Thread: Does it bother you that hard drives need replacing every 3 to 5 years?

When I read about and contemplate building a music server, I cannot help comparing the available formats and their longevity. I don't see many comments on the short life span of hard drives. I usually buy drives with five year warranties, but that seems crazy to keep paying over and over to put your music on new drives. Well cared for vinyl records and cd's last much longer. Does this bother anyone? I'm not cheap by any standard, but this seems a waste of money.

Yes, it's bothersome, but it is what it is, unfortunately. You can expect a HDD to fail any time really, but it will almost definitely fail as it ages to the 5 year mark. In fact, I've never had one last five years that I can recall.

A few years ago, I started buying SSDs with 5 year warranties (Intel 320 series). So at least when they fail, I can get a new one that lasts a long time...for free.

As for music, I have the CD for every album in my losless iTunes library. So even if I lost ALL computer hardware somehow, I could simply reburn my entire library.

So, ultimately, my backup is the original CDs, not a HDD. Helps me sleep.

Most of my hard drives, except in laptops, have outlasted the useful life of the computer.

"I just hope that the life span limit for drives does not include the time the drive is in storage. Actual does anyone know whether this is a reasonable assumption about drive life span?"

As usual, the answer is "yes and no". The usual failure mode is mechanical (bearing failure and/or head crash). If you keep your disks in a dry and even-temperature place (maybe in a a bag with some silica crystals) you should avoid the platters oxidizing.

Unfortunately the next failure mode is electrical component failure - especially electrolytic capacitors, that tend to degrade over time. But if you have several drives of the same model, you can usually rescue the data by swapping over the circuit board from a working drive.

They are cheaper than a good phono cartrige. Actually pretty good value when you look at their place in a high performance hifi.

"Actually pretty good value when you look at their place in a high performance hifi."

And unlike most hifi gear, getting cheaper (for a given capacity) all the time.

getting cheaper (for a given capacity) all the time

Hope mine holds out until SSD gets inexpensive enough at TB(s) sizes to consider purchasing, at which point I'd be less unhappy to have to replace it.

On my computers at work, I set the drives to never spin down (since it can mess up my NFS connections). I've got a fair number that have spun continuously for at least 5 years.

I think the best thing is to back up anything critical on two other devices.

I rarely see them fail before the five year mark, and then mostly in laptops that have been dropped a few times.

After five years, they seem to fail rather randomly, though I see I have some drives online that are at the 7 year mark, having been put into service Q2 of 2005.

I try to never turn them off, as I feel the thermal expansion and contraction hurts them more than constant spin. Your milage may vary with that, just what I see here.

At work, I have production drives still spinning that were put into service in November of 2003. Those are in an IBM ESS800 unit, and were very high quality drives to begin with.

-Paul

you and Bill both leave your drives spinning and see fewer failures. I have many drives here connected to various devices and I have all of them spin down when not being used. I have never had a catastrophic failure due to my backups.

What do you two do at home? Are your HDDs always spinning there as well?

Yes, all the systems at home spin the drives continuously, except for the laptops and portable drives.

I do see failures with those, but they are the ones that get dropped and shocked and left in the truck in 105 degree + Texas summer heat, and other stupid things.

-Paul

first, how do I stop the drives from spinning down?

this is the drive I have that is actually the oldest, connected via a firewire 800 to 400 cable.

sudo pmset disksleep 0

I gotta do some fancy terminal commands...

;-)

It has always done this, spinning up and down in relation to its activity level. It also follows the computers power state, so perhaps if I set the computer never to sleep, the drive will follow. It seems an awful wasteful thing to do considering I have not had any serious failures letting the drives spin themselves up and down.

In you guys collective experience, are "enterprise" hard drives worth the additional cost?

As I see them, are there others in different places?