Age of a hard drive.

Gifura · June 9, 2020

Hello community,

Recently I bought a hard drive from a friend. It says that it was made back in 2011.it has 8000 hours.I know that hard drives normally have a life expectancy of 40,000 hours . I also know they can fail at any time but does the age of the hard drive matter or only the power on hours in this case.

Thanks in advance!

mariushm · June 9, 2020

4 minutes ago, Gifura said:

it has 8000 hours.I know that hard drives normally have a life expectancy of 40,000 hours .

That's bullshit - not a rule or anything. I have a WD Black in my computer that has over 65k hours and still works well.

It depends on the model - drives with higher warranty (and higher mtbf rating) will typically last longer as they're better built and sometimes have extra anti-vibration stuff and higher quality

How much it will last depends on how hot the drive was while in us (a drive that was constantly kept at 50c is much more likely to die soon)

ubuntu-guru · June 9, 2020

When a hard drive dies is completely dependent on several factors. That "life expectancy" / hours is a ball-park figure they put on the drive based on lab testing, as a reference number mainly for warranty sake. There are hard drives that are well over x5 that amount of hours that are still going strong (but it also depends on luck). It's based on usage, ensuring you don't cause the case or anything to sustain an impact and make the heads on the hard drive jump around. The temps of the machine, and multiple other factors.

I have WD black drives that I own from when they were released that still perform great that I use for random projects.

SSDs, have a life expectancy based on the TBW. But even those are a "estimate", again, depending on what the drive is used for / how often you write to it. How cool the temps are in the machine, etc.

Treat your drives right and have proper cooling, and unless you ended up with some drive that had a fault in it prior, or a manufacturing defect, they should last a long long time.

For a more in-depth look, you can read https://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

LloydLynx · June 9, 2020

I have 19 year old and 16 year old IDE hard drives that weren't used that often and still work great today. They sat in your average size OEM case their whole life with decent air flow, hardly ever being moved around. It depends more on running hours and living conditions than it does age.