Storage forum: Is there a life expectancy on external hard drives?

Most 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.

This 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!

I 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).

awwww, 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

Ben 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

Well 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.

give us your opinion why, and which brands you avoid- that is the information we are looking for.

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.

Is there a life expectancy on hard drives? Yes, there is, but I can't tell you what it is (it varies). It is not based on calendar time but on "power on hours", at least usually. It's fairly long (the numbers I have seen have ranged from 50,000 to as much as 300,000; note that if the drive was left on 24x7x365, a full year is a bit over 8,000 hours). Also, drives have a system in them called "S.M.A.R.T.", which is "self monitoring and reporting technology" or something like that, generally, in so far as "natural" death is concerned (not death caused by a sudden event like a physical shock), the drive will usually know when it's going to fail and is capable of giving warning IF ASKED. The problems with this are that SMART does not always work unless the drive is connected natively (directly via IDE or SATA; not by USB or Firewire) and many systems are not setup to "ask" the drive about it's health (for drives connected natively, most BIOS' have an option to do this each time the system boots; amazingly, the default, however, is often to disable this capability). In particular, drives connected by USB or Firewire (in other words most external drives) probably never get asked.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: I'd probably rather trust your "old faithful" drives, even if they are 5 years old, than a brand new drive that I had just received from a vendor. The death rate for drives in the first 30 days (some would say in the 1st 6 months) is frighteningly high.

Last comment: An external drive should be a backup, not a primary drive. And, further, you should always have multiple copies of anything that is important. If these rules are followed, it would be difficult to lose data due to the loss of a single drive (and, in particular, a single external drive). You should have another copy somewhere.

Ted, we recently had a discussion on CD and DVD media and the life expectancy predictions were all over the map depending on who read what. Without getting into firm numbers, I've seen hard drives last a few months to lasting many years.

There are advantages to using a hard drive for backup but, first, what do you mean by "backup"? There is a difference between backup and archive. In the case of backup, the primary copy of the data will exist elsewhere. That means you will always have a minimum of TWO copies of the data. In the case of an archive, there may only be one copy on archive media.

One of the issues with backing up to disk is the finite space on the disk. Someone once said that if the backup drive is the same size as the main disk drive, it can always be used as a backup. This may not necessarily be true if you plan on keeping multiple generations (current backup + one that is a month old + one that is 3 months old + one a year old). The more generations you plan to keep, the more space will be taken up. You need to analyze your data to determine how many generations of that data would be kept. Say you are keeping backups of data that changes daily and a loss of 1 week would be unacceptable. Then there would not be much point keeping anything older than a week old as the data would be worthless. Keep in mind, this may not really be the case when you can restore two weeks back and then go through physical papers to recreate the missing data. If you figured out that only ONE copy of all of your data is all that is really needed, then you have very little to worry about because the odds of losing both the original data and the backup is small. However, if you will need to have access to a lot of older generations of the data, making several backups may be a good idea if they are all on seperate media as any media can suffer sudden death brought about by non-disk related things such as temperature problems (fan dies?), processor problem, fire, theft, etc.

If you really want to know what the manufacturer thinks is the lifetime of the disk, look for a statistic on the manufacturer's description of the drive called "Mean Time Before Failure" or "MTBF". There are different measuring units for this but it should give you an idea of how to compare drives. This, of course, assumes that the disk manufacturers all thoroughly tested their drives to come up with this number and there is some conformity in the testing. Still, this is a "mean time". Your mileage may vary (for better or worse).

You don't need to "retire" your drive arbitrarily. Many times a drive will give you a warning before they go such as data errors in some file or by the use of S.M.A.R.T. technology. You can alwas "push" the issue by running diagnostic tests (non-destructive) on the drive and see if small errors popup. I would not recommend this, though, because the tests could damage the drive more than you would expect.

Here are some alternatives to think about:

1) Periodically, burn your data to a DVD. Especially if you use archive grade, these backups could last awhile even though your current backup is still on the disk. If you don't use archive grade, the MTBF is about 5 years and some people reported having degradation after only three.

2) Consider a RAID system for your main data drive and/or the backup drive. If you don't know much about RAID DISK, it can easily be looked up. I would recommend something fast, like, RAID 1 for your primary data drive and a slower RAID 5 or 6 on your backup drives.

3) If there will be a "gap" between your last backup date and your current date for your data, consider keeping some paper copies for the short term (Quicken can print transaction reports, for example).

4) If any drive or fan starts to make unusual noises, that is the time for immediate repair or replacement. Waiting a few weeks is not a good option.

So, to answer your question directly, the MTBF statistic could be used as a guide but remember that a drive can fail at any time and this stat is only a mean/average figure. The best way to handle this is by planning what data needs to be backed up, how often the data changes and ask youself "If the drive (backup or main) dies in 5 minutes, how much trouble would you be in?" Use redundancy for critical data and consider environmental changes as a cause of problems almost more than just the drive "wearing out".

I thought this reply was excellent and it confirmed what I had expected... These drives, if left to run and run will last a very long time...
If the numbers given (750,000 hours = MTBF) are right... that's over 80 years... you will be very old before your drive gives up...
Maybe there is a decimal point problem there, but 8+ years is still pretty good. That's continuous running... However, contrary to what has been said elsewhere... maybe switching on and off lots of times isn't so healthy - the 'stress' of start-up will doubtless do more harm to moveable parts than constant running... remember Newton's first law...
Pre-penultimately (this is my first post, I think)... at least one drive manufacturer - Seagate - has free downloadable software that analyses the health of your hard drive. I don't know for sure, but it probably compares actual read-write times with the expected times for different sections of the disk... I have used it several times and am still using, as a second hard drive, an old 1997 6Gb drive... don't ask me why, I'm a bit bonkers that way... The Seagate Tools program says that it analyses some other manufacturers' drives as well...
Get the software from http://www.seagate.com.
Penultimately: of course you can run said software and some evil gremlin can cause your drive to crash - we are talking in hundredths of millimetres in the amount of substance that is needed for operation of some parts of the drive.
Finally... I wish all readers of this post their fully 750,000 hours of trouble-free disk usage...
Mike

I've been told, that one needs to run -all- their external hard drives, at least once every 1-2 months[for a few seconds], to prevent the data stored from degrading/disappearing from your external HD and to prevent the moving parts from becoming stuck/frozen in place.-Dog Daddy

Google tracked their HD failures. You can read the full report here: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/30990/113/

The main point is:
"In general, Google's hard drive population saw a failure rate that was increasing with the age of the drive. Within the group of hard drives up to one year old, 1.7% of the devices had to be replaced due to failure. The rate jumps to 8% in year 2 and 8.6% in year 3. The failure rate levels out thereafter, but Google believes that the reliability of drives older than 4 years is influenced more by "the particular models in that vintage than by disk drive aging effects."

I would think the same applies to an external drive, but since you only use it for backup, maybe you do what I do. I only turn mine on when I run the backup. That's once a week for about 15 minutes. I expect mine to last a long time.

I have had three (3) different brands of external harddrives
go bad on me. They still go on. Spin. BUT, I could not get
the data off of them.

I was running Windows XP. The brands were: QUE, W.D. + Maxtor.

I found out that Windows XP does not unmount the external USB
drives by itself. After a while it does something to the drive.

Windows VISTA has a automatic dismount for external or USB
drives. I also have a WD Portable Drive that just plugs into
the USB port with NO electrical cords. IT IS GREAT. I have
it in my duffle bag, it takes a beating and still works.

The most important thing to remember is to always follow the correct closing down procedure. Never just pull the plug from the external drive, as i did one night to my cost. I lost 900 films in one go.It is completely dead. I have another one for music which still works perfectly after three years. Hope this helps.