Storage: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives?
- 5/29/09 1:02 PM
Looking for a smarter drive helps...
by bob.taylor - 6/1/09 7:18 AM In reply to: Life Span? Definitely! by ZorchedAll mechanical things will eventually wear - as in "normal wear and tear". I like to think of it in terms of revolutions - whether it's a washing machine, power drill, or hard drive - the little bits and pieces only have so many revolutions of life before they eventually give out.
Getting a drive that knows when to stop spinning, or managing that cycle yourself by only connecting and powering up when you're performing a backup, will maximize the life of the machine.
The counter argument is based on constant environment - powering up and down causes thermal variations - heat and cool - expand and contract - another factor in the life-cycle calculation.
Hard drives have Smart technology circuity
by kenkirsch - 6/3/09 11:14 AM In reply to: Looking for a smarter drive helps... by bob.taylorMost hard drives have "smart" technology that can report read/write failures. As the drive error rate goes up the smart technology contionue to retry the request. But most utility don't read this information so it is usually useless informtion.
However, I have used software (SpinRite) that that can read this information. This software is mainly used for hard drive recovery
but it may be help to evaluate whether a drive is having problems and detecting when the error rate is high, hopefully allowing someone to replace the drive before failure occurs. But it may be cheaper to just buy a new hard drive. 
Hard drives life expentancy
by salamoun - 5/30/09 12:36 AM In reply to: Life expectancy of external hard drives varies by ben_myerswell said,,, congractulation
Average life of a hard drive.
by ldavidson - 5/30/09 4:42 AM In reply to: Life expectancy of external hard drives varies by ben_myersThis formula never fails;
The life of a hard drive is directly proportional to the amount of really important stuff you have on it and inversely proportional to the length of time since you've last backed it up.
Therefore, If you have every family photo you've ever taken, every song in your collection (many only available on THAT drive) and all of your important personal business documents on the drive and you haven't backed up, RAIDed, or immaged it off in, say, about a year....STAND BACK! That sucker's toast!
for: Average life of a hard drive. - by ldavidson
by gtscnet - 5/30/09 2:20 PM In reply to: Average life of a hard drive. by ldavidsonthis perfectly scientific and mathematically sound equation has my hard drive to back it up, evidentially speaking.
gt
Try reversing the equation
by cyberdave03 - 5/31/09 6:37 AM In reply to: Average life of a hard drive. by ldavidsonI think you meant to say the opposite: the life of a hard drive is INVERSELY proportional to the amount of really important stuff you have (in other words, the more important the stuff, the shorter the life seems to be).
Harddrive
by Sheila1949 - 5/31/09 3:38 PM In reply to: Average life of a hard drive. by ldavidsonI have had my little Dell since 2003 but also I keep upgrading things. I have to tell you if this little puter quit's tomorrow I didn't waste a dime that I have put into. I am a power user;(grahic design) would trade my little desktop for anything you could offer me to this day, New and In Box. My computer has been very good to me of course I am nice to my darling in return. Upgrades and cleaning are not option here I do this quite often. Thanks for the article, awesome.
Happy Computing, take care and things will just keep on keeping on.
dogs of drive
by gtscnet - 5/30/09 2:31 PM In reply to: Life expectancy of external hard drives varies by ben_myersawwww, cummon ben! i'm about to pick up another drive and wanted to avoid the one year blunders.
if you can't say here, please tell me: gtisnow aaaaaaaaat yaahhoooo
thanks
gt
I agree with Ben Myers
by morris.davis - 6/2/09 6:08 AM In reply to: Life expectancy of external hard drives varies by ben_myersI've been running an external for 2-years and two internals for 12-years. In fact, I am about to retire my 12-year old computer, pull the drives and make them external drives for my new machine. My son did this already with his machines. He pulled the drives, put them in enclosures, bought a USB hub and now command them with his lap top. I rather have a drive rack instead of a bunch of wires running everywhere.
Like ben stated, alway turn off your machine when you are done. Letting your machine run in idle waste energy and cost you money.
Last thing; you can read an old windows drive with an apple machine but you can not write to it without drive maintenance first....
soon will buy one
by vetansant - 6/6/09 10:27 AM In reply to: Life expectancy of external hard drives varies by ben_myersBen I want to buy an external hard drive, at this moment I don't owned one. Would like to buy that same brand had worked for you. Can that be possible?
I respect you by not mentioning the bad brands.
Thanks
Most reliable....
by Phil411 - 6/13/09 9:19 PM In reply to: soon will buy one by vetansantwhen buying any electronic devices always purchase well known established brands, such as Sony, Panasonic, RCA, Toshiba, etc. As it relates to the most reliable hdd manufacture, in my experience SeaGate, Western Digital, & to a point Hitachi. I have a 40GB seagate in my desktop had that for bout 6 years, works great. Also had a 60GB segate for my laptop, that survived a few falls, bout 4 years, SMART data read all's good (had to do replace it, needed more room; 250GB WD) still use it as an external though.
Not necessarily
by BillSamuel - 6/14/09 3:32 AM In reply to: Most reliable.... by Phil411Well I've had Western Digital and Seagate, and they both died on me. I recently bought a Transcend - not a brand I'd heard of before but highly reviewed.
Highly Reviewed.
by Phil411 - 8/19/09 2:38 PM In reply to: Not necessarily by BillSamuelYou said so yourself, Transcend has a good track record!
life of a hard drive
by Bob Newman - 5/22/09 7:39 PM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Insurance and piece of mind is the first order for me. With the technology issue the computer will have gone through two evolutions of advancement. The question is, is the computer fast enough and has enough memory (or can be expanded with additional of the correct type) to put the additional money into it. Should the answer be "Yes", then replace the hard drive and clone the original drive to it. The original drive then becomes a back up drive.
Be advised that in some cases Microsoft will require you to contact support to register the new hard drive to the computer.
Persistenc of data only gets cheaper
by whmurray - 5/22/09 7:49 PM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
All artifacts have a finite life. Disk drives have a mean-time to failure measured in thousands of hours. This number actually goes up with the age of the device; those that do not fail in the first ninety days will last a long time.
However, you must plan for the eventual failure of your drive. Fortunately for you, the price of external storage is falling so fast that you can now have a TB drive for less than you paid for the 250 GB drive several years ago. Buy a new drive and copy the one that you have to it; hours, perhaps a day. Retire the old drive and keep it for backup. Repeat every couple of years. While not perfect, this will give you a high degree of comfort.
Consider using an online backup service such as Carbonite or Google. These service use "hierarchical storage" strategies that provide for your data to persist as long as they do.
Modern technology does nothing quite so well as to make cheap, dense, portable copies of data. The total loss of one's data reflects some absence of planning.
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