Anyone Swap Hard Drives Every 1-2 Years to Avoid Failures?

I've had terrible luck with hard drives failing and was wondering if buying a new hard drive every 1-2 years and selling the used one on ebay would be ideal?

I noticed some HD companies offer a 3 year warranty which tells me they expect it to die after 3 years.

I'm talking mechanical/hybrid of course.

Thoughts?

 

I dont think hard drives are expected to die after 3 years, companies just expect to have better hard drives in that time or less.

 

Backups are a far better plan - planning for the drive to eventually fail and protecting it accordingly is an excellent plan.

Of course, I'm the guy who, in 10 years, hasn't had a single hard disk failure. The two drives that were in my first self-built system are still running strong after 8 years of almost continuous use. I only started performing backups of my systems about 6 months ago, so I'm hardly one to talk.

 

I haven't kept a laptop for over 3 months, so I don't ever replace the hard drive.

Well, I kept a Wal-Mart special laptop for about 6 months, but again no replacement.

My dad bought his desktop in 2007 I believe, and he stuck the old hard drive from his fried 2005 machine in there, and its still running strong.

No need to replace for no reason. Hard drives rarely fail instantaneously , generally you hear clicking, etc before.

 

Maybe you should do the immortal hard drive fairy dance...I heard it helps.

No but in all seriousness if you are that paranoid, do an imaged back up like once a week or so. Just do remember any corrupt OS/viruses get mirrored onto your 2nd drive. You could sell that drive every 1-3 years just I doubt a used hard drive would fetch much on Ebay..

 

I do. I have externals for that.

Just trying to be preventative

 

Not to avoid failures but I just do it generally because that's the time to.

 

i've never had a hard drive fail on me...... other than the one my dog knocked off my bench.

 

I usually replace mine because I want something either larger or faster or sold my laptop for a whole new one, which happens about every two years. Desktop hard drives I keep pretty much forever.

 

Personally it seems like a waste of money to go and buy a new hard drive every 2 years; as long as you have a spare around you can get up and running to do a quick rescue operation before a drive falls south, even better would be to just have a backup already in place.

Most drives have a 3 year warranty anyway; why not just use that?

 

Let's see...

Since I use laptops (8 years now) I've had:

1. 20GB HDD that I resold 4 months later with my laptop - was working all fine
2. 40GB HDD that I resold 2 years later with my laptop - was working fine
3. 40GB HDD that is now 5 years old, I once kicked into the wall while spinning (as external), the casing broke apart... but the drive is yet still working fine (using it almost daily)
4. 80GB 7200rpm - 4 years old, still working fine - in use every single day.
5. 500GB - one year old - working fine
6. 500GB 7200 rpm - 9 months old - working fine
7. 500GB 7200 rpm which I resold 3 weeks later because of very intensive vibrations and noise
8. 1TB external which is now 1,5 years old - still working fine
9. 80GB which I resold after 4 years - was still working fine, no data loss, but started making clicking noises.

So apart from the problems with number 7 and 9 - I have never had a drive fail on me. So don't be paranoid. Do some backups (I'm more afraid of data being erased or harddrive/laptop stolen) and don't worry-be happy SSD manufacturers tend to advertise their products implying how durable they are compared to mechanical drives - I have yet to see how well an SSD will work when it it 4 or 5 years old

 

I mean drives are becoming cheaper and cheaper. 500 GB 2.5" drives just 2 years ago were 140-150+ range. Now you can get a 7K500 or Scorpio Black 500 GB for ~60 dollars.

Notice warranties only cover parts/labor. Any data isn't covered by warranty (if it did, drives would be like 1000 dollars). Plus a couple of days downtime is unacceptable for a business professional.

 

I have some that are soon at that age, work without a flaw.

and i've had about 5 hdds dying on my own, two with my dad, my friends had 3, 1, 2.. some others had some, too.

so you have incredible luck.

still, i would never change a hdd except when it dies. the rest is the job of the backup.

 

I've only had one hard drive fail on me in many years of computing (my first computer had trouble with cassette tapes failing). I just keep back-ups of everything important in case of problems. I think the longest I've had a drive running is about 8 years before I passed the notebook on to someone else.

 

I replace HDD's long before they have failed. The latest one (Scorpio Black 500GB) lasted only a few short weeks - just received the Scorpio Black 750GB model.

Simply for performance reasons (and secondly for capacity) - any HDD's that have failed were essentially DOA and they did not see any use anyways (I torture test new equipment for up to 48 hrs when first bought).

I have also never returned a used HDD for warranty nor have I sold one either that was used in any of my systems. Yeah - I'm paranoid, but I am 100% sure that I didn't hand my data over to some stranger.

When a HDD is ready to be officially 'retired', I take out the trusty hammer and return it to the dust it came from.

The 'old' drives that I don't 'retire' are used as backups of the backups of the backups (up to 6 BU's deep, depending on the value of the data) - I have a few HDD's around that will still power up and let me read/copy the original data from - some from a decade ago.

Your version of 'preventative maintenance' will not protect you against a HDD failure - all it will do is ensure that you are getting the most current performance when you upgrade - same as me.

Good luck.

 

I have yet to see one report of SSD turned into 'read only' mode.

 

I keep single drive installations around for 3-4 years. The drives, if I keep them, then get 'promoted' into mirror sets. I run the mirror sets and then replace drives as needed.

Come to think of it, the only single drive install I have is my laptop. My three home desktops and about 10Pb of nas disk are all mirrored sets.

If you have the chassis space, mirrored drives for your primary data/OS installs and your backup targets is very cheap, effective insurance.

But no matter how sophisticated your disk setups may be, you have to do backups. Frequently. And store those backups in a a safe location well away from your on-line disk. Any other course is setting yourself up for 100% data loss.

 

Anandtech did (as ever!) a particularly thorough job of proving that it would not be a problem.

 

Anandtech has proven very useful in explaining SSD over the last few years, however, it is getting clearer and clearer that they are not as unbiased as they seem at first blush.

ssssssssss, where is the link that 'proves' what you state?

 

Looking for it now (will edit this when I find it) - the one where they subjected a drive to some huge amount of data being read/written, more than any consumer use case would ever need.

Explanation of your comment re. bias? I have to say they stand out as being about the least biased consumer tech site as far as I'm concerned as well as one of the more informative, extra points for reproducible methodology with in depth explanations of what they did.

 

IMO, SSD's are not for 'consumer use cases'.

I can write over 3TB (to nand, not all 'data') in 2 weeks time period - so far all SSD's look 'weak' with this focus.

Anandtech biased? Oh Yeah!

Read with a critical mind and you'll see that not everything is above board. Or, simply look in the forums there.

 

I do read with a critical mind - have never looked in their forums so will have a look.

And 3TB in 2 weeks is not a consumer use case really, or if it is it's pushing the envelope.

Edit: some actual explanation of their supposed bias would be nice though, rather than just 'biased? Oh yeah!', since you're the one making the accusation.

 

The typical lifecycle measurement of 'enterprise class' SSDs from IOFusion and Seagate is a spec of 10x full capacity writes to the drive every day for 5 years.

So if you have a 400 Gb drive, the spec is for 4 Tb of disk writes per day every day for 5 years.

Compared to that, the current and foreseeable groups of consumer SSDs are pretty cruddy devices that would last about 4 months under that kind of use.

 

3TB in 2 weeks sounds like a lot but have to remember the pattern also play a big role.

If it is sequential in nature(i.e. big block of write), the life calculation is completely different from random 4K write(that is what Intel's figure was testing on).

In ideal case(sequential write) the life of a SSD = size * PE cycle.

so a 120GB @ 5000 cycle would be 120x5 => 600TB or about 200 x 2 => 400 weeks => 8 years.

not bad.

 

Not that I've avoided failures but I replace laptops every 1-2 years. In every category. And I'd have to say I've suffered far, far fewer hard disk failures than other components.

Anandtech - yeah, what a shame. They've increasingly become Apple Fanbois too which means I now rate them lower than pond scum for objectivity / the correct amount of jadedness for a real tech publication.

High-profile tech journalism really seems to come down to how well you can write / present your articles (regardless of actual merit) and how digestible they are to the Apple-addicted social digerati.

 

At home, I don't think I've ever had a computer, let alone a HDD for 2 years. lol
At work, I run them till they drop. I can rebuild any of the desktops (except for 1 engineers machine, custom software) here within a couple of hours and seeing as how the users are not permitted to keep files on their workstations no data will be lost.

 

All -

We've had to remove a few posts. Just a reminder, lets learn to disagree with each other. We all have varying opinions from time to time. Its fine to discuss them, just no pointing fingers or firestarting.

Thanks everyone...