Asklemmy

44656 readers

781 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Should I be concerned that my HDD, which seems to be working fine, is 8 years old? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven't noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven't noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.

Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

Hard drives can last a long long time. I have test equipment with hard drives from the 90s that still run fine. That said when hard drives fail they fail quickly

I run a 15 drive nas. You’ll often see a few smart errors one day then total drive failure the next day. Sometimes the drive fails completely without any smart warning, especially if it’s that old. I try to retire drives from my nas before they fail for that reason (if they hit 7 year service life, and that’s pretty long but my nas is just a home server thing)