Hard drive lifespan factors

[camner]

I have read several articles/forum posts about how long a hard drive (spinning disk, not SSD) typically can be expected to last, and a number that comes up more frequently than others is 10,000 hours of use for consumer-level drives.

DriveDx reports two hours statistics: Power on Time and Spindle Motor Power on Hours, and the second is significantly lower than the first. Does anyone know whether the 10,000 hour figure refers to Power on Time or Spindle Motor Power on Hours? Power on Time presumably refers to the # of hours that power is being applied to the drive, and Spindle Motor Power on Hours refers to the # of hours that the drive is actually spinning.

Also, does "years since manufacture" matter? I have a couple of drives that are over 10 years old but have very low Power on Time figures, since they're used for backup of things that don't change often.

 

[Fishrrman]

I don't believe there's really any way to "know".
Some drives will go on and on and on.
Others will just... stop.
Regardless of what "the statistics" may say.

Only a day or two ago, I was using an old Seagate HDD (that must be near 15 years old, or even older) -- to make a backup of mp3 files. I only run this drive once every several months.

It still mounted/worked just fine.

If you're worried about the continuing longevity of an older HDD, then perhaps it's time to replace it...

 

[kagharaht]

I have a 9 year old Seagate 2TB slim portable drive used for TM backups. It's has always been connected to a Mac to use as a backup. It's been formatted a few times when upgrading to a new Mac and set up again for TM. I have 2 other Seagate drives that are used for storing and Home Sharing. They are also 9 years old. They sleep when not in use but they are always connected and wakes up and sleep several times a day. I have an 11 year old 2TB Verbatim that has really old files stored there just sitting in the closet. Fires up normally when I need to pull a file from the past. The only time I Had one fail was a 1TB WD but that was physical damage not wear and tear failure.

 

[madams1000]

In my oldest TrueNAS box I have 4-5 drives (WD Red Plus - 4TB) that have over 50,000 hrs on them and have been in continuous service (only powered off for maintenance/updates). Not even any anomalies in the SMART stats yet either.

That said, in the same lot of drives I had one start showing SMART errors and eventual failure at ~17,000 hrs. Moral of story; YMMV. Set up a cron job to monitor and alert on the relevant SMART errors.

 

[Project Alice]

I've got drives from the late 90s that still work. I've also got some newer ones that don't. It's mostly random.

My TrueNAS server has four 4TB drives that I bought new probably 5 years ago, and two 12TB drives I bought 2 years ago and I haven't had to replace any of them.

 

[camner]

Thanks to all who replied.

I do understand that statistical statements about a group of objects (or people) cannot be used to infer how an individual member of that group will turn out. BUT, a statistic about some characteristic that is "average" for a group can be used wisely to plan, depending on the degree of risk one is willing to take on.

For example, assuming the 10,000 hour statistic is valid for the sake of this conversation, I personally wouldn't use a drive with more than 10,000 hours for my most important data, and I probably wouldn't do it even if I had a good backup system (I do). In fact, for critical data, since about half of drives will fail before 10,000 hours (again, assuming the statistic is valid), for really critical data, I would probably retire the drive used for critical data will before 10,000 hours and rotate that drive out to a less critical use. For data that I want to keep longer-term but isn't critical, I wouldn't hesitate to use an older drive, perhaps adding for safety another older drive to be used as a back up.

What I'm really trying to do is get a handle on the relevant statistics about drive lifespan. Knowing whether the 10,000 our "rule" applies to total power on time or spindle turning time makes a difference in how one assesses when a drive is "past its prime." Similarly, and I have found relatively little about this, it would be good to know whether "Time since manufacture" is a minor, middling, or major factor in drive longevity, independent of how much the drive has been used. There are infrequent occurrences that can affect lifespan, such as whether a drive has been dropped accidentally, but that is a hazard that doesn't arise from normal usage, so it isn't particularly helpful to try to get statistics on "How many times can a drive be dropped, from what height, and onto what kind of surface before lifespan is impacted?"

I would've thought that it would be easier to find at least some information on the factors that impact lifespan with more than qualitative information attached to it. Absent that, we are stuck with using the uninformed "what are you personally comfortable with?" heuristic approach.