About a year ago, or maybe a little bit over, I bought a Passport 160GB USB drive. As most or all of you know USB drives are laptop drives in a case with a SATA to USB adapter.
A while ago something went wrong with the adapter so I broke the hard drive out of the case and hooked it up internally to my PC. It’s now the G drive.
I was using it for backup, but my C drive is 500gb capacity and the used space finally surpassed the capacity of my G drive.
I have two small drives also hooked up, one with 80gb capacity and one with 40gb capacity. Since I can no longer use the G drive for backup I’m thinking about partitioning it into two or three partitions, copying the contents of the two other drives onto it and disconnecting those drives.
My only concern is what the lifespan of the G drive will be. Googling I see that a 3 year warranty is common. But how long after the warranty runs out do most laptop hard drives last? Since a lot of factors influence the lifespan of a hard drive, then just working in generalities, will my two desktop drives last longer than the laptop drive, or will the laptop drive last as least as long as the desktop drives? Obviously the two drives are older, so that will obviously make a difference.
Typically at least several years (say 3-5) on average is the expected lifetime in my experience, but in practical terms it can be minutes or days from today or it might last 20 years. Just keep your data backed up and there will be no tears when it does fail which it will a some point. There is no meaningful difference in life span between major brands. Choose one with the specs you like and move forward.
The manufacturer of the drive might have given you a warranty. That could give you some estimate.
However, it’s pretty much what Astro says - they could go at any moment or last forever. I have a laptop hard drive that served 5 years in the laptop and has served another 5 as an external USB drive. My wife’s laptop drive was still going strong after 7 years when the motherboard finally gave. But the one that came with my new laptop lasted just over 1 year before it had to be replaced.
Since laptop hard drives are tiny compared to desktop hard drives and are made to consume less power I wasn’t sure how well they would hold up compared to desktop hard drives, but it sounds like there isn’t much of a difference in lifespans.
Yep. What they said. HDs can die any minute or they could last 13 years.
I’ll chime in with an outlier – my first computer ever, an IBM Inspiron 7K laptop that I’d gotten as a college gift. It underwent a ton of abuse, several moves, and a retirement under my couch until a few months ago. With the help of an IDE-USB adapter, I got perfectly cromulent data off its 13 year old HD.
