Hard drive life expectancy.

[xDoron22]

Hello everyone, Something I thought about while thinking what to do with almost 8tb of important date..

 

So here's a question:

 

Lets say I bought a new external hard drive (2.5 inch) and an internal hard drive (3.5 inch), both are 2 tb drives.

 

I connect them to my computer (with cable and a dock), I move my 1 tb of backup files to each of the drives, disconnect them safely, store them in appropriate cases and off they go into my safe and in the closet (safe from extreme temperature).

 

Once in 6 months/a year, I connect both drives to my computer for 10-15 minutes just to stretch their mechanical muscles and off they go in the closet again.

 

In theory, Would those drive live indefinitely?

 

Thanks!

 

[BobVonBob]

They won't last indefinitely, but they'll last a very very long time. You'll probably see mechanical issues pop up before any data is permanently lost. Bearings losing lubrication, oxidation, stuff like that. If you don't need to access it all that often like it sounds you don't, blu-ray is a very good household long term storage solution, and should last longer than you will without needing to be spun up occasionally.

[mariushm]

Not really. It could last for 10-20 years, or next time you plug it in the burst of power from power supply could kill it.

 

The start up of a device is the most stressful part, that's when a drive has the higher chance of dying.

Each time you'll connect the drive, you'll risk it dying on you from the stress of starting from "cold"

Long periods of non use can be a problem... the oil in the motor of the drive, if any, can over time go to the bottom of the motor, due to gravity. It's really rare but if you're in a humid area, humidity can be absorbed into chips over time and if such chips suddenly warm up a lot, the water particles inside chips can turn to vapor and blow up chips.

You could also damage it from handling... ESD, static electricity... forget to handle it properly and put your fingers on the drive circuit board and you may zap one of the chips with esd.

 

There's also the infant mortality thing... basically a high percentage of mechanical drives will fail for no reason within the first 3 months or so of (near) 24/7 use ... if you use it for just 8h or so each day, this period is basically extended with a few more months.

See Google's hard drive study (pdf): Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

If you look on page 5, you'll see a nice chart showing the average percentage of drive failures based on how much they're used.. you can see there's much higher chance of drive suddenly dying on you within the first 3 months of usage and after 3-4 years of use :

 

 

Quote

Overall, we expected to notice a very strong and consistent correlation between high utilization and higher failure rates. However our results appear to paint a more complex picture. First, only very young and very old age groups appear to show the expected behavior. After the first year, the AFR of high utilization drives is at most moderately higher than that of low utilization drives. The three-year group in fact appears to have the opposite of the expected behavior, with low utilization drives having slightly higher failure rates than high utilization ones.One possible explanation for this behavior is the survival of the fittest theory. It is possible that the failure modes that are associated with higher utilization are more prominent early in the drive’s lifetime. If that is the case, the drives that survive the infant mortality phase are the least susceptible to that failure mode, and result in a population that is more robust with respect to variations in utilization levels.

So probably the best thing would be to have the drive in your system and leave your system running 24/7 or as close as possible to 24/7 and copy files to the drive each day, watch movies from the drive, basically do something with it. If it survives the first 3 months, you can be a bit more comfortable and say chances are much smaller it would die on you.

 

I've used to run my system with 4 or 5 mechanical drives 24/7 .. other than power cost it's just better for drives to stay spinning and stay at the same temperature 24/7 ... i have drives with 60k+ of runtime hours that work just fine, but typically after 4-5 years cheaper drives tend to have bad sectors so you know it's time to consider replacing them.

 

[xDoron22]

2 minutes ago, BobVonBob said:

They won't last indefinitely, but they'll last a very very long time. You'll probably see mechanical issues pop up before any data is permanently lost. Bearings losing lubrication, oxidation, stuff like that. If you don't need to access it all that often like it sounds you don't, blu-ray is a very good household long term storage solution, and should last longer than you will without needing to be spun up occasionally.

Thanks for the comment!

What do you mean by 'blu-ray'? 

Is it blu-ray disks? Their max size isn't 50 gigs or so? I would need a lot of disk to backup all my data.

[mariushm]

2 minutes ago, BobVonBob said:

They won't last indefinitely, but they'll last a very very long time. You'll probably see mechanical issues pop up before any data is permanently lost. Bearings losing lubrication, oxidation, stuff like that. If you don't need to access it all that often like it sounds you don't, blu-ray is a very good household long term storage solution, and should last longer than you will without needing to be spun up occasionally.

Not really, don't rely on optical media to last more than 2-3 years these days, unless you use proper archival media and even then I wouldn't trust them.

Google disc rot ... process where chemicals between disc layers oxidize or go bad and the disc slowly becomes unreadable

[xDoron22]

6 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Not really. It could last for 10-20 years, or next time you plug it in the burst of power from power supply could kill it.

 

The start up of a device is the most stressful part, that's when a drive has the higher chance of dying.

Each time you'll connect the drive, you'll risk it dying on you from the stress of starting from "cold"

Long periods of non use can be a problem... the oil in the motor of the drive, if any, can over time go to the bottom of the motor, due to gravity. It's really rare but if you're in a humid area, humidity can be absorbed into chips over time and if such chips suddenly warm up a lot, the water particles inside chips can turn to vapor and blow up chips.

You could also damage it from handling... ESD, static electricity... forget to handle it properly and put your fingers on the drive circuit board and you may zap one of the chips with esd.

 

There's also the infant mortality thing... basically a high percentage of mechanical drives will fail for no reason within the first 3 months or so of (near) 24/7 use ... if you use it for just 8h or so each day, this period is basically extended with a few more months.

See Google's hard drive study (pdf): Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population

If you look on page 5, you'll see a nice chart showing the average percentage of drive failures based on how much they're used.. you can see there's much higher chance of drive suddenly dying on you within the first 3 months of usage and after 3-4 years of use :

 

 

So probably the best thing would be to have the drive in your system and leave your system running 24/7 or as close as possible to 24/7 and copy files to the drive each day, watch movies from the drive, basically do something with it. If it survives the first 3 months, you can be a bit more comfortable and say chances are much smaller it would die on you.

 

I've used to run my system with 4 or 5 mechanical drives 24/7 .. other than power cost it's just better for drives to stay spinning and stay at the same temperature 24/7 ... i have drives with 60k+ of runtime hours that work just fine, but typically after 4-5 years cheaper drives tend to have bad sectors so you know it's time to consider replacing them.

 

Wow, Thanks for all that info!

So my best option for protecting all my date is to just connect them to my pc and use them.. Guess I will need new case than hehe.

 

Any other options for storing a lot of accessible data

 

What is considered the best method for keep large amount of data safe?

 

Thanks!

[Chiyawa]

Well, there is something called M.Disc. Maybe that could help? Info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

 

Anyway, if you want to store or archive data, the best way I can think of is using off-site archive system. This means having multiple storage system in different location (nope, different location inside your house doesn't count) then create schedule backup within them. For the backup system, create RAID 1 (mirror) to increase the integrity of the data as it is less prone to data loss if one of the disk in mirror group failed. To increase off-site security, you can encrypt the data and store the encrypted data, and make sure you store the decryption key somewhere safe.

 

Another 'cheaper' alternative (if you don't mind the possibility of data breach or hacked by others) is to use cloud storage service such as Google Drive, but they only give you a limited storage and will need you to upgrade with a monthly or annual fee.

[RayLeech]

2 hours ago, xDoron22 said:

Is it blu-ray disks? Their max size isn't 50 gigs or so? I would need a lot of disk to backup all my data.

As Chiyawa pointed out, MDISC are a good long term storage option, but are limited to 100 gigs.  I've been using them since 2011/2012 to archive some of my business records. The ones that burned correctly are still readable! They are slow (and relatively expensive), so you should probably pick and chose exactly which data needs to be saved long term.

[Guest]

Supposedly HDD last 5~ years but it would appear many outlive that expectancy several times.

[xDoron22]

Those M-DISCs are really expensive! There is no way I can make my private archive out of them

Damn..I guess I got to a dead end. my best choise is just to connect all my drives to my pc and when one is starting to fail just replace it with a new one every few years..

Thats a bummer.

 

But thanks to all of you !