How Often Do HDD Disks Fail?

[Good Night Owl]

Cleaned my PC today because my tower was cheap, and the cost of it being cheap was not coming with a dust filter.

After cleaning I noticed certain games were just randomly not installed anymore, and that's when I noticed that my HDD is no longer detected. I reconnected a cable, gave an extra push to the cables, and now the HDD is working again.

All this made me wonder how often these things actually fail

[Omega]

They are usually one of the first major components in a system to fail.

[potato]

mechanical hard drives have a higher percentage of failure due to the spinning disk and moving parts

[AustrAlien2010]

Let's try to figure that out by posting in a discussion topic.

I've never had one that broke. And all the people that I gave computers to, all replaced their computers before the hard disc drives even broke.
I still have all the old garbage in use, because its not broken yet.

[nullable]

Първоначално публикувано от Good Night Owl:

Cleaned my PC today because my tower was cheap, and the cost of it being cheap was not coming with a dust filter.

After cleaning I noticed certain games were just randomly not installed anymore, and that's when I noticed that my HDD is no longer detected. I reconnected a cable, gave an extra push to the cables, and now the HDD is working again.

All this made me wonder how often these things actually fail

All you need to know is they do fail. Any sort of average is going to vary from model/age/amount of use. But there's no concrete number to tell you. Someone with bad luck has had a drive fail in five days. And someone with good luck has been using the same model drive for 15 years.

In 25 years I've had one HDD fail properly, and one SSD fail. But I typically build a new machine every five years and that usually entails new drives and the old drives don't see much use after that.

[Zygfryd]

Seagate's consumer HDDs used to fail a lot, I lost tons of data to them a decade+ back. Afterwards I started buying WD server-grade HDDs and those are still with me, just collecting dust, since I have too many SSDs now to bother with HDDs.

I don't know how up to date this info is, but back in the day a lot of failures came from the drives parking/spinning down too often, but you can control that on the operating system level if need be.

Backblaze keeps drive failure rates if you're interested in statistics: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2023/ (but that's for a server environment, YMMV).

[HypersleepyNaputunia]

10 years average lifespan for hdd for me, they get too small to be useful before they fail like 128 gb hdd kinda useless nowadays but works

[_I_]

Първоначално публикувано от Omega:

They are usually one of the first major components in a system to fail.

20+ years is common on a hdd

mobo/cpu often fail sooner
bad caps, from hardware around 2005 killed off alot of hardware

[skOsH♥]

I typically get at least 10 years with a large spinny

I would recommend getting a backup drive of your backup and loading stuff on there and don't touch it until your first backup fails

OP, kind of sounds like what I experienced when my BIOS was out of date

But it could also be the storage

[PopinFRESH]

Първоначално публикувано от Zygfryd:

Seagate's consumer HDDs used to fail a lot, I lost tons of data to them a decade+ back. Afterwards I started buying WD server-grade HDDs and those are still with me, just collecting dust, since I have too many SSDs now to bother with HDDs.

I don't know how up to date this info is, but back in the day a lot of failures came from the drives parking/spinning down too often, but you can control that on the operating system level if need be.

Backblaze keeps drive failure rates if you're interested in statistics: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2023/ (but that's for a server environment, YMMV).

It is a decent resource if you understand what it is. If you are not familiar with Backblaze it is important to note how they use drives. They use a custom built chassis to “top-load” disks into. They primarily use consumer disks, but they have a variety of disk models they will use. The important things to keep in mind is consumer disks are not rated for a 24/7/365 duty cycle like enterprise and data center disks are; and their chassis slots the disks in vertically without securing them in place so they may experience higher rotational vibration than they are rated for when the spindles spin up or down.

In other words it is not a good resource to look at “failure rate for this specific model or brand”, but it is a good resource to look at in aggregate for general mechanical disk failure rates, and how well (or not) some smart attributes may predict potential failure.

[Viking2121]

Depends really, I've had bad luck with WD Green drives and had weird issues with seagate, I've had some die, but they always end up acting weird rather than just dying, I got one that will sometimes just not copy things to it, got another that parks its heads like someone is smacking it with a hammer over and over, but works fine.

I'd say after 5 years or normal wear and tear is pretty good, but if its on 24/7, I'd probably replace them sooner than 5 years, would also have multiple drives of the same content if its irreplaceable data, even a cloud save or some off site back up just in case.

[Pocahawtness]

I have three PC's because I keep old ones and use them for media PC's.
In all the PC's I have had, which is a lot, only one HDD has failed. Whereas I have had about five SSD's fail. So the answer is, in reality they are a lot more reliable than SSD's!

[Viking2121]

Първоначално публикувано от Pirate☠️Pocah:

I have three PC's because I keep old ones and use them for media PC's.
In all the PC's I have had, which is a lot, only one HDD has failed. Whereas I have had about five SSD's fail. So the answer is, in reality they are a lot more reliable than SSD's!

I disagree, portable SSD being tossed around will have a far better chance than an HDD being tossed around, I've have yet to see a failed SSD and I work on many computers.

[_I_]

portable hdd in laptop or external is just a bad idea, hey are fragile, and can be easily damaged due to moderate g forces

in a desktop, hdd will outlast any ssd

[AmaiAmai]

From a decent brand, you should expect slowdown or failure around the 5 year+ mark.

I no longer use mechanical disks because they make zero sense when seek time causes a large performance loss even on it's own.

Some of my Toshibas are over 12 years old and still spin, but I don't use for data storage. Only getting old photos off.

EDIT: Also my SSDs are 12 years too and have no failed, so ...

[_I_]

Първоначално публикувано от AmaiAmai:

From a decent brand, you should expect slowdown or failure around the 5 year+ mark.

I no longer use mechanical disks because they make zero sense when seek time causes a large performance loss even on it's own.

Some of my Toshibas are over 12 years old and still spin, but I don't use for data storage. Only getting old photos off.

EDIT: Also my SSDs are 12 years too and have no failed, so ...

hdd does not slow down
its not as fast as ssd, but its more than fast enough for older sp linear games, music, videos, documents and other long term storage

unless its a 5400rpm or slower hdd

but they are spinning rust, if it starts getting bad sectors backup and replace it asap
the corrosion spreads quickly once it starts forming