What's the average lifespan of an external hard drive?

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ComputerWhiz305

ComputerWhiz305

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Jun 25, 2014
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I have a 2TB external hard drive that I've had for a couple of years and it died today. I sensed that it was on its way out so I was able to backup my data before hand (luckily) and run some diagnostic tests.

The Seatools scan said that my drive has been powered on a total of 62 days.

I was wondering if that was above of below the average lifespan? I saw some articles online that said hard drives last roughly 4 years, but I'm not sure whether that's the total powered on time or the time since the purchase.
 
Solution
Phillip Corcoran
External hard drives can often fail sooner than internal ones because they have a small circuit board inside the enclosure called a "bridge chip" which handles the SATA-to-USB interface conversion.

It's often that circuit board which fails, not the hard drive itself (notwithstanding the unit being dropped of course, that would almost always damage the head mechanism).

I've got three WD external hard drives & they are all still fully functional in their 8th. year of use (and I use them every day).

Compare that to the two Seagate's I used to have which lasted only 2 years despite very careful use & handling.
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Ironsounds

Ironsounds

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Hello... I have had WD drives last longer than 4yrs... but I have had to replace peoples Seagates/maxtors more often... B / basically the engineering term/spec is MTBF mean time between failures.

How did it fail? the arm get stuck and the clicking noise of doom? or did it just become a unknown file structure/name? sometimes the 2-4tb models need the backup fat table re-loaded back into them... Or the Disk Geometry reset/entered for them and they are fine for another a year or two. B /
 
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Phillip Corcoran

Phillip Corcoran

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External hard drives can often fail sooner than internal ones because they have a small circuit board inside the enclosure called a "bridge chip" which handles the SATA-to-USB interface conversion.

It's often that circuit board which fails, not the hard drive itself (notwithstanding the unit being dropped of course, that would almost always damage the head mechanism).

I've got three WD external hard drives & they are all still fully functional in their 8th. year of use (and I use them every day).

Compare that to the two Seagate's I used to have which lasted only 2 years despite very careful use & handling.
 
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