How long does a hard drive usually last?

[seawid 0]

Hi!

 

I'm asking because I recently replaced my Seagate 3TB hard drive. Luckily, it still had warranty.

 

It recorded 16 channels 24/7 and was set to overwrite once full. It was installed less than a year ago.

[Don Stephens 0]

Seagate has been struggling with their failure rate for over a year now, but that's not a reflection on how long the hard drive should last. You should at least be getting the two years out of it that the warranty covers (some have 3yr warranties). I believe after that, depending on the quality of the hard drive, the normal lifespan of an ordinary hard drive is 3-5 years.

[unix1992 0]

Here is some nice information about consumer HDD: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

 

But it's just hit and miss I think, some wil last 5 years while others barely last 6 months. If you have warranty, just send it back.

 

And here a nice 'overal' graph (from backblaze but from another source).

 

[Lu7s 0]

Any feedback of the WD Purple?

[Don Stephens 0]

Any feedback of the WD Purple?

 

No one's been using them long enough to be able to provide you with anything conclusive yet. For example, we haven't had one fail yet, but we've only been using them for about 6 months. At the very least, I've seen better performance from them over other WD drives or anything from Seagate.

[Lu7s 0]

Any feedback of the WD Purple?

 

No one's been using them long enough to be able to provide you with anything conclusive yet. For example, we haven't had one fail yet, but we've only been using them for about 6 months. At the very least, I've seen better performance from them over other WD drives or anything from Seagate.

 

Thank you Don, that´s good to know.

Found this review, http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/surveillance-hard-drive-performance,3831.html

[Digiscan 0]

Very cool article I just found. Short answer is 80% live to the 4 year mark. There is a spike in failures early on, but those that last tend to go for several years before then reaching increasingly high failure rates a few years in.

 

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/170748-how-long-do-hard-drives-actually-live-for

[mkkoskin 0]

The backblaze articles are actually a bit invalid for this forum, as it is a backup service, the usage is not anything like in recorders. They do give a nice overall picture of which manufacturer might be the "best", but there are no HDD's that are meant for recorder usage on their 2013 or 2014 setups.

 

We have used Seagate Barracuda in the past (failure rate VERY high) and SV35 (recommended for surveillance video recorders) series recently (past 2-3 years) with very low failure rate. So my experience kinda fights against the backblaze statistics, but as i said, they've not used any HDDs meant for recorders, as their usage is completely different.

 

No experience on any other manufacturer.

[Securame 0]

We have only had 1 WD Purple unit fail so far; and if I remember correctly, it was a DOA unit. But they have only been on the market for about one year, so it is probably too eaely to tell.

[survtech 0]

We've used Enterprise drives from WD, Seagate, Hitachi (now owned by WD) and Toshiba. All manufacturers produce occasional bad batches of drives. For that reason, in a RAID environment, best practice is to mix batches in any given storage device so that the drives from a bad batch are at least somewhat counterbalanced by good drives.

 

We ran into that with an older system. It stored ~300TB on 32 24-bay RAIDs populated with 500GB WD RAID Edition drives. WD sent an engineer who tested each drive, replaced the bad ones, updated the firmware on the rest and provided us with 80 free spares. Once the initial bad drives were weeded out, the rest of the drives ran fine. When the system was replaced in 2013, about 50% of the original drives were still working fine after approximately 7 years of continuous 24/7 video recording operation.

 

And, of course, never use RAID5 for large-scale critical storage. We switched to RAID6 in 2006. From 2003 to 2006, we lost data on four RAID5 chassis due to rebuild failures (URE's). From 2006 to 2013, we didn't lose any data.

[Ted 0]

I recently setup 6 servers, each with a 4TB WD Purple. 3 of them failed initialization an had to be replaced. Other than that I've had no problems with WD Purple since we started using them about six months ago and so far I've deployed about 50 disks, mostly 2 TB.

[SyconsciousAu 0]

Ive got a couple of WD reds that are over two years old now and still going strong. I have them in Raid 1 so I should never lose everything. Never even consider using WD Greens for a system. I did and it did not go well. They lasted about six months.