Is the lifespan of HDD affected by number of times being written?

Quite a dummy question here: does the number of times the HDD is written on significantly affect the lifespan of the HDD? If so, then perhaps one should avoid unnecessary formatting and writing extensively on the HDD (such as using the programs like 'eraser')?

 

it u tink it affect..mayb get a SSD better?

 

I've never heard of this one for conventional hard drives (with spinning platters). The factors that I've heard that affect life span are head-flying hours, head load and unload, and number of spin ups.

 

Doubt you'd use the HDD enough to really degrade performance that much.

 

No.

Normal HDD should last many years and become useless before they break.
I have many old HDD used a lot and they still work, most don't even have any bad sectors.

If you buy a SSD, then yes I heard you can affect the lifespan by writting a lot (e.g. page file).

But you HDD will be fine, write all you want. You will be fine, just dont drop the disk or anything like that.

 

I still have a WD Caviar 80 Mb IDE drive from 1992 or 1993... I can't remember exactly and it still runs fine, no bad sectors. The thing wasn't powered on for like 8 years and it still runs. I have PCShell version 6 and MS-DOS 4.1 on it.

 

I'm sorry what I was trying to say is that the harddrive will become obsolete before it goes bad if you take good care of it.

 

That's kind of like asking if the life-span of your car decreases every time you drive it. Technically it does, but it's a car, it's meant to be driven, that's what it does.

I don't think I've ever thought to myself "Maybe I shouldn't go to the grocery store today because I want my car to last longer."

I understand your point, but the reasoning there isn't very solid.

 

it'll be fine lol. and its not just writes that use the disk-head either. reads use it as well, for obvious reasons.

you're thinking of SSDs(i'm going to guess you've attributed the theory from SSD articles). its an entirely different technology, theres nothing to worry about.

 

It has nothing to do with the life span of the HDD. Even if you frequently reformat and install an OS the life span will still not be affected. Unless you applied some outside force like dropping or shaking the hdd to hard.

 

This is a silly discussion, but of course writing to the drive effects the life span.

If you have two of the same HD's, one being formatted and reformatted 24x7x365 for 5 years, I think that one is going to fail before a drive that just sits idle for 5 years.

but like I said, silly discussion. Drives are meant to be written to. Failures happen, just like cars break down. Backup your data.

 

HDD last way longer than SSD's.. A lot of writing in SSD's wears them out..

 

The most recent versions of SSDs will withstand a lot of writing no problem, for years at a time. The latest drives from Intel are expected to last at least 5 years if 20GB of data is written to them per day.

As for the original question...no, writing to the hard drive is not going to significantly decrease its lifespan. Either the drive is going to die from the platter motor wearing out (which does not happen with a SSD) or if the platters themselves develop bad sectors from the drive's heads scratching them up (which does not happen with a SSD) or if the motor for the heads starts wearing out and causing read/write errors (which does not happen with a SSD).

Anyway, even with all those 'mechanical flaws' hard drives are fairly robust and should last a long while if you take care of them. Well, that and if they are manufactured well.

 

And that is if you dont have an active protection system.
But I read some articles where the HDD withstand a heavy shake and another one been tossed into water, and both had the heads damaged, but the platters were fine, and 95% of the info was intact.

So, if you ask me, a HDD is quite sturdy, and writing a lot on it wont damage it nor wear it out to the point you can say that the HDD is running noticeably slower. The one thing you could have if you abuse your HDD is writing heads to be worn out, but the platters themselves survive.

 

That's completely false. Please use Google and do a little more research before making such claims.

 

In case you haven't read it, there is an excellent study done by google on their server hard drives over several years. Some of the results are quite interesting. They don't release manufacturer or model information, and all the drives are now obsolete, but their data is very useful and was a little eye opening for me. Here it is:
http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

 

An excellent read, I remember this some time ago...

 

Hard drive life span is characterized by the Mean Time Before Failure(MTBF) for that particular model, and modern hard drives have MTBF of 100,000+ hours which would be a life span of decades. You will probably have bought a larger by the time you current drive time is up....

 

MTBF doesn't actually mean that. What it means is that for a large group of drives, on average the elapsed time multiplied by the number of drives equals the mean time before failure. So for for a large group, MTBF is the average amount of aggregate hours for the hard drives before the first one fails. Consumer hard drives don't have listed MTBF rates for that reason, while enterprise drives do have these figures published for them. No hard drive is going to last for 171 years of operation as the common perception of MTBF would indicate an enterprise drive with a 1.5 million hour MTBF figure should last. So for instance if you have 1000 of the same hard drive that has a MTBF of 500,000 hours, the average elapsed time of operation is 21 days before the first failure.