How long do most harddrives last before they die?

[ssgohan434]

How long do most harddrives last before they die? I have a 20 gig harddrive, 5400 RPM, a compaq brand i think and i just want an estimate on when drives die on average?

edit: its not a compaq i just found out it is a western digi 20gig 5400RPM

[Carnil]

A quick search on Google shows that the mean time before failure of hard drives is on the order of 1,000,000 hours. In other words, it should last approximately a hundred years of operating before breaking down.

[12am]

I have various hd's of diffrent ages, my oldest one is 6 years old, others are around 2-5yrs, they still work but thier performance has slipped a bit.

[FTC]

but thier performance has slipped a bit.

OK.Let me comment on this quote for the general case... Hard disk hardware performance does *NOT* degrade with time. Period. An HD with a seek time of 80 ms and 4 ms latency.... will be like that till it breaks. There is some wear that the motors can take which will increase a bit the spin up time, but nothing more sigificant than that.

What *does degrade with time* is the perceived performace due to fragmentation and older drives tendency to be almost full.... so that the disk head has to move a lot more (more times and more distance) to find the same amount of data.... So, if ou want to 'recover' most of your disk 'lost performance', do a system cleanup (to remove unused things) and defrag...

Regarding HDs longevity, well, a *good* drive will last more years than those you're willing to use your computer for ....i.e 10 or more. The problem is that after about 5 years (which is about the time for a *reasonable expectation* life length), you will not probably want to trust in that disk any longer... In my case I still have two disks running that are 12 and 14 years old.

Hope this helps
Regards
FTC

[ssgohan434]

thanks for the info guys

[Liss]

a very long time..