How Long Does a Hard Drive Last?
Let’s make this clear. Your hard drive will die. The mechanical device in your computer that contains all of your data will eventually stop working. Moving parts are subject to wear and tear and at some point wear out. Even newer solid state drives which contain no moving parts have a limited life span. These disks can only be written to so many times before they expire.
Some hard drive will have a nice long life of five years or beyond. Others may fail in the first week you have your computer. 5% of all hard drives fail in the first year. This is not an insignificant number. That’s 1 in 20 computers that contain a bad hard drive straight out of the box from the factory. There is a 1 in 10 chance that a hard drive will fail in the first 3 years and a 1 in 5 chance that it will fail by the fourth year.
This is without taking into account outside factors that can add to the chance of hard drive failure. Overworking a hard drive will shorten it’s life. They can also suffer physical damage from the shock of dropping or sudden jarring of the computer. Heat is a big factor as well. Working in environments where a hard drive may be exposed to high heat such as industrial conditions or non-ventilated work spaces can increase the drive failure rate. Power surges are another common factor that can cause sudden drive failure.
What can you do? Obviously start with trying to avoid any of the contributing factors listed above. Watch for signs of impending hard drive failure. Dying drives may begin to make loud or odd clicking sounds. The computer may become slower as a drive degrades. You may see warnings of corrupted files or reports of bad sectors. You can run the built in windows check disk utility or a 3rd party utility like HD Tune that scans for errors.
But beyond that you already know what in the long term your drive and any data it contains will eventually be lost so be prepared for this time. Have a backup plan. Preferably an automated backup plan that is checked on a regular basis to ensure that is it running correctly and backing up the data you intend to have backed up. The best backup plans will always send data to more than one location. Merely installing some backup software once on your computer is not enough to protect your data. So many times I’ve seen situations where the user “thought they had a backup.” In many cases the backup software was not even running. In other cases the software was running but not backing up the correct files and folders or only partially backing up the necessary files. Learn more about backup plans here. Or give iSharpe Computer Solutions a call 336-260-0664 to help set up a plan for you.
The last days of your hard drive are coming! Be prepared.