How long do hard drives actually live for....

[JJonas]

Quite an interesting article.

 

How long do hard drives actually live for? | ExtremeTech

 

It seems that hard drives have three distinct failure “phases.” In the first phase, which lasts 1.5 years, hard drives have an annual failure rate of 5.1%. For the next 1.5 years, the annual failure rate drops to 1.4%. After three years, the failure rate explodes to 11.8% per year. In short, this means that around 92% of drives survive the first 18 months, and almost all of those (90%) then go on to reach three years.

 

Extrapolating from these figures, just under 80% of all hard drives will survive to their fourth anniversary. Backblaze doesn’t have figures beyond that, but its distinguished engineer, Brian Beach, speculates that the failure rate will probably stick to around 12% per year. This means that 50% of hard drives will survive until their sixth birthday.

[caffrey]

Got some here on their 9th birthday...

[JJonas]

Got some here on their 9th birthday...

 

[Gaz]

I had a Generation 1 WD Raptor 74GB that lasted 7 years before I retired it for an SSD. It still works but the SSD is much faster!

[witch]

Got some here, in Dell 505s that have been in use for at least 10 years, and probably longer

[JJonas]

from the article...

 

Now, before you all rush to the comments section to tell me how long your hard drives have lasted, I’m not talking anecdotally. I mean, in hard numbers, just how long does the average hard drive last?

[witch]

Yeah, but if we all tell you how long our hard drives have lasted, we could work out an average, couldnt we?

[JJonas]

We could but so far the Edugeek sample size is three which isn't enough for an accurate statistical analysis.

 

The authors of the article used 25000 drives

[Gaz]

Gotta start somewhere, Its about 8.6 so far.

[caffrey]

Those backblaze machines I'm guessing wouldn't be an ideal indicator for HD failures with the way they are configured, densely packed in pods (45 per pod) and in a rack using consumer drives also I'm not sure what their cooling solution is..

I need not talk though I'm using WD greens in Raid 5 for our storage pool and they've been in service for 4 years.... (I cringe daily)