Backblaze: How long do disk drives last? The short answer is: we don’t know yet, but it’s longer than you might guess. Why does a company that keeps more than 25,000 disk drives spinning all the time not know how long they last? Backblaze has been providing reliable and unlimited online backup for over five years. For the past four years, we’ve had enough drives to provide good statistics, but 74% of the drives we buy are living longer than four years. So while 26% of drives fail in their first four years, and we have detailed information about the failure rates of drives in their first four years, we don’t yet know what will happen beyond that. So how long do drives last? Keep reading.
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I bought a Maxtor 80GB HDD for my 1st (my own) PC back in 2002 in Japan and I still use it as a partition in my PC now! it has been over 11 years and it's still going strong.
can't say that this is true for all HDD though as from my experience of over 30 HDDs, internal and external, they tend to live longer the more frequent it is turned on. bought 2 250GB Buffalo externals in 2005 but I literally forgot about them, tried to launch it again this year after 5 years since the last time I turn them on, both are dead! - along with the contents! same with a 400GB external I bought in Australia in 2007, tried to turn it on this year (after 4 years), same story, DEAD! my 60GB from the original PS3 still going strong in my PC too after I swapped it with a 500GB.
so...seems like, the more you use them, the longer they last!
3 years or so more if you're lucky and less if you're not.
4 years RUNTIME or 4 years and however much they happened to be running during that period?
the oldest one I have is 14 years old and still runs fine small as hell though(10 gigs).
40 GB Seagate Barracuda since 2001.
120 GB Hitachi Travelstar since 2008.