Tell me how many years my HDD will last

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Sagar_20

Sagar_20

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Jun 29, 2016
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Many times i have been into a situation where i had to hold the power button to turn off my. Im guessing about 50 times in its lifetime(since 2011). The same pc has also been through some power outages before which led to bad sectors on my HDD. However i had got them fixed from CheckDisk Utility. But now sometimes i think my hdd might fail anytime. Can you tell me how long would it last?? Its a 7200 rpm 1TB Seagate Barracuda if that matters. Currently 700 gb used.
 
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There are some utilities which will tell you what your HDD condition is - you need something that will read your SMART codes. I have some 250GB drives in our business computer here - one has 45,000 hours, the other has 102,000 hours. That comes out to 5.2 years for one, and 11.7 years for the other. Both have zero pending sector counts and zero reallocated sector counts. Those really are the numbers you want to look at. Hours, how many times powered on/off - those have little effect (well, except for maybe hours) to how reliable a drive is.

Pending sectors means the drive couldn't read a sector, and is going to try later and move the data off it to it's spare area. High counts there are not good as it means you have data which...
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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Somewhere between 1-20.

:lol: in all seriousness, there's a lot of factors that come into play. Power outages/Physical Damage among other things can impact the lifespan.

Regular(ish) health checks of your drive should give you an idea when it's on it's way out, but there's no guarantee.
The smartest thing you can do is perform regular backups of your important data so you're not caught by surprise when the HDD does finally fail.

Also, if you suffer frequent power outages, it would be prudent to invest in a UPS/Surge protector. As things stand, your PSU would be taking the brunt of any electrical issues and, if the PSU is of poor quality - your other components may be suffering also.
 
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boosted1g

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Jun 12, 2013
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If you often have to hold power down to shut down computer then you have some issue going on.

I fthe hard drive is getting bad sectors that you had to fix that is your warning flag, the drive is heading out the door and you should replace it sooner then latter.

If after replacing the drive you sitll have to hold power button down to reboot often you have some defective hardware or need to reinstall windows.
 
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Rookie_MIB

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There are some utilities which will tell you what your HDD condition is - you need something that will read your SMART codes. I have some 250GB drives in our business computer here - one has 45,000 hours, the other has 102,000 hours. That comes out to 5.2 years for one, and 11.7 years for the other. Both have zero pending sector counts and zero reallocated sector counts. Those really are the numbers you want to look at. Hours, how many times powered on/off - those have little effect (well, except for maybe hours) to how reliable a drive is.

Pending sectors means the drive couldn't read a sector, and is going to try later and move the data off it to it's spare area. High counts there are not good as it means you have data which might be lost and/or unrecoverable. If it succeeds in moving it, it will move that number back down.

Reallocated sectors means you had failures and sectors were remapped to spare area. This number if it starts going up indicates failing media. Once it goes up you'll want to start looking into getting a replacement and cloning the data over.

Of course, none of this takes into account a sudden failure (internal breakage) or electronics failure (controller failure) which can happen at the drop of a hat. It is possible to recover from controller failure (buy a controller board from an identical hdd and replace it, then get the data off asap). Internal breakage though - there's not much to be done about that beyond having a good backup policy in place.

For my non-critical data (ie: OS and programs) - I occasionally backup the OS. For critical data:

Data is backed up to a secondary HDD or SSD internally daily.
Weekly - is incrementally backed up to an external drive.
Monthly - is backed up and copied OFFSITE to my storage system.
 
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hang-the-9

hang-the-9

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Mar 25, 2010
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You have 348 hours and 12 minutes to use that drive.

Or less.

Maybe more.

There is no way to tell really, but the older the drive and the more times it has sudden power loss, the greater the chance of failing. If you are worried, replace it. Either way you should have backups, so when it fails, just replace it then.
 
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