I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
I still have a working HDD from the first PC I ever built back in the mid 90’s.
I have 20gb drives that still work
All 6 of my Western Digital Red drives for my NAS I bought in 2009 are still going strong. I hope they keep going bc I hear all kinds of things about hard drive buying issues that Im lost on.
Yes. And I’ve had various drives die without warning, including SSDs, flash media, spinning rust. You never know when a power spike (or corruption, or bad luck, or a spilled drink or…) is going to come along and smoke your storage.
Bought a 2nd hand 2tb hitachi enterprise drive on ebay over 10 years ago. It’s still going in my nas as the most busy disk.
We had an old Hitachi 9200 disk array stay up for about 12 years with maybe 1-2 disk replacements. Those were very well built systems and at the time, Hitachi companies manufactured everything in them from the drives to the paint to the screws.
I have ssd’s still in daily use that are like 12 years old. The only hdd’s I use are externals for my data backup though.
It depends on the POH (power-on hours) more than the actual age
I have had many individual drives last decades at work and at home the problem is that the odds for failure are the same for each individual drive but if you have more drives the odds that YOU will see a failure increase.
It is like saying what are the odds or rolling a 1 on a 6 sided die
1 16.67% 4 38.58%
So think of it like having a PC with one drive, vs having a NAS which typically has 4 drives. The more drives you have the more likely it is that you will see at least one failure during the life of the drive.
I still have old IDE drives (with the ribbon cables) that still work. I still plug them in on occasion to check the data on them because they hold a copy of very old cold storage data, and even though that’s not the only copy of that particular data, as long as the drive still works and I have a means of accessing it, I’ll still use it to store copies of data. The oldest drive I have is a western digital 4GB drive.
I have a 200MB Seagate coming from the 90s that still works fine and it was untouched from 2001 to 2019. Yes, I had to buy MANY, MANY, MANY drives in the meantime, even if that drive didn’t die.
When I started my first serious networking job, there was a syslog server in our datacentre that had been running nonstop for almost a decade. It was an ancient radiator-white supemicro 3u server with 6 SCSI disks. I decommissioned that server 7 years later. Those SCSI disks had been running nonstop for 16+ years without a single problem. The inside of the server was covered in black plastic dust from the slowly disintegrating case fans. Other than half the case fans not working, there was nothing wrong with that server.
I have four 2TB drives in a software RAID0 in my gaming rig. They were manufactured in 2011.
I have a 50MB HDD in my first computer, a 286 Digital VaxMate that still works, from 1989 maybe?
you should always have backups as all tech fails but yes, I have drives from the 90s. not spinning all the time but still working when required. why? ancient small scsi drives for ye olde samplers and an atari. will replace with sd cards eventually which, ironically, are much less reliable.
I’m in the same boat as others that have commented – I’ve got some old IDE drives sitting on my shelf, and every time I’ve ever pulled them down to see what was/is on them, they always fire right up.
I’ve never had any in continuous use for decades, though…
I also have an old IDE drive about 25 years old that’s still working. My PC is about 20 years old and the mobo has 1 ide slot so I leave it plugged in for the hell of it. My PC doesn’t run continuously but it has a lot of damn hours on it.
