How long should a hard drive last?

My Seagate Barracuda came in a Used machine that i bought just over a year ago and its amazing. And who knows how long it was in before i bought it. The downside and possibly the cause for this drive is that its only 250GB. Im thinking of getting a Momentus XT 500GB to put in my desktop as i cant afford a SSD. i However, am not backed up but am working on that right now. i am going to use the Original Seagate for a backup of the Momentus XT as well as some other networked machines in my home.

i have a 500GB drive and it is a western digital and is over 1yr old now i also have a old 40gb that is 5 yrs old and still kicking. and it is also western digital i swear by them never had one let me down yet.

Why have you bought a replacement drive? Surely the 4 month old failed one is in warranty

Good point. Two reasons actually - speed (new drive in two days, warranty replacement after dealing with paperwork in ...how long?) - and the fact that the drive is kinda sorta working. If it were dead dead dead it's be a slam dunk.

But your point is well taken - I'll definitely look into that after the system is working again.

26-Jul-2010

Thank you Leo, so much for educating people on backing up there data. If you do not have your data backed up you are relying on Data Recovery to be your backup. Drives are very reasonable and you can buy a lot of hard drives for the cost of Data Recovery. I work for a HD manufacture and am amazed at the # of people who call in upset that we do not cover Data Recovery in warranty. It is the User's responsibility to backup your data. If your data is truly backed up you will never be at the mercy of Data Recovery. Again thank you Leo, you do a service to all of us. Keep harping on backup and the fact that all hard drives will fail eventually. Back up your data. Thanks.

Just a little additional insight.

I work in the IT department at my current place a business. We maintain roughly 100 computers. We have had some hard drives work 10+ years after implementation and we have had them DOA (dead on arrival). It doesn't really matter the brand either, we have had them all through our doors and have had them all - at one point or another - in our trash. Leo is 100% correct is stating that they can and are very inconsistent... Please be vigilant in your backups and always keep in mind that your drive may last 10 years or 10 minutes. Also take note in the reviews of any given drive. If it has 200 reviews with a 2 out of 5 star rating you may want to avoid. 4 out of 5 stars or higher is usually a stable and proven drive.

The good thing about dirt cheap drives? There is NO reason not to have RAID. There is NO reason to not have an old machine in the corner where you do a very frequent network backup of important data. I really like a program called Second Copy for data on a Windows machine.

And backing up is so easy these days.

Plenty of free reliable packages that let you schedule a back-up when you are not actually working on the machine etc etc. And external USB drives are so cheap - there isn't any excuse.

It surprises me, however, that PC manufacturers insisting on filling GBs of new hardrives with largely useless crapware, and yet few, to my knowledge, include reliable back-up software.

I've just looked at what came with my Samsung laptop. It's relatively crapware free, but other than its own Recovery Solution (not a back-up at all) there is no shipped facility for backing up.

As always, this is yet another superb article by Leo.

I've been troubled by seeing many of the reviews for hard drives at the Web sites for major online retailers; too many of the drives seem to be arriving DOA or dying early deaths. This DOA and high failure rate is frightening.

The declining dependability of a component as vital as your hard drive makes me anxious to make the transition to "cloud computing." Hopefully the companies that host such professionally-run online storage sites have sophisticated redundancies built into their systems, thereby increasing the survivability of their customers' precious data.

On a related note, I DO backup and have been doing so since purchasing my first PC back in the early '90s. In all these years, I've had just two or three hard drives die suddenly and without warning. In each case, though, the loss of data was virtually nil and quite tolerable thanks to my habit of backing up my drives.

I'm the first to admit that backing up is more boring than watching grass grow ... Really! I say this because as you're sitting at your computer, you have the subconscious expectation of getting some tasks accomplished and getting them done quickly. After all, that's what computers are supposed to be about. But if your backup strategy involves any waiting, this feels like the antithesis of what you sit down to use your computer for.

And the temptation to ignore or procrastinate doing my backups is ever-present ... But only until I remember how comforted I was after replacing a dead hard drive and being able to move on without any major data loss.

In sharp contrast to my personal practice of backing up, I'm immediately reminded of the U.S. Defense agency where I last worked. The whole agency is filled with thousands of IT "professionals," yet they have a sense of immunity from data loss, it seems, or they just don't care. Few ... VERY few of my colleagues used an external hard drive as I did to perform backups.

How about network-based storage? Yes, there was also network-based storage available, but this was supposed to be ONLY for data you needed to share; use of the servers for backups was aggressively discouraged by the network admins. In effect, since there was no stated policy, guidance, advice, or support regarding data-preservation strategies, major data losses were experienced every single day! With over 6,000 personnel, and with each of them having at least one computer on his desk — not to mention the massive gymnasium-sized computer lab with rack after rack of hard disk arrays — you can be sure that a hard drive was failing somewhere in the agency all the time.

I digress, though. Listen to Leo ... If you care about it, BACK IT UP, period!!!

Thank you, Leo, for your continued devotion to helping your fellow computer users.

So how best to backup? I used to use CDROMs but I've got too much data, now. External hard drive? What's best?

I use an external hard drive with Acronis True Image as my backup software, and in addition I also make redudant copies of important files in other locations as many people have suggessted. The "best" is whatever you'll actually do.

29-Jul-2010

Leo, I hope that your backup works. However, if you are using Windows 7, you have a potential problem. If you are restoring from a system image, Windows will not restore to a drive smaller than the one you are replacing. I make sure that I use Windows tools to keep the size of my primary partition smaller than the spare drive I keep here (which is smaller than the drive I am using). Most hard drives, mine included, are much bigger than needed (unless you are keeping incredible amounts of video files). Windows allows the active partition to be made smaller, when the drive is viable. However, once it fails and you try to restore from backup, even if most of the drive was blank, you will be unable to go to a smaller drive. Windows will only be happy with the same size or bigger. Leo, what happened to you when you tried to go from a 1.5 TB to a 1.0 TB drive? Did you have to restore individual files because the system image wouldn't work?

I definitely had to do some dancing around - though with Acronis, not Windows backup. In the end, though, Acronis restored all files, and Windows 7's boot repair worked to fix my ability to reboot.

29-Jul-2010

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