When to replace HDD?

Since reading the 7k320 hits 3000 hours thread, I've been wondering when is the best time to replace a HDD? Should you replace it when the error scan in HD Tune starts showing damaged blocks? What about HDDLife's health status? Should you just go by hours of usage?

My current HDD, a 7k200, has 6551 hours on it already. The health status listed by HDDLife is at 47%. I'd like to upgrade it once SSD prices come down, but not at the risk of losing my HDD. Although I back up everything, I don't want to be without an HDD.

 

I guess there really isn't a good rule of thumb. Use it until you start hearing sounds or things begin to act sort of.......different. I would say that your fine right now if your S.M.A.R.T and all of your tests show nothing conclusive.

 

...replace it before it dies...or, if you back up religiously, after it dies.

(in case you're wondering, that is merely a different way of saying ALWAYS BACK UP EVERYTHING YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSE)

 

I replace my hard drive when my current drive a) fails, or b) runs out of space.

 

Harddrives should essentially be good for 1 million hours as the manufacturer states
I would upgrade the drive after 15,000 hours because by that time a replacement drive will be very cheap, larger and faster than the current drive.

The drive should easily last 10,000 hours, as they tend to
I personally upgrade every 2 years, so that I have a refreshed drive to increase performance and reliability

My momentus 5400.6 had just shy of 6300hrs before I upgraded to the 7K320. My seagate was fine, no errors, I just wanted the upgrade for more power/performance, and a newer drive.

K-TRON

 

LOL... true, but your answer doesn't help the OP at all since that is the basic rule that we all follow

 

1M hours MTBF is for enterprise HDD.
Still regular consumer HDD should have minimum 3 years lifetime.

 

Perhaps I should be more specific...the former has always happened to me rather than the latter. The last 4 hard drives I've gone through were all replaced because I filled them all the way up. They were all in fine working order when I left them.

 

when you first start getting read/write errors , replace the drive.

 

In all of the notebooks I have ever owned I have never had a drive fail on me (knock on wood ) but I usually replace my hard drive when I realize I need more space than I currently have.

Also this question becomes very important when you are dealing with servers and raid arrays. I am currently planning an expansion of the raid 5 array on both of my servers at work. All of the drives were replaced last year with new drives (the raid was rebuilt) and this year I am going to be adding a few new drives to the year old ones already in there therefore building in more redundancy.

 

If read/writes become slow after a good format, then it's time to upgrade.

 

I replace file server and desktop drives every few years or if they show any sort of error or potential problem (such as reallocated sectors in SMART). They become my new backup drives. Replacing the drives also yields greater storage densities; a plus when you're juggling several terabytes.

I consider notebook drives (when installed in notebooks an other portable devices) to always be at risk of failure, so I just replace them when they die.