HDD's lifespan

My friend told me that external hdd have lifespan, that the files inside, like movies and such became corrupted, as time passes. But my other friend said that the files wont get corrupted if I don't fully fill the hdd and let several gigs stay empty. Which is true? Or both wrong?

Your friend should not speak about shit he has no clue about. Here is the question: is your "external drive" solid state or just a regular hard disk? Since you're talking about a HDD I assume the later.

HDDs can operate for years and years without any degrade in reliability and performance. If you can't kill a HDD with stress testing within a month it'll likely last you years if you take good care of it. What does that entail? Prevent sudden power-losses, impacts and avoid high temperatures and humidity.

In fact HDDs are a lot more reliable than CDs or DVDs and data can be retained for up to 10 years on one. CD-R/DVD-R by comparision will develop faults within 5 years if not paranoid cared for and even then you might be in for nasty surprises as the dye in the disc may break up and destroy your data.

The death-rate of HDDs follows the bathtub model - you have significant infant mortality that weeds out manufacturing defects which is a sharply declining trends as the disks age, then you have a low steady state of failure due constant causes, finally old age takes its toll and mortality is on the rise again.

SSDs by comparision can retain data for ever longer times! However one can only perform a limited number of *writes* to each bit of their capacity. Manufacturers try to mitigate this by load leveling and other tricks. However if you pretty much fill up an SSD the effectiveness of these measures will be significantly lowered, hence why it's not recommended to fill one beyond 80%.

So the problem with SSDs is not data-permanence, but usability. If all you use an SSD for is storing data it'll be good for a very long time as you're not actively writing to it.

Thx a lot!! Well, problem is i pretty much turn my hdd 24/7 (for downloading) and sometimes there's power outage in my home. How much does this affect?
Also, If it's just keeping data archive and i dont fully fill the hdd more than 80% my hdd and my data files will be just fine, right?

HDDs don't actually get corrupted over time.

They can last you 5-10 years so long you don't do anything stupid like drop it.

I still have a hdd that i put in a ex hdd case two years ago... it's from 1999 rig. So yeah 10 years in a case and 2 in a ex hdd case and their no degradation what so ever. It was used a lot because it was a server for 6 years for a raw doujin group.

Only solid state (i.e. no moving parts, flash ROM) drives suffer when filled to capacity. Since you have a HDD (hard disk drive), not an SSD the issue shouldn't concern you.

Actually running a drive 24/7 doesn't significantly impact its life-span as the bearings used tend to outlast the drive itself. Constant start-and-stop cycles are a lot worse by comparison, since this leads to increased wear on the head mechanism.

Modern HDDs use a head that operates on the magneto-resistance principle (the resistance of a live wire changes when in a magnetic field) instead the earlier direct induction method. This necessitates that the coil of the head has to be really close to the actual platters that hold the data (in a magnetic form) which can only be achieved by floating the head on an air cushion. The drive achieves this, by keeping the head on a parking position when not in use and spinning up the disk (creating the air cushion) before the head is actually moved onto the active storage part of the disk. - By comparison this is like a 747 gliding 5 centimeters over the ground while cruising at 800 km/h. This is why impacts and shaking are the bane of the modern HDD.

If the force is high enough, the head can pretty much crash into the surface of the platter, ruining it (and loosing the date that's there) and if you're unlucky the broken platter particles can wreak more havoc as the clearance between the head and the plate is no bigger than some dust-motes even during normal operation.

What do you mean by constant start and stop cycle?

-If the drive is switched on-and-off all the time (possible if you keep plugging in and removing an external HDD, or it's attached to a device used in tis manner).
-If the drive is sent-and-recalled from "sleep mode" all the time (...because power-saving options).
-If the drive's internal firmware constantly moves the head to parking position (because bad firmware, some WD Caviar Green HDDs suffered from this for instance).

Granted the wear from these causes is *normal*, i.e. while it will lower the life-span of your drive it shouldn't cause a failure. One should concern themselves with such causes only under extreme conditions - i.e. that these occur hundreds to thousands of times per day.

My hardware is always connected to my pc, even when my pc is off^^. And i dont know if this is sleep mode, but my pc screen goes black each time i left it untouched for too long. It comes back if i moved my mouse or something. Bout the third condition, I dont really get them ...

Oh, and maybe a little late, but what is the differnce between SSd and HDD by appearance or functionally?

An SSDs can only be bought in low capacities for now (32-320 GiBytes) and cost an arm and leg. Since they have no moving parts, they're lightning fast compared to HDDs which can significantly improve boot and program load times. It also a young technology so not all of its kinks have been worked out yet (see my comment about not filling SSDs up beyond 60-80% of their capacity).



A HDDs by comparison are a mature technology and when it comes to raw storage space nothing beats them dollar for dollar. 1 TiByte (that's 1000 GiBytes) capacities are common place nowadays and even 2-3 TiByte HDDs are affordable. In other words you can get 10-100x more capacity for the same money if you buy a HDD instead an SSD. Unfortunately they're also 10-100x slower as they rely on moving parts.



In the past most HDDs used the PATA (sometimes also called IDE) standard to connect to a PC. Modern SSDs and HDDs have switched to the newer SATA interface.

PATA on top, SATA on the bottom:


High performance SSDs can also be bought as expansion cards that use the PCI-E interface.

[quote="Flaser"]An SSDs can only be bought in low capacities for now (32-320 GiBytes) and cost an arm and leg. Since they have no moving parts, they're lightning fast compared to HDDs which can significantly improve boot and program load times. It also a young technology so not all of its kinks have been worked out yet (see my comment about not filling SSDs up beyond 60-80% of their capacity).



A HDDs by comparison are a mature technology and when it comes to raw storage space nothing beats them dollar for dollar. 1 TiByte (that's 1000 GiBytes) capacities are common place nowadays and even 2-3 TiByte HDDs are affordable. In other words you can get 10-100x more capacity for the same money if you buy a HDD instead an SSD. Unfortunately they're also 10-100x slower as they rely on moving parts.




In the past most HDDs used the PATA (sometimes also called IDE) standard to connect to a PC. Modern SSDs and HDDs have switched to the newer SATA interface.

PATA on top, SATA on the bottom:


High performance SSDs can also be bought as expansion cards that use the PCI-E interface.


Man you're awesome. Thx for info

Anyways, from the way i treat my hdd, my files will still be intact for about 5-10years right?

Yeah, unless you drop the drive or leave it in the washer, it should be good for a good number of years.

Got it, thx alot. +rep.
Now i wont have to worry that my animes got corrupted in my hdd^^

Keep in mind though, that while HDDs are reliable, their fault incidence is *not* zero. The good news is that unlike catastrophic failure from outside forces, drives tend to fail gracefully due age, i.e. you can see it coming and do something about it.

Speedfan (and a million+1 other programs) allows the user to check the SMART data of their hard disks. This is self-diagnostic data that all modern HDDs provide. The things that one should look out for are: bad sector count, reallocated sector count and pending reallocation count.

As long as you only have a couple of reallocated sectors, things are peachy - the drive has detected the faults, and has remapped the area from its factory given spares - however if this keeps going up your drive's dying. That's the moment when one should backup ASAP.

Any critical data (critical = you job, degree, welfare depends on it) should be backed up, that is you should have at least 2 copies of it on different mediums.

Does this program already inside my hdd? Mine's a wd hdd 'My Book Essential'

No, speedfan is not part of your HDD. SMART features are. Programs like speedfan can access this data.

i had an 1 gb memory stick 2-3 years long and not even a single corrupt file
only thing that happened was tha the usb plug broke from the motherboard (little)
usb sticks last about 5 years had one but perfect state but doesnt load anything now

Sorry for bothering again, but i found that several of my .mkv files has square blurry pixel when played, although if I backward it several seconds, the blurry's gone. Does this related to hdd? The files was copied from my friend, not my own download.

The files could be damaged, though I doubt this has anything to do with the HDD and more with the drive/DVD you've copied them from. You can check this by doing a CRC/MD5 check on the files. Total Commander can do this, by creating an "sfv" file. (You can check the actual CRCs by pressing F3 after selecting the sfv).

UUmm, how do I do this again?