Storage: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives?
- 5/29/09 1:02 PM
Lets see
by autome5 - 5/28/09 2:38 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
My friend has been in the IT field over 20 years, internal hard drives he says last about 5 years, so except for the lack of heat witch I don't know if that causes internal hard drives not to last as long?So I would give a educated guess of 5 years.I wonder if SSD drives will last at least 2 times as long because of now moving parts?
Windows System Restore problem
by Comray - 5/28/09 5:05 PM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I didn't read your question about Windows System Restore problems until just now But what I have found to work when Windows says after a attempted restore that your computer could not be restored is.
Open msconfig. Go to Services. Check mark "Hide all Microsoft Services". Than select "Disable all Services". Restart the computer and run System Restore again. The problem is that a number of programs have a file locker built into them and a locked file prevents System Restore from working. This is a simple solution that works well. But still doesn't work if the problem is caused by Malware that has been on the computer for a few days
NEW life for dead EXTERNAL Hard Drive
by jackw37069 - 5/29/09 6:43 PM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I recent had my external hard drive die. In fact, it ended up dragging my system down - causing 4 hours to boot up windows, etc.. I was not able to access the drive in its original case. BUT, I was able to extract it from the original case, and install it into a new case. It was just a regular IDE hard drive. The new case only cost $17.99. And, now it works fine.
Life expectancy short
by BillSamuel - 5/29/09 7:33 PM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I've had 3 different external hard drives, each by a different manufacturer. Some were bought based on ratings by places like CNET. None lasted much over a year. I only used them to backup files once a day. I got so tired of them crapping out that I switched to online storage. But when I had to do a restore, it took 2.5 days to restore 12 GB. So I've bought another external hard drive, deciding that online storage is not appropriate for primary backup. Will keep the online backup as secondary.
Depends on usage but if you lose an external don't fret...
by ACRScout - 5/29/09 9:48 PM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
If you have an external drive fail, it may not be the drive that has failed.
I have had computers in the home since 1990. I am currently running a network of 7 machines in my home. Since the beginning I have had one drive actually "fail". I have some drives that have been working for the full 19 years. I currently have four external USB drives and one ethernet storage drive in the network. The USB drives are the least reliable of those in my system, but the drives are not the problem, it is the case interface that seems to bail on me. I have had only two of them fail in the past three years, the interfaces not the drives, I simply tore the cases open and pulled the drives and installed them in the computer as internal drives, and they work fine. I am a fairly active gamer and I have 4 x 500Gb in a non striped RAID in my gaming machine today, all are over 6 years old and all are working well. I have been told by some "experts" that certain brands are good and others are bad, I was told by a computer store owner that he would never use a Western Digital drive. Well, I am no fan of their software, but 95% of the drives I have been discussing are WD brand and I can't say they are the best only because I have not used others that much, I can tell you that in my experience, WDs have been reliable for me since 1990, and still going.
Extending life
by kosmolino - 5/30/09 12:12 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
If you use your external H.D fro backup, make sure to plug it off after each use. The life cycle of your H.D depence of its total working time so it is extended when not working.
Ronen
External drive Life
by Macron - 5/30/09 10:42 AM In reply to: Extending life by kosmolinoFirst as some have mentioned, HEAT build-up internally is the biggest factor next to quality of the drive in a preassembled enclosure and then handling. Avoid knocks an movement when runing or powered on!!
What I have not seen mentioned is that in the case of 3.5" drives which are nearly all 7200RPM get quite hot even in your tower cases which usually have adequate cooling. But in the external enclosures only 1 out of 20 will have a cooling fan and vents built-in. No cooling fan then life will be very short and 99% cause of failure! As for the aluminum cases claiming they self cool being heat sunk is totally rubbish. If you examine them few if any have the drive mounted to the external case directly. They are usually mount on some sliding plate which is inserted into the case and that is not even remotely close to the cooling needed and some on rubber or other heat isolating material. A heavy highly conductive mount is required and the four screws themselves are not enough to transfer the heat outwards to the case and air.
If you are building you own which I have done in all but one instance I have used vented metal cases or a convection heated plastic case (vents top and bottom allowing heat to flow out and cool air to enter at the bottom so their is no build-up). Bytecc used to make a few well cooled aluminum cases with an 80mm fan and even they can get quite warm after hours of running. Use a quality drive (brand name, EG Seagate, Fujitsu, WD which is backed for 3 years or more) Until recently the Seagate warranty was 5 years and was always my choice along with their high performance chipsets.
Using a model with a dual voltage power supply rather than a single voltage AC adapter in which 12V in is also converted to 5V internally. I prefer an external dual voltage power supply since the PS heat is outside the chassis. If it is well cooled an internal switching power supply (has a 110VAC input cable) would also be good. Bottom line is the chassis MUST have vents for the heat to get out and cool air to get in. The fan moves the air and if its convection as I believe Nextec makes some. Hot air rises so don't expect air transfer if you lay it on the side.
Many preassembled solutions are quite unreliable for long term use and the drive OEMs used are not industry leaders, simply cheap storage. The longer you run them the hotter they get especially if reading or writing data. This generates much more heat then when idle. Pay a bit more and you'll have many years of service from your external drive.
How long ? Depends on the drive
by markske100 - 5/30/09 12:47 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
How long a hard drive lasts depends on an number of fators:
- Heat. In a portable hard drive, this can be a problem with, for example maxtor diamondmax 9plus and 10 drives, they tend to get quite hot. Today , there are a lot of drives that run at a reduced spindle speed. Since you mostly connect an external drive with th USB bus, this is no problem, because in practice, you transfer data at about 30MB/s, this bottlenecks even today's slowest drives.
- The voltage a drive gets from its power supply. 12v between 11.4 and 12.6 volts, higher for an extended time means damage to the motor drive and spindle motor.
- times of spin-up and spindown. The spin-up and spindown are the most taxing on the bearings, spindle motor and motor drive
- times you rewrite the drive. This determines the wear on the platters. This factor is less dangerous, because even with some bad sectors, you can still get most of the data off the drive.
- Age, or mor specifically , power on time
It is a matter of luck when it comes to when a drive fails, you can never tell when it exactly will fail, but you can limit the chances of it failing:
Don't buy a drive that has bad reviews. For example, some time ago there were bad forum ratings about samsung spinpount F1 drives that seemed to fail by the bushes. I had, at the time, just bought 3 brand new samsung spinpoints. They all failed within 2 months. even the return disk from RMA ( a 1 TB SATA drive) again failed within the month.
Don't leave a drive turned on continuously, but don't turn it on and off every 10 minutes.
A drive running for an hour is likely to have less wear than a drive spinning-up.
Don't keep essential data on only one drive. No, seriously, don't. Back up all the data you do not want to lose. A drive only has one certain factor : It Will Fail! You just don't know when exactly that will happen (within the month, within 5 years, who knows ? )
If you do want reliability: A drive is most likely to fail the first 2 months of its lifetime, and after 3 years, at the end of it's lifetime, the chance of it failing starts to rise again.
External Hard Drive failure
by foxie849150 - 5/30/09 1:45 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
This was a timely topic.
I have had 2 MAXTOR external HDD die on me.
My Son has gad on MAXTOR die on him.
In all three cases the units were hardly used at all.
Used occasionally for backups and storage and then turned off.
The supplier was not interested in the fact that 3 of their products had failed. (All three out of warranty)
They suggested data recovery - at a cost of up to $2,000 each with no guarantee that the data could be recovered.
I have had computers for up to 10 years with no internal HDD failure.
I have also worked in companies where the HDD has run for 7 years or more 24/7 with no failure.
My suggestion is to steer clear of cheap HDD.
From now on it is only WD or Lacie for me.
Life expectancy irrelevant
by maartsen - 5/30/09 3:02 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Hard drive manufacturers publish a host of data on their products - I don't mean the manufacturer of the finished product, but the manufacturer of the actual drives themselves. I have a USB RAID drive assembly made by Cavalier, for instance, that has two Western Digital drives inside. From a "predict the future" perspective, MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) will enable a system designer or integrator to calculate how many drives can fail within a given time period, thereby enabling her to ensure an appropriate number of spares are on hand, but there isn't any way to calculate when it is appropriate to replace a drive. Too many factors are variable - drive orientation, drive temperature, ambient temperature, cooling method, write cycles per hour, I could go on.
Most importantly, data stored on any type of drive - magnetical, optical, solid state - is never secure. Especially writable optical media has a high risk of failure, but the fact that other storage media is less at risk means little, other than that they can - and will - all eventually fail.
I back all of my systems up to a small - 1.5 terabytes - RAID server array on my home network. This backs itself up to yet another RAID drive assembly, a couple of times a day. For each of the drives I use, I have a spare, and once a year or so I "back up the backup" and swap the drives out. While this method is not 100% failsafe, it approaches what we refer to as "five nines" in the industry - a statistical uptime availability of 99.999%. This may sound a very high number, but 99.999% still translates to a downtime of a little over five hours a year, in an assembly that runs 24/7/365.
Online backup services cannot be considered reliable, either, as you have no control over the way the vendor maintains their server park, or over what happens to your data should the server owner go bankrupt. Where data stored with Amazon, Google or IBM is probably safe, as these companies make server space available in server parks they use to store their own end product on, there are ultimately no guarantees.
The assembly I use was relatively cheap to buy and put together, and takes little time to maintain. Decide how important it is to have access to the data stored - there are guidelines how long tax data must be stored, for instance, and you probably don't want to lose Quicken data with mortgage information for the length of the mortgage, assuming you have "gone digital" with this, as I have. The best you can hope to do is have regularly maintained storage available, to back up the backups, and to ensure sufficient UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) electricity is available online to power down drive systems in an organized manner when a power failure occurs - a drive that loses power during a write operation has a good chance of becoming corrupted, and there is no statistic that covers this common cause of data loss.
One method to keep an eye on drive performance is regular defragmentation of the data on the drive. Windows Vista can do this automatically, even on a daily basis, assuming a system is kept "on" 24/7. "Defragging" will provide an early warning of impending drive failure, because the routine will provide error messages when it detects bad areas on the drive it is defragmenting. At the first error message, it is time to immediately back up all data, and then replace the affected drive - assuming you have a spare on hand, one that uses the same form factor and interface technology the original equipment did.
External hard drive life expectancy
by unclekpm - 5/30/09 3:36 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I had an external USB hard drive crap out after 2 years. However, I heard a whine (like you hear when a camera flash is charging) so i figured a capacitor was bad. It turned out that the circuit board that connects the IDE to USB was blown. I unplugged the drive from that board and made it an internal hard drive by plugging it in as a slave drive. I got all my info back, and it has been running fine ever since.
Kevin
Failed USB HD
by kjellkri - 5/30/09 4:09 AM In reply to: External hard drive life expectancy by unclekpmI have a total of 10 USB harddrives. Of these five have failed. In two cases it was the HDD and in the other three the electronics (all three were WD). When the HDD failed it was out of warrenty so I just reformatted them and could reuse them. The three with electronic problems all failed within warranty. They all stopped beeing recognized by the OS. The first I got replaced by WD. But with the two others I ran into problems. I use them for backup of my server. So the data on the drives is very sensitive. It contains all information abot my bussiness. Thus it was impossible for me to send the USB HD for repair. One thing to be aware of.(Oh, by the was, there was no error what so ever on the HDD it self).
From that lesson learned I have now changed strategy and have more or less stopped using the encased USB drives. Instead I have ordered a USB dock for SATA drives. I intend to use that dock as a "tape station" where SATA drives will act as tapes. Two docks. One for a weekly full backups (mirror) and one for all files changed since. If that fails, with the mirror, I will just use full backup.
Yes there is a life expectancy to all hard drives...
by darrenforster99 - 5/30/09 3:44 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
All hard drives have a certain life expectancy, although it all depends on how they are used and how you keep them.
If you keep them in a dusty, non-ventilated room and you are smoking 50 **** a day near them then I'd give them a couple of weeks before they die.
However keep them in a good well ventilated area, and clean from dust, away from smoke, etc and they could last a number of years (sometimes even decades).
In addition to this it's also down to drive electronics, no-one can predict exactly how long all the electronics are going to last for in a hard drive.
You also have to consider other external factors which you can do nothing about, such as fire.
One place I used to work in had a major problem when they kept all their hard drives downstairs in a place that was on a flood plain (hmmm... guess what happened?). Luckily they'd kept all the paperwork upstairs, but they had to go through all the paperwork one by one and put it back onto new hard drives a very time consuming process.
So even if you wonder whether or not a hard drive will fail you also have to learn from their mistakes and take into account outside factors as well as whether or not the hard drive itself will fail.
A lot of my stuff I keep a copy on MMC memory cards, hard drive, and Gmail that way if my HDD dies I've got it on either my MMC cards or Gmail, if Google goes bankrupt or anything I've got it on mmc cards and hard drive, and if the mmc cards die (probably the most likely one to go first!) then I've got it backed up on hard drive or Google.
In addition to this if anyone breaks into our house and steals the hard drive or memory cards the files are still there on Google.
That is another important thing to remember if backing up your important files, ensure you keep a spare copy of them somewhere else other than in your house. That way even if someone breaks into your house and steals your items your files are safe outside of the house.
Ext storage
by daevans - 5/30/09 4:54 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Hi everyone
OK, so how many times should I backup? One, three, ten? This is a question I have often thought about. What if the backup fails? Could this be Armageddon?
The more times I backup,the longer it takes me, the more chances I have of losing the data AND the hard drives.
Realistically, what is reasonable? How many copies of my HD should I have?
Bemusedly yours,
Dave :oS
Life expectancy of hard drives
by northgeek - 5/30/09 5:43 AM In reply to: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
I was a hardware technical specialist for 30 years.
1. Electronic failures were more prevalent in the 1st year then in the following 10 years.
2. Systems that were powered on 24/7 had less failures then ones that were powered off everyday; so don't power off your computer if you will be using it within an hour or 2.
3. The heads in disks actually fly over the surface of the platters closer then the particle of cigarette smoke(I think maybe about 10 microns). Every time the drive stops the heads touch down on the platter surface with a potential for a head crash. A former post had the stats for 50,000 average start/stops before failure.
4. After you backup your data, no matter what media you use, read the backup. One of my customers did not do this and when he needed his backup copy could not read it!
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