How Long Do Hard Drives Last? [Chart]

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Posted November 12, 2013 at 9:45pm by iClarified

Backblaze, a online backup company, has released a report that offers data on how long hard drives last. Backblaze has over 25,000 disk drives spinning at all times. Over 74% of the drives they've purchased live longer than four years, meaning 26% of drives fail in their first four years of use.

Backblaze calculated three distinct failure rates:
● For the first 1.5 years, drives fail at 5.1% per year.
● For the next 1.5 years, drives fail LESS, at about 1.4% per year.
● After 3 years though, failures rates skyrocket to 11.8% per year.

The chart below shows that nearly 80% of all drives Backblaze has purchased are still operational.

Blackblaze has been running for five years and so doesn't have data for drives older than that; however, they extrapolated the line from the previous chart to estimate the point at which half of the drives have died, determining that, "The median lifespan of a drive will be over 6 years."

Many more details in the full report linked below...

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ios3d - November 17, 2013 at 9:35pm

some real engineer will introduce oiling system some day, let's hope

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Truffol - November 14, 2013 at 7:29am

This shows the importance of cloud storage doesn't it? Not only does it provide multi-screen access, security is another important factor as you'll never have to back up...

Not try to be hard - November 13, 2013 at 5:47am

How long do Hard on Last ? Depending to age and subject lol

Kr00 - November 13, 2013 at 2:36am

Laptop HDD's fail more often than a desktop or tower, as many carry them around while they're running, tempting the hard drive gods. Kids laptops fail 10 times more than any other user. That being said, I have a 2001 iMac that still runs today, on the original HD.

stokerino - November 13, 2013 at 1:48am

Needs several qualifiers....especially to do with actual use. Their HDDs are spinning 24/7. Mine spin a couple of hours every week. At that rate, mine should last a couple of lifetimes.

Steve - November 13, 2013 at 12:20pm

Yours will fail sooner because every shutdown and switch on are much worse than 24/7

Loic - November 14, 2013 at 6:24pm

That is a myth. The disk plates are balanced and the force when stopping and spinning the disk is applied evenly on them.

gamerscul9870 - November 12, 2013 at 11:12pm

I bet macs have long lasting ones if it's possible!

MeNoLikeyFanboy - November 12, 2013 at 11:23pm

You bet wrong. Next.

gamerscul9870 - November 12, 2013 at 11:37pm

Did I say it did? No. Moving on!

CliveB - November 12, 2013 at 10:49pm

I think this is too simplistic. I assume that in the Backup application there are many many read/writes going on. I have four HD's in my Mac Pro running 24x7 and have had no failures after four years. Simple probability analysis of the 0.8 number from the graph suggests that the probability of at least one drive failing is about 0.6. Of course my HD's don't have constant read/writes going on.

Slasher - November 12, 2013 at 9:57pm

Depends on your stamina