking it might happen again any time. This means regular backups (backupS plural).
My father also had a Seagate he kept old family photos on that just unexpectedly died. Their stuff is trash.
I mean, all hard drives are expected to die.
Sorry about your photos though. My boomer dad made the same mistake.
backup. backup. backup.
then also check the SMART stats on it and run the internal tests. if you don’t know how, gsmartcontrol is a good place to start.
i’ve had a couple disks fail right away, and others that just go forever–and one of those is a deathstar, even.
I’ve got a 300gb WD velociraptor 10k rpm model that has been running almost non stop in every computer I have built for the last 20 years. I only use it as an extension of my steam library though so when it does die I won’t lose anything.
First rule, always have backups. Especially with an older drive, make sure anything you might need is duplicated somewhere else. Ideally off-site to prevent loss in case of things like burglary or a fire. Even something as simple as Google Drive or OneDrive.
Personally, I’d take a look at replacing it with an SSD if you can afford to, not only because of the age, but better performance. You may not notice slowness, but making the jump from a HDD to an SSD is still at least a little noticeable even on secondary drives from my experience.
it could easily last a few more years but after that long you should assume it could fail any day and either don’t keep anything critical on it or make regular backups of anything important.
You should get a new drive when yours breaks - its usually pretty obvious when that’s happening.
You absolutely should ensure your important files are backed up though, even on a brand new drive.
