I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
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I have a 250GB external Seagate that is nearing 20 years old. Even made it through a house fire. Still works just fine.
I still have a working HDD from the first PC I ever built back in the mid 90’s.
Yes. And I’ve had various drives die without warning, including SSDs, flash media, spinning rust. You never know when a power spike (or corruption, or bad luck, or a spilled drink or…) is going to come along and smoke your storage.
you should always have backups as all tech fails but yes, I have drives from the 90s. not spinning all the time but still working when required. why? ancient small scsi drives for ye olde samplers and an atari. will replace with sd cards eventually which, ironically, are much less reliable.
I have some ancient Samsung spinpoints that still run…
I have buckets of tape drives that still work from the 90s, and my dad has some ST-225 drives in his old work pc that have been on 24/7 for ~30 years.
If I go and poke around some old servers at my work, I could easily find some 20 year old drives in production.
Are you selling any of those tape drives?
My 2012 Macmini with the Fusion disk setup SSD disk with HD running 24/7 still working till this day 😂
Now my 6.4tb P4610s will probably last till the heat death of the universe.
Bought a 2nd hand 2tb hitachi enterprise drive on ebay over 10 years ago. It’s still going in my nas as the most busy disk.
I have ssd’s still in daily use that are like 12 years old. The only hdd’s I use are externals for my data backup though.
I have a 200MB Seagate coming from the 90s that still works fine and it was untouched from 2001 to 2019. Yes, I had to buy MANY, MANY, MANY drives in the meantime, even if that drive didn’t die.
When I started my first serious networking job, there was a syslog server in our datacentre that had been running nonstop for almost a decade. It was an ancient radiator-white supemicro 3u server with 6 SCSI disks. I decommissioned that server 7 years later. Those SCSI disks had been running nonstop for 16+ years without a single problem. The inside of the server was covered in black plastic dust from the slowly disintegrating case fans. Other than half the case fans not working, there was nothing wrong with that server.
I’ve more than once seen a scenario of a 386 or 486 box somewhere in the corner of a server closet that has been running untouched and uninterrupted since the mid-90s, performing some absolutely critical process, with no one in the company knowing exactly what it is. Everyone who could’ve possibly had a clue has retired decades ago.
The only consensus is to never touch it.
This is more common than many people imagine. And it’s a ticking timebomb.
However, it also speaks volumes of the sheer quality of old-school hardware (and software). Most modern stuff has to be replaced (/rewritten) every few years. But there is more COBOL code running untouched from 3 human generations ago that our entire societies depend on than most people would be comfortable with.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after
This machine kept working but was missing for 4 years. They traced the network cable and found it got buried behind a wall but it was still working.
I have had many individual drives last decades at work and at home the problem is that the odds for failure are the same for each individual drive but if you have more drives the odds that YOU will see a failure increase.
It is like saying what are the odds or rolling a 1 on a 6 sided die
1 16.67% 4 38.58%
So think of it like having a PC with one drive, vs having a NAS which typically has 4 drives. The more drives you have the more likely it is that you will see at least one failure during the life of the drive.
We had an old Hitachi 9200 disk array stay up for about 12 years with maybe 1-2 disk replacements. Those were very well built systems and at the time, Hitachi companies manufactured everything in them from the drives to the paint to the screws.
I’m in the same boat as others that have commented – I’ve got some old IDE drives sitting on my shelf, and every time I’ve ever pulled them down to see what was/is on them, they always fire right up.
I’ve never had any in continuous use for decades, though…
I’ve seen one with near continuous uptime from the 90s. It finally failed to detect, but some canned air cleaning did the trick.
I also have an old IDE drive about 25 years old that’s still working. My PC is about 20 years old and the mobo has 1 ide slot so I leave it plugged in for the hell of it. My PC doesn’t run continuously but it has a lot of damn hours on it.
It depends on the POH (power-on hours) more than the actual age
The drives do not have any expiration data and etc. They just work until the failure, so some of them can work for 10+ years, some of them can fail in a few weeks. It is more about luck and, I think, workload.
You want to have backups with any drive, if the data is critical to you and you do not want to lose it.
