I got a computer about a year ago. I have heard that hard disk drives can fail after several years.
How long can a hard disk drive last?
Would the hard disk drive fail before other parts?
I suspect someone will be along with some hard figures (drive manufacturers do keep track of “mean time between failures,” for example), but drives do eventually fail, so always, always, keep backup copies of files that are important to you, either on burnable CDs, zip disks, or tape.
That said, my experience has been that hard drives have become very reliable, and can run for years without complaint. Removable media drives (CDs, floppies, for example) will likely fail sooner.
A lot of it depends, of course, on how you use your machine. A corporation’s server that has hundreds or thousands of users requesting files all day, every day, will give a hard drive a workout totally unlike what a home PC experiences.
Your machine will probably become obsolete, and you will have replaced it for other reasons, before the hard drive fails. It could crap out tomorrow, of course, but it’s not likely.
I’ve had several HD fail in earlier years, but none in the last three years
I do a lot of data processing, and run my laptop, external USB, and internal IDE drives on my home compu full-out at least several hours each day. No problems.
I know various makes spec their drives as mentioned above w/ mean time b/t failure, however, I’m not convinced this number really means anything in the real world.
If you’re concerned, keep backups and consider a drive cooler, esp if you have a number of HD stacked close to eachother in your compu case.
We have a drive that has been running 24/7 for the last 7 years. First in a Windows 95 desktop machine and later in a network server, for our home network. Just a standard 2 gig IDE, but it keeps on going and going.
I’ve noticed a significant drop in hard drive quality in recent years. Three hard drives that I have had since about 1999 have failed. Thankfully they all failed slowly so I never lost any data, but I don’t trust them to last very long these days. Meanwhile, I resurrected a 1991 era 80 MB hard drive from an old computer of mine that hadn’t been booted in 5 years and it turned out to be still in mint condition.
Backups, backups, backups!
Think of a plot of % of disk drives of a given type that fail after x months. It starts out near zero. (But not at zero. I have had two that were faulty straight out of the box.) It grows to near 100% after a “few” years. What is a “few”. Older drives “few” could be 10 years. Nowadays, it appears that “few” might be around 7 years. But the big question is where on that curve will your drive fail. Impossible to tell.
Note that drive makers used to offer 2-3 year warranties. They are now down to 1 for most consumer gear. I.e., they know they are pushing it in cramming in more bits per cm[sup]2[/sup] and the drives are not going to be as reliable as before. WAG: 10% or so fail in the first year. Assume your drive is one of the 10%.
What kind of computer you got Dunmurry? Alot of factors determine how long the hd lasts, how long the computer is on, lightning, etc. Used to be they came with a three year guarantee, now most are just 1 year.
It will usually last until her roommate gets back early from the library and opens the dorm room door without knocking first.
Then it becomes the opposite of hard very quickly.
What’s that you say?
Hard disk?
Never mind.
Actually, ftg, I think the failure rates for hard drives over time, like those of many other kinds of manufactured equipment, follow a “bathtub curve” shape.
I was talking about the integral of the bathtub curve. I.e., the cumulative total.
"Think of a plot of % of disk drives of a given type that fail after x months. "
Depends how your define ‘fail’…
I saw one case of this the other week, the computer couldn’t see the HD to boot from it. It was a HP Pavilion, so I looked through the manual & it said to push F10 when turning it on & sure enough it loaded the complete original system from some area of the HD. It wasn’t an XP restore function as it said it couldn’t use the Restore function. Amazing.
Some PC manufacturers, and here I’m assuming HP is on of 'em, store a “restore CD” (only it’s not a CD, obviously) on a hidden partition of the hard drive. That’s how handy’s example did that, most likely.
It is my experience that if the hard drive lasts the first few months (i.e., has no manufacturing defects), it’ll last for over 5 years. I don’t think I’ve ever kept one more than 5 years due to upgrade/storage space issues, so who knows how long they can go after that. If you keep one longer, I’d guess anywhere from 7-10 years before failure becomes imminent.
Generally, a hard drive will last until you’ve stored several years’ worth of personal and irreplaceable documents on it and forgotten to back them up for a long long time. Then they do a nice little head crash.
I’m really starting to daydream about RAID. Wouldn’t that be cool!? No more backups being out of date. One drive dies, you yank it and replace it with a blank drive and the redundant copy re-mirrors itself and you just keep going without losing anything at all.
it doesn’t make any difference how long they last. what makes the difference is, if one goes down you are screwed. i personally would never trust a hard drive for more than two years.
after two years install a second hard drive and start saving to it and backing up your first drive. i lost two hard drives a long time ago and it ain’t pretty.
i also try to burn all very important data at least once a month. as a graphic designer and webmaster the clients rely on me to have their files. you only have to lose them once…
I have ultra wide scsi disks that have been running for +5 years and I recently had a 9 month old 40GB IBM deskstar fail with the “click of death”.
So - you might be lucky and your drive will still work for many years, or it could fail tomorrow.
RAID is a nice way of protecting yourself against failure of a simple or few disks at the expence of lost storage space. Proberly not something you will see in home machines except with computer enthusiasts allthough it is quite easy to do, especially with RAID 1 as it only requires 2 disks of the same size (and a hardware controller, if you don’t want to use software raid).
RAID is nice but shouldn’t be considered bulletproof. It won’t protect you from buggy software, malicious viruses and operator errors. External causes (lightning, flood, theft) can damage the whole array. Even a hardware fault in the disk controller can corrupt multiple drives at the same time. The bottom line is that you must assume your hard drive (or drive array) can fail any time, and take appropriate precautions.
An external hard drive is an attractive option for backups. They are fast and reasonably affordable, and unlike a RAID array you can unplug it and store it in a safe place. If you use FireWire or USB you don’t even have to turn off the PC to connect/disconnect the drive. The down side is that you only get one copy of your backup. (Unless you buy multiple external drives, but then it gets pretty expensive.)
This is probably a good place to trot out one of my pet theories, developed during my sysadmin/IS director days:
Pieces of Equipment Know When You’re Going to Replace Them!
They then fail in a way, and at a time, that will cause you the most pain.
Here’s the typical scenario: you’ve purchased a new PC. It arrives on Thursday. You haven’t backed up the critical stuff on your old PC for a few weeks, since you knew the replacement machine would be arriving shortly. You’re planning to spend Saturday morning copying stuff from old PC to new PC. Your old PC, sensing its imminent demise, will crap out sometime Friday, in some spectacular, non-recoverable way.
I’m usually a very rational person, not inclined to believe in conspiracy theories, the paranormal, sky pixies, etc. But I’ve seen this scenario played out so many times, I’m forced to conclude that something spooky is going on!
OK, how’s this for an answer:
For data backup purposes, assume the drive will fail sometime in the next week.
For planning when to upgrade and/or spend money on replacing it, assume 3-5 years.
As to what fails first on your computer, hard drives are more likely to crap out than most other things, because of their moving parts. And of course, they’re the worst thing to fail, because a hard drive is easy to replace, but all the data stored on it isn’t. Floppies and opticals also can fail, for the same reason. Monitors seem to be fairly susceptible to gradually becoming too flaky to use.
The solid-state stuff (motherboard, processor, modem, etc.) will likely never ‘wear out’, though could get destroyed by a power surge, overheat if something blocks the cooling fan, or some other accident could kill it.
At any rate, there’s a very good chance a given computer will be considered obselete before it fails.
Early Out, I am so down with that.
The “WallStreet” PowerBook has two design flaws: the sound card, which doubles as the AC power in, cracks easily from any lateral torsion when you’re plugging/unplugging/accidentally tripping over the AC line; and the screen hinges are poorly made and get weak and loose and eventually snap off abruptly (slicing through your video cables and dropping bits of deteriorating-metal dust into your circuitry). Of the two, the second is lethal.
A third-party company makes solid steel replacement screen hinges, and I had just purchased a used WallStreet via eBay, good condition, and was going to transfer hard drive and modem and RAM and accelerator daughercard to the new and send the old off for screen hinge replacement. Had a problem getting the internal modem out of the old and enlisted the help of the Mac tech in our IT department. So he hoists the lid and <snap bye bye baby. (I rescued the undamaged hard drive but everything else was either DOA or not worth fixing).