It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven’t noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven’t noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.
Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?
If you don’t have backups then yes you should be worried.
Same goes for any storage.
of any age. brand new disks fail too.
a HDD can fail at any given time. It could fail within a week of buying it, could last over a decade.
What I’m saying is, if you have data you don’t want to lose, yes you should be worried. Keeping backups is the only safe option.
Don’t forget to scrub and checksum your drive before making backups. You don’t want to copy over rotten bits.
Same goes for the backup. And the backup’s backup.
Don’t forget to scrub and checksum your drive
What is the process for doing this?
Use a modern filesystem that manages file integrity for you.
I use btrfs.
Lol, so the process is “go back in time and change how you initially formatted the drive”. Come on man.
Good knowledge for setting up new drives though.
Well, sure. If you did it wrong the first time around. For everyone else, just run “btrfs scrub <device>”
how can i do it on ntfs and ext4?
Use btrfs-convert to convert ext4 to btrfs.
NTFS is 31 years old and not modern by any standard. Avoid if you care about your data.
There are only. 2 kinds of people:
- Those who have lost data
- Those who will lose data.
Plan accordingly
Have backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule.
All drives fail, at any time, and you will eventually lose data if you don’t have good backups in place.
2 of my main system drives have been powered on for 5 and 7 years respectively and are therefore much older.
Just don’t wait for them to start clicking before thinking about backups.
Hdd can live a long and happy life, but absolutely don’t trust a single drive ever, independently of how rugged, old or expensive it is.
My main hard drive lasted 5 years with 1 year of power on hours, working fine and suddenly failed. It was a good fail because I was able to get all the data from it, but it took almost one month for how slow it was.
Always assume your data storage is going to die tomorrow and be ready to replace it.
don’t trust a sibgle drive
sibgle?
Edit: oh I see the edit now. “single” is what it meant. I couldn’t figure that out at the time. Shitty to be downvoted for asking a question.
I have old 500 gb drives from 2009 that i ripped out of beaten laptops still working 24/7 and i’ve had new drives grenade themselfs two weeks in use, there are too many factors to properly gauge how long of a life a drive has, the best option is to have backups, even something as simple as a copy on a flash drive is better than nothing.
I get people saying follow the 3-2-1 rule, but there are places like mine where storage is prohibitively expensive, so just do what you can, anything is better than nothing in this cases.
Always make sure that important files and folders are backed up at least twice! Even when drives are new, they can and do fail at random without warning. My HDD’s are the better half of a decade old and I had no issue with them at all until last year. They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
I’ve not responded to the majority of comments in this thread because I’d have nothing to add except “thanks”, but here:
They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
Er why haven’t you bought new drives at that point??
Er why haven’t you bought new drives at that point??
There’s different ways to arrange data on multiple physical drives. One group of ways is called RAID. One specific type of RAID is called RAID5. And, one can have 3 or more drives in the RAID5 array.
I’ve 3 drives, each 2TB. In RAID5 I only get 4TB of effective storage (not 6TB). If any one of my 3 physical drives fails, the array preserves all data and continues to operate at a slower speed. The failed drive can be replaced, a rebuilding process performed, and performance restored. If a second drive fails then data is lost and the array stops working. But, even then, new drives can be purchased and data restored from backup.
In a business we never want unplanned downtime because it’s costly. We’d be replace hard drives before they fail on a schedule we choose: planned downtime when no one is working. But, at home, particularly with backups, unplanned downtime often isn’t very costly. We can keep using our old hardware, maximizing its value, until it fails entirely.
I’m gonna buy a new computer when this one inevitably refuses to boot up 🤷♀️ there’s more age related issues besides just the HDD’s at this point so it’ll be less hassle to start over.
I’ve not responded to the majority of comments in this thread because I’d have nothing to add except “thanks”, but here:
They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
Er why haven’t you bought new drives at that point??
I’ve not responded to the majority of comments in this thread because I’d have nothing to add except “thanks”, but here:
They’re now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.
Er why haven’t you bought new drives at that point??
Always assume your data is in N-1 places at all times.
Any drive can and will fail at any time, no matter how well it was working yesterday.
I’ve had people in with their entire PhD and years of research on one single drive, with no backup - just gone.
If your data is only in one place, it will be in zero places soon enough.
Disposable or replaceable data - which honestly is going to be 90% of your stuff - meh.
But anything that you need and couldn’t replace, that shit needs backing up to AT LEAST one other place.
As for the rest - drives can fail slowly, or they can fail fast. When they fail slowly, you start getting a couple of disk errors here and there, and you may just be able to order one in time to replace it.
When they fail fast, they just drop like a heart attack.
There’s no way to know in advance. If your data is safe, then you’ll either be out a few days while a replacement arrives, or you’ll be just about able to copy stuff across. At that age, I wouldn’t trust it farther than I could spit it. It could work fine for years more, but the moment you rely on it for something important, it’ll give out on you.
If you’re not seeing anything of concern in the SMART info then there’s little to worry about. You could install/run smartctl from the command line, or for something with a gui try gsmartcontrol / any other app that can interact with your hard drive diagnostics.
Hard drives can last a long time, as a general rule if your hard drive made it through its first 1-2 years without issue then there’s a good chance it’ll keep chugging along for years. I personally haven’t found that hard drives consistently die in 5-7 years, not too sure where you got that info from.
In any case backups are your friend, not just in case the hard drive dies but there’s always the possibility that your entire OS blows up somehow or you get a bad case of malware.
As others have said, you don’t have to be concerned about anything if you keep good backups. Disk storage at this time is very cheap compared to what it used to be, you could probably find a 5200 RPM 5 TB disk for ~100 dollars USD, or even better, two 2 TB disks which you could configure with software RAID.
backup. backup. backup.
then also check the SMART stats on it and run the internal tests. if you don’t know how, gsmartcontrol is a good place to start.
i’ve had a couple disks fail right away, and others that just go forever–and one of those is a deathstar, even.
- Follow the 3 - 2 - 1 backup rule.
- You can use SMART to see the health of your drive.
The majority of HDD failures happen in the first 1-2 years (see Backblaze data). I have a NAS that has the same 5 drives running since 2013 and in all that time those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total.
That said I assume that any drive can fail at any time and anything I don’t want to lose has 2 backup copies, e.g. stuff I am working on on my PC gets copied to that NAS, that in turn backs it up online.
those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total
This is actually a good thing for longevity. Start up and stopping is the hardest part of a drive’s life. So you will see more failures on a personal PC that you turn off every night than a server drive running 24/7. Laptop drives will typically fare the worst as they may be power cycled many times a day, often fully stop when idle for power saving and get shaken much more than other drives.
First rule, always have backups. Especially with an older drive, make sure anything you might need is duplicated somewhere else. Ideally off-site to prevent loss in case of things like burglary or a fire. Even something as simple as Google Drive or OneDrive.
Personally, I’d take a look at replacing it with an SSD if you can afford to, not only because of the age, but better performance. You may not notice slowness, but making the jump from a HDD to an SSD is still at least a little noticeable even on secondary drives from my experience.
