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> while most modern hard drives are lucky to make it to five years. Lots of people say things like this, but I have still never even heard of a normal consumer

> while most modern hard drives are lucky to make it to five years. Lots of people say things like this, but I have still never even heard of a normal consumer disk with normal access patterns¹ failing in even ten years, across dozens of hard disk drives (3.5″ PATA, 3.5″ SATA, 2.5″ SATA) and solid state drives (2.5″ SATA, NVMe). The last disk I remember hearing of failing was probably around ten years ago, and it would probably have been fifteen years old.² I’ve heard of laptops dying of other causes, but not disk failure any time recently. Now USB flash drives, I definitely encountered a few failures at less than five years of age over a decade ago (in 2011, I started one week running some tech for an event with three sticks 2–6 years old, and by the end of the week all three were dead!), but haven’t encountered a failure in the last decade (mind you, I haven’t used them as much either). By similar token, I’ve heard people saying things about consumer-written optical media commonly becoming unreadable in a decade with careful storage, but never had any issue with reading CDs burned fifteen years ago. All up, it seems to me that people commonly say all these things barely last a few years, but it just doesn’t match my experience at all. —⁂— ¹ The only thing I’m excluding by this is Backblaze storage pods, which are clearly not typical of consumers, and will obviously hasten mean time to failure. ² My favourite drive at present, one that by rights should have failed, is the second drive in my laptop: 256 GB capacity, 326 TB read, 140 TB written, 119% used, SMART failed. It spent the first threeish years of its life in a Windows laptop with 8 GB of RAM and a workload that would have filled 32 GB of RAM. This caused lots of swapping, amounting to about 500 GB of I/O per day. It fails SMART and has 2031 error information log entries, but still works fine for now, and hasn’t got any worse since I rescued it. Oh, and I also improved its aboriginal habitat, giving it another 8 GB of RAM when I upgraded my own laptop to a 32GB stick; the owner said that made the laptop perform much better.

adrian_b 2y ago
You were just lucky. I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties. In some cases the motors failed, in other cases they began to show very frequently bad sectors. These were among the almost one hundred HDDs that I have used in my personal computers during a few decades. Judging from your tiny 256 GB HDD, you might have mostly used small HDDs, which are more robust. I have typically used only the models with the largest capacity of each series, which are more prone to failures, due to having more disks (i.e. a heavier load for both the motor of the disks and for the coil actuator of the head assembly) and with narrower spacings. Before switching to magnetic tapes, I have used many HDDs for backup and archival purposes. After such HDDs have been kept in cold storage for a few years, few of them did not have any corrupt file. However, I have always kept duplicates for each archival HDD and even when both HDDs had a few errors, they were not in the same place, so I have never lost any archived data. The files were stored with hashes, which caught some cases when the HDD had read the file without apparent errors, but the file was corrupt despite that.

adrian_b 2y ago

You were just lucky. I have seen plenty of old Seagate or WD HDDs failing. In a few cases that was just a couple of months after the expiry of their warranties. In some cases the motors failed, in other cases they began to show very frequently bad sectors. These were among the almost one hundred HDDs that I have used in my personal computers during a few decades. Judging from your tiny 256 GB HDD, you might have mostly used small HDDs, which are more robust. I have typically used only the models with the largest capacity of each series, which are more prone to failures, due to having more disks (i.e. a heavier load for both the motor of the disks and for the coil actuator of the head assembly) and with narrower spacings. Before switching to magnetic tapes, I have used many HDDs for backup and archival purposes. After such HDDs have been kept in cold storage for a few years, few of them did not have any corrupt file. However, I have always kept duplicates for each archival HDD and even when both HDDs had a few errors, they were not in the same place, so I have never lost any archived data. The files were stored with hashes, which caught some cases when the HDD had read the file without apparent errors, but the file was corrupt despite that.