The average external hard drive lifespan is about 3 to 5 years , provided that no physical damage occurs. Owing to the moving parts inside of external hard drives, a slight knock or drop can cause a great deal of damage. Similarly, the brand of drive also makes a difference. Want to see more comparisons between Seagate Digital? It is hard to explain the relationship between hard drive size and hard drive lifespan.
One user said on www. Where you place your external hard drive? The environment is quite important. Temperature, humidity, and dust can have a great influence on the external hard drive lifespan. Different from a hard drive in a desktop PC, external hard drivers are designed to be moved around, which increases the risk of being exposed to moisture. When the wet air gets inside of external hard drives, internal components could be oxidized and a tiny amount of internal rusting can lead to a head crash.
As to temperature, too hot or too cold is both not allowed as this will cause the failure of hard disk circuit components: when the temperature is too high, magnetic media will also cause recording errors due to thermal expansion effects; when the temperature is too low, moisture in the air will be condensed on the integrated circuit components, causing a short circuit.
Dust should not be neglected. In a dusty environment, dust can get inside of the external hard drive and it will accumulate on the internal circuits and components of the disk for a long time, which will affect the heat dissipation of electronic components. This part offers eight suggestions on how to prolong the external hard drive lifespan. It is worth bearing them in your mind. This applies to both internal hard drive and external hard drive. Vertically, the more the hard drive is active and working, the more it suffers from wear and tear.
During the operation, the flying height of the magnetic head on the surface of the disk is only a few microns. In other words, when the drive is in the read-write state, moving it may cause the head to hit the disk, resulting in damage.
Moreover, do not power off your computer when your external hard drive is working. During working, it is in high-speed rotation.
If you power off your computer suddenly, the head and the platter will rub each other violently. To avoid the damage, you should pay attention to the external hard disk indicator.
When a computer crashes -- which happens from time to time no matter how careful you are with managing the PCs in your office -- you may lose all of its files and contents. Some hard drives may work properly for a few months and other might outlast the computers you have them attached to. Since hard drives are made up of moving pieces, mechanical failure is a possibility. Mechanical failures tend to occur early on the life cycle of a drive. Unlike a hard drive in a desktop PC, external drives are designed to be moved around.
But while moving the drive from PC to PC, or from office to office, you increase the risk of it coming into contact with moisture or of the drive being bumped or dropped. What matters is how you prevent losing the data stored on the drive itself. The MTBF describes an estimated amount of hours of runtime before mechanical failure in a drive. The AFR will describe a drive failure possibility percentage after a full year of use.
This makes it harder to predict exactly how long a hard drive will last. Failures occur for various reasons , ranging from temperature to magnetic field conditions to a manufactured defect.
Due to their no-moving-parts design, solid state drives SSDs have a much more predictable failure rate than the mechanical nature of HDDs. Though the average might be three to five years, hard drives can theoretically last much longer or shorter, for that matter. As with most things, if you take care of your hard drive, it will better last to its potential. Then, as the drive moves into its fourth year, failure rates skyrocket as drives start to wear out — the various components can only rotate, gyrate, and actuate so many times before something goes sprronngggg.
Considering around Hard drive failure rate, by quarter, for the first four years. In the case of enterprise-class hard drives with five-year warranties, they are probably manufactured to higher tolerances and subjected to more stringent quality assurance testing. After 36 months, though, you should definitely back up your data, or copy the data to a new hard drive.
Backblaze says it will continue to update its data as the years go by, so that we can see if the failure rate indeed stays the same after the four-year mark. Now read: How a hard drive works.
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