Hard drive with a lot of hours on it..

[silicon]

I have several seagate hard drives and each have in excess of 42000 hours of use. The smart check show they are both good. My question is this. In theory how long can a drive last if they get past this many hours? Why do some drives fail quickly and others just keep working? 😀

 

[corkyg]

A lot depends on their environment and how they are used. The latter includes how full they are. Having said that, my suggestion is that you have them fully backed up. They will fail one day, and it could be sudden. My current HDDs are at least 4 years old, but I don't run all of them all they time. I rotate my OS drive e very week - I have two that are duplicates.

 

[Puffnstuff]

I wouldn't worry too much about the hours on them and enjoy them. I've had drives fail and in almost every case I had very little warning except for an ibm deskstar gxp75 that started clicking beforehand.

 

[jackd1839]

One really can;t predict the exact reason some fails because of manufacturing defect, excess of heat. Actually many causes. Just keep backup of everything.

 

[Lorne]

I still have several HDs running 24/7 at work going on 10 years now.

 

[C1]

As reported various times before, I have many many hard drives (2.5" now as well as 3.5"). They fail so infrequently that I almost never think about it.

Just be sure in your initial purchase to buy quality units (eg, research user experience/history reports) and do keep a backup.

 

[tweakboy]

I had my WDC 320GB to 55 thousand hours, then I retired it,, Still working..