Post your HDD lifespan (bragging topic)

[Budget DIY]

Many years ago, I was on these forums. Back then, my oldest HDD was something like 8 years old. 8 years and turned on/spinning 24/7 that is. Everyone went slightly ape-poop, saying I should back-up this drive and quickly replace it. I had something of a discussion with one of the mods here (can't remember who it was), and I told them I'd be reporting back, saying my drive was still up and running perfectly fine. Sadly, I forgot all about that. So here, after a few more years, a new HDD update from HD Sentinal.

 

It's been powered on and spinning, for 12 years.

[Morgan MLGman]

This thread is more suitable to be a profile status update.

EDIT: As per request - thread remains open, with a slightly modified title that is more generic and understandable.

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 hours ago, Jahee said:

Many years ago, I was on these forums. Back then, my oldest HDD was something like 8 years old. 8 years and turned on/spinning 24/7 that is. Everyone went slightly ape-poop, saying I should back-up this drive and quickly replace it. I had something of a discussion with one of the mods here (can't remember who it was), and I told them I'd be reporting back, saying my drive was still up and running perfectly fine. Sadly, I forgot all about that. So here, after a few more years, a new HDD update from HD Sentinal.

 

It's been powered on and spinning, for 12 years.

But have you run a long test and how actively is it actually used?  If there are huge parts of the drive you haven't read in years there could be errors the drive has never noticed.

 

I've had many drives that report fine in SMART then just unexpected stop working, its only a rough guide to drive health and is not going to know much unless the drive is heavily used and/or actual SMART tests ran on it.

[Budget DIY]

2 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

But have you run a long test and how actively is it actually used?  If there are huge parts of the drive you haven't read in years there could be errors the drive has never noticed.

 

I've had many drives that report fine in SMART then just unexpected stop working, its only a rough guide to drive health and is not going to know much unless the drive is heavily used and/or actual SMART tests ran on it.

It's been my OS drive for about 5-6 years. After getting an SSD, I've turned into a mass storage disk. And I regulary do watch all kinds of random files from that disk. So there isn't that big of a load, but it's not totally unused. It's also the place where I store my SQL db, with 10-30 mb db's getting queried about 2-3x a second. (not sure what kind of an actual load that gives)

But let's forget about the arm/needle/disk plates. Just having that disk itself physically spinning for 12 years: impressive IMO.

[da na]

My highest hour is a Barracuda with near 12 yrs in my XP system. After that, my WD RE3s have 10-11 years. Ultrastars in my workstation have 6yrs. Those are the notable ones I own

[Budget DIY]

Oh, yea. Big fan of Seagate too. My oldest seagate is a 3 tb disk. It's almost 9 years old at this point. But I did turn on power savings yesterday... I hope it does well with the heat cycles.

[6502man]

Here's my RAID1 WD Black 2 TB pair on a Linux server (MDRAID). The disk is scanned monthly for errors. Both drives have been running continuously for 6 years.

 

A friend recently showed his WD Blacks have been running for 10.5 years. So I have nothing to brag about.

 

But people with old WD Blacks, especially those in RAID 1/5/10 can sleep at night.

 

disk 1 of 2

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       223
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   028   028   000    Old_age   Always       -       52941
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       203
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       138
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       84

disk 2 of 2

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       162
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   029   029   000    Old_age   Always       -       52355
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       160
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       107
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       58

I also periodically run SMART tests:

== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     51931         -
# 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     33322         -
# 3  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%     21726         -
# 4  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%     17549         -
# 5  Extended offline    Completed without error       00%      2971         -
# 6  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%       284         -
# 7  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%         6         -
# 8  Extended offline    Completed without error       00%         4         -
# 9  Short offline       Completed without error       00%         0         -
#10  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%         0         -

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
# 1  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     51345         -
# 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     32729         -
# 3  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%     21128         -
# 4  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%     16949         -
# 5  Extended offline    Completed without error       00%      2359         -
# 6  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%        40         -
# 7  Conveyance offline  Completed without error       00%         0         -

 

[Pickles von Brine]

I don't have proof but when I was a data recovery engineer I had a set of server drives with well over 130k hours. They were in a raid 5 and had 2 drives that were badly degraded. The other 2 drives were degraded but not nearly as bad. I did end up recovering most of the data though it was a bit of a pain in the ass.