HDD lifespan – How long is your hard drive?

Generally, everything has a lifespan. Even a computer hard drive has it.

Here is a report said, it is three to five years.

Generally speaking, you can rely on your hard drive for three to five years on average. A compelling study that proved this statistic comes from the online backup company Backblaze who analyzed the failure rates of 25,000 running hard drives. They found that 90% of hard drives survive for three years and 80% for four years. But this number varied across brands. Western Digital and Hitachi hard drives lasted much longer than Seagate’s in Backblaze’s study.

This is a study based on their own use of hard disks.

I have a NAS system at home.  There are four disks inside. I bought them as early as Nov. 2009. The newest one is installed in summer 2018.

• My first NAS DNS-323
• Add a 4TB hard disk

• 2009 – Western Digital WD15EADS Caviar Green 1.5TB.
• 2010 – Western Digital WD20EARS Caviar Green 2TB.
  
• 2016 – Western Digital WDC WD40EFRX WD Red NAS Hard Drive 4TB.
  
• 2018 – Western Digital DC WD40EJRX WD Purple 4TB

Here is a SMART info page of the oldest WD HDD.

The Power_On_Hours is 99280 hours. So, I did a little bit of math here.

99280Hours = 4136 days = 11 year 4 month.

I put my NAS under the TV stand in the early years, later I put it in the storage room until now.

I think there is a lot of situations that may affect the life of the HDD.

Such as, installation, temperature, shaking.

• Installation: How firmly do you install the HDD into the system, Do you use all four screws?
• Temperature: The environment temperature, is the place clean enough?
• Shaking: Do you have a cat or kid at home? He may touch the NAS or your system accidentally time by time.

I guess these disks can still work another two or three years. Cross fingers.