How long will it last?

[BuildItYourself]

How long will an average 80 gig Seagate hard drive last? How long will an average 60 gig maxtor last? I've heard that they only last about two years. Is this true? They are not used anymore than 10 hours a week maximum.

[Steve R Jones]

There is any sort of "rule on thumb" answer to questions like these. I bet most people have had more problems with new ones out of the box. If the data on the drives is important->back it up:x

[Paco103]

I run my 30Gig Maxtor 24/7 as my primary. I bought it back in 2000, only had one problem a couple years ago, lost no data, but had to do a low-level format to get all the sectors fixed. Haven't had troubles since.

I bought my 80GB IBM DeskStar about 2 years ago OEM, and haven't had a single problem with it, and I've never done anything other than defrag (with NTFS and FAT32 partitions). I use it as a large data storage drive (ISO images, TV recording, etc)

On the other hand, I have friends that claim to fry hard drives every year or 2.

I don't OC, and I've heard that causes problems if the drive and bus don't sync right. I also run coolers on my drives, as new ones get fairly warm. Some claim that boosts reliability, I do it just because I don't like things so critical being that hot. Everything in my computer can be replaced, but the data on my hard drives cannot. I have backups of most things, but I'm not known for reliable backups.

[rsfnatik]

Even if there was an accurate "rating" for the lifetime of a drive (most manufacturers do provide a MTBF rating, but...) I wouldn't recommend anyone trust it. A drive can fail at any point in time for a variety of reasons.

Backup your data regularly.

[BuildItYourself]

That's not what I mean. I backup. I don't trust my data to be safe. I'm just wondering how often these fail.

BTW Both these drives aren't new, the maxtor is nearing its second year of usage and the seagate is a little over a year old.

:t

[rsfnatik]

That's my point tho, the lifetime of a hard drive is pretty sketchy... I can't really give an accurate "average" lifespan or how long you can expect them survive. If you had over to seagate.com/maxtor.com and take a look at the data sheets for these drives you can the rated MTBF. But I don't think those numbers necessarily reflect real world performance.

[sm8000]

You could try reading up on those drives at http://www.storagereview.com/