Hard Drive Life Expectancy

[@ItsKapow]

Interesting story. I bought a hard drive from a garage sale, as I was about to wipe it I found over 4000 photos of this guy in his college days, photos like college parties, holidays, friends etc all dating back to 2003, also a copy of an old Counter Strike game. Interesting enough, I was surprised all the files were there and not corrupted from being turned on for the first time since the last file was written in 2004. I tracked down the guy and found out he lives in another state, currently in the process of reuniting him with the hard drive he has lost for over 15 years!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Great story indeed!

[@muhammadagungwicaksono4472]

@@tamie341 he was virgin

[@CRAZYREY78]

any update on the story?

[@mbahmarijan789]

@@muhammadagungwicaksono4472 wkwkwkwkwk

[@Apple_Pen_Pineapple_Pen]

Wow

[@LazerLord10]

It always amazes me how complex and sensitive hard drives are whilst not failing all the time.

[@ExplainingComputers]

I totally agree. It is amazing the accuracy they achieve.

[@joseislanio8910]

Unless you accidentally drop one from a 30 cm height and it stops working

[@khairulhafidz15]

@@joseislanio8910 I once did that without knowing its fragility and accidentally broke them..... after that happened I'm super careful with hdds.

[@joseislanio8910]

@@khairulhafidz15 I was cleaning a connector in a 80 gb Samsung, and I got distracted by my daughter, me dropped it, not on the ground, but simply on the bench. But it was enough to damage it. Fortunately, it was nothing special, or had any important data.

[@sottosondani9879]

wow

[@pedroprobst5230]

HDD failure is one of my greatest fears.

[@fightfannerd2078]

same being a kpop fanboy i got so many fancams

[@HeenaPatel253]

For me its ssd

[@deus_ex_machina_]

Backup your important data on multiple places (including at least one off-site) and ease your tensions.

[@MetalTrabant]

@@deus_ex_machina_ Yeah, but full backup is a major pain in the ass if you have multiple TB's of data you wanna keep safe... at least if you do it manually, 'cause you don't trust automated solutions.

[@dailleursstraits]

@@MetalTrabant robocopy makes it significantly easier

[@LazerLord10]

Gotta love the way my laptop uses an SSD and hard drive. If the HDD isn't being used, it won't spin it up at all, thus greatly reducing the run-time of the drive in my computer. It's currently sitting at 29C.

[@stinkycheese804]

Does it really matter, aside from battery life? Typically a HDD in a secondary role will outlast a laptop, and the low temperate isn't all that significant, meaning it would have to be tens of degrees higher before you could expect that to reduce lifespan below another failure modem but again, heat = power consumption and it's great to have storage that is only using power when needed, particularly in a mobile, battery powered application.

[@christianlucke4042]

Makes no sense. Every spinup of the HDD is worse than it running consistently for a long time. My NAS HDDs have 25000 hrs of runtime, still doing fine.

[@frankligas2249]

Thanks for the video. Dell had a 50% dead-on-arrival rate for computers shipped to their customers in their early years. (Note: I edited and reworded this post without extreme sleep deprivation choosing my words for me.) The problem was largely due to a single cause, hard drive failures. Something had to be done. Dell invented a new term, the "hard drive touch". What a hard drive touch referred to was any time a computer hard drive was picked up, moved, vibrated, dropped, tossed, or bounced. Some of these words sound... crazy. Tossed? Why would hard drives be "tossed"? Keep in mind how Dell started. Dell helped pioneer the idea that computers could be manufactured to order, per the customer's specification. Then, the computers were only available via delivery, through the mail. During shipping and handling, Yes; often computers were dropped, tossed, or bounced Dell started at the hard drive manufactures and followed the hard drives all the way to final delivery counting the number of "touches" along the way. The total number of "touches" had to be greatly reduced. Conveyor belts, factories, fork lifts, and just about everything else in the supply chain all had to be redesigned. This was very expensive, but it paid off. Dramatically improved, dead-on-arrival statistics proved it. There was quite some delay, but it was Dell's investigations that lead a consortium of hard drive manufactures to add a new feature to all disk operated hard drives, "parked heads". One of the worst things that can happen to a drive, is that the read/write heads can bang into the disk's surface, damaging the read/write heads, and the data they are attempting to read. "parked heads" was a concept that when the drive is not reading or writing, the read/write heads should be safely parked off to the side, away from the disk's surface. This allowed for drives to be much more damage resilient. Hope this helps. If you enjoyed this comment, please do me two favors. One: click the like button on Chris's video above, and Two: Tune into my video comments 30 years from now, when I share a wonderful tale of how a little KZbin channel called Explaining Computers helped change the world for the better. : ) Again, thanks for the video.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Great post, thanks for sharing.

[@JOOLZNED]

My 20 meg hard drive that I bought in the 1990's finally failed last year, I recon thats pretty good going

[@ExplainingComputers]

Great going! :)

[@MetalTrabant]

Well served! I guess it wasn't made in China back then...

[@haseenabadshah5381]

that's*

[@marcse7en]

Hi Chris! My fave HDDs are WD and I use Data Lifeguard Diagnostics! I also like HGST. My fave drives were Samsung, before Seagate bought them out. I have two 500 GB Samsung HDDs with around 12,000 hours on them (around 10 years old). 100% perfect. I use Crystal Disk Info and display HDD temps on the taskbar. On data fade, I have Betamax home video movie tapes from 1984 still perfect! Great videi as always! 👍

[@sodiumvapor13]

Excellent vid. One thing I've personally noticed is how much longer HDDs can store data long term. I retrieved files off an old IDE-type HDD that were over 20 years old! In comparison, I've had flash devices have their data get corrupted after around 5 years.

[@ricky_pigeon]

One thing that never seems to get mentioned is if your hard drive is starting up in a cold place. like if you have it on a concrete floor. it can seriously damage the hard drive if its starting up cold. that same goes for sudden temperature changes if you open a window in winter, that will kill your fans too.

[@stinkycheese804]

It never gets mentioned because there are few to no applications where people are running HDDs in non-climate-controlled areas on a concrete floor, and even then, the floor has nothing to do with it. If you just mean a cool basement floor in winter, no, that is nowhere near cool enough to cause a problem if the room is otherwise a hospitable (to humans) temperature, and opening a window in winter does nothing to my fans, in fact I have ventilation fans directly exposed to outdoor freezing temperatures. They merely need a lubrication that stays effective in the temp range of startup as well as operational temp.

[@ricky_pigeon]

@@stinkycheese804 You are talking from your own experience it seems. My experience is that it does matter because i live in a place where temperature changes of 20c to 40c can happen if i want some fresh air by opening a window, clearly not something you've had to think about. Computers are used in all sorts of places, not just at home on a desk. In the facebook data center where i work in Sweden, built here for the cold winters, we have to be very careful about temperature regulation as you may guess. May i recommend to you, look at googles study on hard drives so you can understand the lubrication is designed and proved to run best at 30 to 40c. temps below 10c can cause greater damage on start up, like anything mechanical, it will have an effect on its life span. The floor always matters in a cold room because heat raises... so naturally the coldest point is the floor..

[@santosturmio8189]

@@ricky_pigeon you're right Too cold is actually worse for than "too hot"

[@ErnestJay88]

It's a blessing when SMART tells you that your hdd will gonna fail soon because you can backup your important data. Many hard-drive sometime just "suddenly dead" even though SMART monitoring software like crystal disk info or HD Sentinel tell us that hard drive are fine or 100% healthy.

[@Dowlphin]

Should be common knowledge by now to not assume that anything labeled as "smart" is smart. I have had a HDD and an SSD fail recently for unexpected reasons. One was spun up only for differential backup every couple days but had severe data deterioration and positioning issues at 10 years of age (masked because new writes from the backups didn't show any issue), and I had a Samsung SSD experience bit rot that the firmware is said to specifically avoid by refreshing old stored data.

[@succuvamp_anna]

There are two kinds of Hard Drives in the world. Drives that have failed and Drives that have not yet failed.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Totally true.

[@mikelieberman6924]

True but useless. The same is true for human and PC boards and your dog.

[@GaryKildall]

There are also 10 kinds of people, those who talk binary and those who don't.

[@freesaxon6835]

01011001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100011 01101111 01110010 01110010 01100101 01100011 01110100 00100000 01101101 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000

[@GaryKildall]

+Free Saxon You are correct mate

[@AnttiNannimus1]

Well done, Dr. Barnatt! This new video of yours is incredibly concise, accurate, clear, practical, and enormously useful and valuable to those of us who use computers. I suppose we number more than a few these days. It comports exactly with what I've learned and consider important about disk drives after more than 44 years of experience with using different varieties of them. When I started, they were the size of automatic laundry-washing machines, and stored a few megabytes for thousands of dollars each. I was critical of your content last week, so I owe you high praise for a job well-done this time! Thank you, sir, and thank you for the valuable links as well.

[@moonport1]

At Microsoft, we used to call data fade "bit rot"

[@Alfamoto8]

Good one!

[@d.e.b.b5788]

And yet, replace the windows OS and the data on the 'rotten bits' of another drive reappears and is easily accessible, it's only Windows that rots; everything slowly stops working, yet windows reports that everything is fine. I have DOS and OS/2 computers from 1992 and the data never suffered 'bit rot'. My 10 y/o Linux system still works great. Only Windows seems to suffer from the OS slowly degrading over time.

[@billy6690]

That scratching sound of the drive's head is better with headphones on :)

[@ExplainingComputers]

:)

[@billy6690]

That sounds pretty dope to me. If you found that piece of music I would give it a go.

[@Vlaid65]

Thx for the chuckle.

[@haseenabadshah5381]

scratching*

[@walterig33]

Your videos are very thorough and well structured. I love your channels. Thank you.

[@RapiBurrito]

Can always count on learning something new when watching one of your videos, thanks!

[@RealiMente]

I've been using a HDD for storage purposes for over 10 years, and I use my computer everyday! Still working as new!

[@JWY]

Also, regarding heat sensors at about 11:00, Windows 10 software updates can and will sometimes remove temperature sensor based fan speed handling. Yes, you can find a machine automatically updated and stopped running fans based on temperature - and simply running fans at idle. So if you don't hear the fans they might actually not be running anymore. You can find a program to retake control of the fans/sensors and fix this - hopefully before anything's cooked.

[@johnnygoodface]

I find it amazing that you haven't talked about "disk metal extension" over time. Indeed for HDs that have been spinning 5-8 years (yes it's common on servers), the disk has a tendency of expanding. Thus if you have to turn off you disk long enough for it to cool down from its "nice and warm working temperature", it might shrink enough so the head becomes unaligned from it's previous format. Thus rendering the disk unreadable, and causing it to be unable to boot anymore. Rare but I've seen it twice in my life.

[@JohnAudioTech]

After working in IT between '89 and '07, HDDs were poor in the early years but after about 2000 get very reliable. The computers would cycle through the system in about 5 years so I didn't get to see the long term reliability.

[@NeilRoy]

That was a point I raised. The thing is, the HDDs will last long enough as you will more than likely replace it due to lack of space before you ever see one fail. In comparison, SSDs are virtually guaranteed to fail. Also, due to how SSDs operate, you cannot securely erase data from them you do not wish to be recovered like you can on a HDD.

[@rickytorres9089]

@@NeilRoy They aren't, the TBWs are just "guidelines", the cells might often still writes but performance will takes a turn for the worst as the TBW leaves the "safe" zone. So as long as you avoid the cheapos (QLC and TLCs based drives) I think you can get good mileages if not better than HDDs mileages out of them.

[@wb5rue]

Another great video! Thanks. They can also fail if you move the drive when it's spinning. As with any spinning disk if you tilt it on an axis perpendicular to the spin it can distort the platter and cause a head crash. It also causes extreme stress on the bearings because, as you learned in school, anything in motion wants to keep going in that same direction which in this case is a straight line (around the disk). The faster the drive is spinning the more force it requires to tilt the drive. When you apply the force the platters resist that motion and place the load on the bearings and the platters themselves causing them to warp. (side note: server hard drives running at 10K or 15K RPM are two or three times as thick as consumer drive platters and are usually much smaller in diameter. This is why "large capacity" SCSI drives are usually of less capacity than "large capacity" consumer drives.) If you take a spinning hard drive (a bad one..) that is running at full speed try flipping it on its side quickly and you will understand. You will feel the resistance to that movement and you will actually hear the motor on the drive slow down due to the extreme load on the motor and bearings and may actually hear that terrible squeak of the head contacting the platter surface. This and dropping the drive while it's running are leading causes of mechanical failure due to head crashes. Many of the newer drives on laptops have a G-Force detector that can move the head out of the way (park) the instant it detects that the machine is in free-fall.You can test this also by turning on your laptop and tossing it (carefully) into the air and then catching it. If your drive has this feature you should hear the CLICK of the head parking itself and possibly the drive will shut down. Do at your own risk of course.

[@randomvideosn0where]

These might be good for stationary uses, but anything that moves more than occasionally I'd rather go with an SSD. Sure they cost a lot, but not as much as data recovery!

[@ddegn]

I consider myself reasonably computer literate but I pretty much always learn something from your videos (including this one). Thank you for your efforts.

[@ronch550]

I always tell people that if a hard drive lasts a year, it'll probably last for about 4-6 more years.

[@ExplainingComputers]

I think that is a great rule -- and one I would agree with.

[@PatrickBaptist]

I have a Samsung 750GB SATAIII 3.5" drive that is now just over 10 years old been in 24/7 use for half that time or more. I still use it today, it runs every day, I save videos to watch later on it and use it for a temp drive when editing videos. Samsung has always served me well with their drives, that's all I use and this is why. Though this is the longest I've trusted a drive, I intend to use it until the end of it's life, still no bad sectors or heads and runs quite. It does use those fluid bearings I bet otherwise I would have been done long ago. Good video thanks

[@Aero7SVR]

Solid info ! No-nonsense and straight to the point. Thank you.

[@AjaySharma-le3df]

And he is still hearting comments after 3 years? :)

[@awuma]

Very good basic introduction to hard drives. I would add that reliability greatly increased at least twenty years ago, though I've had a fair share of failures. I have had some drives running continuously for up to thirteen years. A 1GB system drive ran on a Linux server from 1995 to 2008 (with one CPU/MB upgrade during that time, and various Linux system upgrades). After sitting in storage it still ran again in 2014. Another server (a Sun 386i) ran from 1988 for about ten years. One of the characteristics of Unix-like systems is that they frequently rearrange data (a kind of defragmenting), so fade is not that great a problem. Different story, of course, for the external backup drives. I still don't have any SSD's!

[@ozmobozo]

A new Christopher Barnatt video, that makes my day good :)

[@HR-wd6cw]

I don't know of many laptops that have HDDs these days (some of the real cheap ones do I guess) but I almost always recommend people spend the money and upgrade to an SSD (either buy a kit or have someone do the upgrade--although it's not very hard). This gives you the peace of mind of an SSD and more durability in case you drop your computer while it's running. Keep the old HDD as a backup just in case but I would recommend people use SSDs instead. For cooling, the best option is to put a fan in front of the drive, that pulls cool air in the front and exhausts it out the back (towards the CPU, if your drives are located in front of the mainboard/CPU). This also helps with cooling of other components. If you can't do that, or there is no bracket or place to mount a fan, consider getting a 5.25" drive bay cooler (some also work as a 3.5" drive bay adapter) and use that. IF that doesn't work, then the drive rail with heatpipes could help. Most aftermarket cases should have a fan bracket in the front, but many OEM/store bought computers--particularly the cheap ones) don't usually have a fan located in front of the drives. If you can find them, you may still be able to find a cooler with fans on the bottom that will blow air onto the circuitboard on the bottom, but I haven't seen these lately in computer stores (since most people are moving to SSDs or doing custom-builds with aftermarket cases that support HDD cooling via mounted fans in the case).

[@cyberp0et]

Thank you for the information regarding "data fade". I had no idea about this. It would totally suck to lose my backup data. Perhaps DVDs would do better for long time backup storage

[@persona83]

Nah, optical discs are evil. Stay away from them.

[@CurtisLittlechild92]

Everything degrades over time. It’s best to store mission critical data on multiple hard disks or usb thumb drives.

[@MrMG43]

RAID, my man

[@PaulMonaco]

For me, this was one of your most informative videos yet. As a bench tech I'm always challenged when explaining to a casual user why a seemingly good drive should be replaced based on SMART data, you've given me some great information to pass on in simple terms. I'd be curious as to your opinion on the accuracy of some of these utilities that go as far as predicting the approximate number of days until failure. I use hard drive sentinel and on several occasions I have encountered drives that allegedly have days left. For fun I've run these drives in test machines and of course they don't fail on cue even months after they've been reported to expire.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks for this kind feedback. I don't think any utility can predict the number of days to failure! Rather, the best that can be reported (or taken from such days-to-go predictions) is that a drive has a reached the point where it has a high probability of failure, and should hence be retired from critical use.

[@Amfibios]

even though i knew all this it wasn't boring to watch. u always go straight to the point and cover every subject perfectly. keep up the good work!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks. :)

[@dj_paultuk7052]

Additionally, they dont make them like they used too. (As they say). I work in a DC, and we swap out maybe 30 to 40 dead drives every single week. The new servers with 750GB 15k drives tend to fail after about 1.5yrs. However for specific reasons we have some really old compaq ml370 servers with 9GB 15k drives that are still working fine to this day. Some 17yrs later !.

[@feynstein1004]

Perhaps that's because the newer drives handle much more data than the old ones and are thus more likely to fail?

[@thomasmaughan4798]

Same here, same exact disk drive and Compaq server and it all still works. Removed from service simply because obsolete.

[@finndriver1063]

Still here with my 80GB hard drive on my ThinkPad X200S. Though my Grandad still has his hard drive from the early 80s going in his really old laptop. It's quite impressive.

[@m24hel74]

I bought a 1Tb Samsung HDD in 2011, used it for 4200 hours on my desktop, in 2013 I put it on a dvr, and in 2015 according to HD sentinel the performance was at 100% and the health at 0%, I didn't replaced it because I want to see when it will finally die, yes It is still alive and spinning 24/7, with more than 40000 hours, the model is HD103SJ, manufactured in 07/2010. By the way, the temperature inside that dvr is above 50°c, hard drives are great, I had an SSD and went back to an HDD. I like the channel.

[@CAHSR2020]

SMART was originally intended to catch predictable failures but in actual implementation it rarely catches anything until it's too late. This was apparently due to concern that such predictive information would likely increase in-warranty repair attempts and could provide necessary legal evidence for class action lawsuits. Instead of reporting failures before your data is lost the drive plays musical chairs with failed sectors until the unit has passed well beyond the warranty period and the defects begin to exceed the drive's ability to hide them. At which point it's time to buy yet another drive from Western Digital (which now includes Hitachi and Seagate).

[@kennethflorek8532]

When noodling around in the linux man pages, I saw some peculiar, forgotten, or ignored stuff. At one time, in the old days, the way to take care of bad sectors, which normally increased, was in the file system. It wasn't internal to the HD. I believe you can still have failing sectors marked for non-use, if you care to. Another thing: At the factory, before you get the HD, they map out bad spots, because all platters have them.

[@TotoFrancey]

Years ago, back before many of you were born and before machines like the VIC-20, TRS-80 or the Commodore PET, the relatively non existent computer industry (there were big firms like IBM and Honeywell making huge mainframes but nothing for the home user) was engaged in an informal debate as to how to cheaply implement computer technology into homes, hospitals, elementary schools and small business. One of the initial topics was memory. Industry used large tape drives or punch cards to store programs and data. The fledgling home computer industry didn't want to go this route. Their idea was to store as much data as possible electronically without cards, tape or a very primitive optic drive. The problem was it couldn't be done. The cost was too prohibitive and the technology to cheaply manufacture high density solid state electronics was just not there. Technologies after the development of the transistor such the Op-AMP and the four NAND Gate chip were HUGE. So the industry had to turn to cassette tape drives, floppy disks and eventually CD/DVD burners and HDD hard drives (in early drives those disks were made from glass and weighed a "relative" ton causing many spinning motors to burn out after less than a year of use) . The SSD drive was where the consumer computer industry wanted to start and it took almost 50 years for it to get there. Today the HDD is on it's last legs. The detour is finally over. Already gone are punch cards, tape and floppy drives and almost gone is the DVD burner. The only reason the HDD is still readily sold is due to inventories and third world manufacturing costs. Once the inventories are gone so will be the HDD. For all my clients I am switching them over to SSD. Any HDD implementation is done externally. I am much older than the presenter of this video and I can say it has been a fascinating ride these past 63 years. When I started working in consumer home electronics a home computer was just an "Orwellian." concept. The Vacuum tube would still be king until 1970 and an ipod was a transistor radio with a crystal earphone. I will not live to see it but I believe some form of implantable computer technology (either biologically or electronically) will be dawning soon in the next 20 years

[@xxxPrzybyLxxx]

You can do SMART tests under Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro) easily by installing gnome disks utility. There's an option for that.

[@theLuigiFan0007Productions]

Yeah, or if you don't want a full distro Puppy Linux or GParted can be nicely placed on a flash drive. :D

[@God-yb2cg]

no thanks, I stick with gmarttools

[@minecrafter9099]

SMART only works for errors that are already detected while in use

[@theLuigiFan0007Productions]

Yes, but performing a full surface scan will detect errors it didn't find during operation or didn't occur during operation. It will reallocate any faulty sectors during the process. It just takes a LONG time to scan.

[@feraudyh]

Anything like Diskfresh under Ubuntu???

[@honkhonkler7732]

At my workplace, we've almost never had desktop hard drives fail, but laptop drives failed left and right.

[@feynstein1004]

13:06 "Back in the late '90s and the naughtys" Did anyone else chuckle at that? I mean, I know he probably meant the 2000s but still.

[@ExplainingComputers]

The "naughties" is a common phrase for referrng to 2000 to 2009! :)

[@HartmutWSager]

Yes, I caught it immediately and chuckled, though I understood it too, since naught/nought is a British term for zero.

[@TopiasSalakka]

Data fade is also called "bit rot", isn't it? Some technologies can mitigate against that, like some Unix filesystems such as ZFS and btrfs. They store checksums for every block of data and verify it periodically to make sure it hasn't changed.

[@clangerbasher]

I remember how we used to park heads.

[@kellyboyd5889]

P for park. ;)

[@SweetBearCub]

C>PARK_ (Imagine the underscore as a flashing cursor, lol)

[@kokosnh1170]

Now WD green parks the head for you, my had over 600000 last time I checked. But yes, I herd that power failure was a dead sentenced to a spinning drive, at that time.

[@stevenvanhulle7242]

I don't know how common they are, but there are drives that have an acceleration sensor in them. When a drive falls it will detect this as a few milliseconds weightlessness and park the heads before the drive hits the floor.

[@Triplex5014]

I almost have the same HDD that is shown in the video that's just sitting in my drawer. It's the WD Caviar WD200, 20GB. I don't know how old is it but I know I connected it to an older computer something like 4 years ago and it worked, booted up Windows XP. Now I'm thinking to get a SATA-IDE adapter and connecting it to my PC to see does it still work. Great video, explained right to the point. I should really have more attention to my current HDD that's about 7 years old and possibly get a new one to be on the safe side. :)

[@motogee3796]

Thorough and useful vid thank you. Wish I had this info a decade ago; could have saved a few HDDs. Iv ready somewhere that overdoing HDD cooling (below ambient) also reduces it life expectancy. (maybe due to condensation inside?) Iv been using HDsentinel for many years now. Iv also used reports from it to get a few disks under warranty replaced. Still i have lost 2-3 HDDs due to failures so far . Another very important cause of failure i have noticed is abrupt switch off of HDD due to any reason like system crash/loose contacts (ext. HDD). When this happens too often bad sectors accumulate over the disk and that very much reduces disk life. Apart from this, iv noticed, when the HDD hardware is apparently defect free the main culprit is temperature (esp. in laptops).

[@Burgercat]

havent seen ur vids in a while! EDIT: awesome vids BTW! keep up the good work!

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks. I post every week, so click that "bell" icon thing to be alerted every Sunday! :)

[@mw10259]

Having trouble booting up , ran a test and it says everything is ok except for the fan . Anyway won't let me start , boot up log on ,,,nothing . How can i recover the files , pictures , docs from my old laptop to my new laptop ???

[@witcheater]

I cannot know everything, but I do try to keep abreast of things that I may not be so attentive to. I learned from this video quite a lot.

[@fightfannerd2078]

i had my computer for 10 years it's still working

[@techgamer1597]

Yeah I had an old HP desktop from the 2000's and it lived for about 10 years.

[@fightfannerd2078]

@@techgamer1597 its dead now lol my PC won't turn on anymore mostly because of porn

[@mirroredchaos]

@@fightfannerd2078 thats why you dont use windows for porn, use a mobile device instead :)

[@AmazingArends]

I have a 17yo eMac that still runs fine, but I guess buying vintage computers on eBay is pretty iffy.

[@Beos_Valrah]

My computer is now over 10 years old (bought in August of 2010), but initially I only had a prebuild that would fail about 4.4 years later. Then I used a laptop for ~2.8 years, and after that period I finally built my own PC using working parts of my prebuild (CPU, RAM, mainboard, hard drive, DVD/CD drive) and bought the other parts online (case, power supply) since the ones of my prebuild were too small / weak for what I had planned. As for the graphics card, I was lucky and got a Zotac GTX 470 from a friend of my sister which I used for ~1 year although for some reason after a summer vacation (I had it for ~8 months already) it suddenly "died". However, I could still use it without drivers but it stuttered _a lot_ and I think sometimes it would even have visual artifacts on the screen. Well, needless to say I could barely play any games or even just watch videos / browse the web smoothly with that "zombie" of a card... Fast forward a few months in the autumn of 2018, I got my new graphics card at last! It is an MSI (AMD) Radeon RX 570 8 GB Armor OC - which I still use today. :) So this is the current state of affairs. Sorry btw, this turned out to be an essay lol

[@SweetBearCub]

I tend to dismiss "data fade", at least in the case of much older HDDs. For example, there are many videos on KZbin of people recovering very old computers, from the early 1980's, with hard drives ranging from 5 to 80 megabytes. These drives usually have sat, untouched, for many years. In a fair number of cases, the data is still accessible. In some, stiction, motor failure, or even a combination of both has made the drive useless, but that is by no means a guarantee of failure. Having said that, I partially agree with your recommendation to periodically refresh the data, though I would just regularly move the data to more modern capacity drives or formats.

[@edwin3928ohd]

I learned alot with this video! This is my favorite channel. :)

[@Censorshift]

Your vids are great, reminds me of 90s British tv when I was growing up. My hard drive is noisy as hell, only had it a year

[@hsoj9550]

To serve as a confirmation bias to what you would have said 15 years ago, the only HDD I had fail was the one in my roughly 2 year old iMac. So your statement from 15 years ago still isn't very far off! :)

[@koningbolo4700]

If you fancy the DIY level of cooling you can use a aluminium/stainless steel kitchen pot scrubby pad and (if you use two drives on top of each other) piece of plastic to shield the drives PCB from shorting out. The scrubby will take away the heat from the top of the drive which then can be carried away by means of a fan or series of fans.

[@douglasguan5254]

Good view to talk about reasons hard drives fail. However, there are no answers on life expectancy of popular hard drives.

[@andrewwebb4635]

Thanks for another lovely clear fact-filled video! Perhaps it’s because I’m English but I find your explanations much clearer than many from over the pond.

[@viralcontent4281]

please make another video about #-lithium ion battery life expectancy

[@ExplainingComputers]

Now that is a great idea, and a subject I know a lot about! I will now certainly put such a video in my schedule. :)

[@edwin3928ohd]

ExplainingComputers I second this!

[@SproutyPottedPlant]

ExplainingComputers can you add NiMH to it too?

[@renehoyvik]

i have a short answer for you. 1000-3000 charge cycles depending on the compound used as a cathode.

[@DragonProtector]

i like that to cause my kindle fire hdx 3 yrs old and battery still good

[@Bluelagoonstudios]

If an HD starts ticking make immediately a backup, don't put your pc off!!! Or it's dead, In my 40 years been busy with computers it happened a lot. Although I had a few where I lost data, I always use enterprise HD's, but they also fail after an amount of time. Thanks for the clear tutorial.

[@dallesamllhals9161]

"click of death' is a 2020-thing?!? ;-D

[@jeffharmed1616]

Thanks for sharing. I have found it essential to keep old computers working and your little study will help in that respect.

[@dirk4926]

I used to have a cat that kept knocking my external hard drives off my desk, I gave the cat to me aunt, and now I have a dog.

[@encycl07pedia-]

Sounds like user error. Dogs are generally much more destructive than cats. I know: I have both.

[@jef8278]

u seen that meme to XD

[@Vitaliuz]

I always do a surface test (any software will do - I use Victoria, for example) of an HDD when I buy one - even if it's brand new. Because better safe than sorry. And one more interesting fact. The less you turn your HDD off/on - the healthier it will be (if it doesn't doesn't overheat from running 24/7, ofc - so use proper airflow). It's because of the expanding and shrinking due to it getting hotter then colder. Those micro-expansions will damage the actual hard disc inside the drive. And the motor (as any other motor out there) is most stressed when it spins up (starts up), so it also help to preserve it. That is an another reason I set the HDD spin-down timeout setting to 0 (disabling it) after Windows installation.

[@marco_evertus]

I never lost anything to a HDD failure....said no one ever.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Indeed.

[@ej_tech]

For me, not YET. That is why I frequently backup my data.

[@marco_evertus]

EJ Tech so do I but I lost some data when I was young, did you never lose any of your data to an HDD failure ever?

[@marco_evertus]

that's great, hopefully you'll never have to suffer data loss. :)

[@alal1322]

I only ever lost data to ONE failure of a HDD...but that was me being stupid and over voltageing it :( I Will most def get the disk fresh prog though since I pretty much do just shove my HDD into a cupboard. Lol

[@fattomandeibu]

I'd never heard of data fade on a hard disk. Thank you, sir. I have been using a 2TB hard disk to hold media files, as well as a semi-regular backup image of my OS drive for a year now and will get refreshing software just in case, since a lot of the media files are permanent and probably never move.

[@carlblaskowitz7817]

Datafade is not a joke. I am mega paranoid about it, full backup refresh every 6 months. Just be sure to refresh backup disks one at time, use a surrogate disk as a temporary backup to your backup in case of failure during the refresh. If you really want to retain your data, have a distro stick to boot from during file copy operations with your backups. Dont use windows, Microsoft filed patents to compare your files to known hashes they are paid to look for and auto-delete them. Its still in the development stage, but it will eventually make it into the update pipeline, and I suspect they will not tell you. Plug your backup with all your movies and music into windows 10... and.. its gone! That's what they hope to roll out. Dont play games with your files, do data management and wrangling in linux.

[@persona83]

Lol, the new evil MS mission: to destroy everyone's backups.

[@the_original_dude]

it's only paranoia. Rewriting all the data every 6 months is straight up insane, even every 5 years makes no sense. In fact, it makes no sense to do that ever, since the drive can fail anyway. All you need to do is to check that the data is readable, nothing more. And thinking that Windows will read your every file, really? That would absolutely never happen. What's this patent you mention? I wasn't able to find anything related to hashing the contents of files.

[@mmpiforall5913]

Not covered: I recovered many of harddrives where the contact pads on the PCB interfacing with sprung contacts from the harddrive had oxidized slightly creating an open circuit and the HD 'died', gentle cleaning of the contact pads often returned a HD to service so I could pull off data and retask the HD for other purposes!

[@XenoContact]

had a head crash on friday... not fun stuff I can assure you that and recovery services are quoting me 12 times the price of a replacement drive...

[@ExplainingComputers]

Sorry to hear this. Recovery from damaged storage hardware is always very expensive.

[@liamjames-hendriks4895]

Wow thanks so much for this, I came here out of curiosity (I did know that HDDs lasted a while if cared for right) but I DID NOT know of "data fade" at all. Now I do and will be refreshing my backup drives at external locations 'refreshed" every year or so. It's mostly photos, but honestly they mean a lot so I want to keep them safe and backed up.

[@Ameen1111]

Any HGST lovers here..?

[@Reza-nu9gn]

Al Ameen p s mines been working since 2009 never failed

[@pavelp80]

It's all about probability. Mine 2tb seagate with reputation of dying in months survived four years to first bad sectors and five years before it failed with ticking sound. You can't make any statement about reliability even if you have ten drives, cause you may be lucky or unlucky.

[@DrkTrx]

82GB HGST here!, since 2007 :)

[@Reza-nu9gn]

Lucky

[@JunkTardis]

My Asus Republic of Gamers laptop came with a 2TB HGST drive as well as an m.2 SSD, but I kept the drive because it's super fast and very reliable. I added a 2nd 2TB Samsung drive as well, but it just hasn't got the same performance.

[@Dr_V]

You don't need to add a dedicated HDD cooling system, just install a case fan to blow air over / in between your drives all the time. Doesn't have to be a noisy high performance fan, a regular low RPM silent fan is more than enough, as hard drives don't generate that much heat in compared to other components like a processor or even a MB bridge, any amount of fresh air that constantly circulates around them will do the trick. I also have extensive experience with PC endurance and data storage, providing your drives are adequate quality manufacture cooling more than doubles their life expectancy.

[@justinrimmer1281]

Regarding data fade, one thing I like to do is a surface scan from time to time. My understanding is that it checks that each byte of storage is writable, and then replaces the original content back onto that byte after it writes its test patterns. It also has the benefit of alerting you to any I/O errors caused by potential bad sectors.

[@needforspeed7081]

Now imagine this guy hyped AF like linus haha

[@sbrazenor2]

If I'm not mistaken, the Zalman company went out of business because of financial malfeasance. I have a great case from them, the Zalman Z5. They went out of business about 8 months after I bought it. It was a good company that was run badly.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Ah, I did not know that. I used to like Zalman products, including their CPU coolers.

[@IgnoreMyChan]

Those rubber mounts for internal harddrives are to limit the noise produced by the drive vibrations, not to protect the drive itself. The absorption of these mounts is so limited that they won't help against falling or shocking.

[@Laziter73]

My oldest hard drive is sitting an a Compaq Presario LTE Elite 75/CX. 350 MB in size and still spinning without any signs of failure. It's been tucked away for almost 15 years, only dead things are the CMOS battery and the power battery. No data has been lost.

[@PSKResearch]

My WD drives usually go about 40,000 hours on them before bad clusters turn up or they start to get noisier or sound unusual. They usually still work fine at that point, but that's when I know it's time to replace them. At that many hours, the slightest sign of failure means there's a good chance they may fail soon & possibly dramatically. Loud & excessive clicking means failure is imminent.

[@simongreaves210]

Yeah. Planned Obsolescence. It's been a 'Thing' since the mid-late eighties unfortunately, and perhaps even earlier in some places..

[@tobyquach8220]

Hard drive failure isn't planned obsolescence unless the manufacturer designs the drive to fail. In 95% of cases it's because of wear over time; the laws of physics and thermodynamics still apply, and that's something that can't be helped.

[@lockdot2]

Thanks for the tips! My main HDD is currently going on to 19 years old. It is in my laptop. Luckily Windows XP is a rather small batch of files so it fits

[@stinkycheese804]

Pretty risking to bother depending on a HDD that old, unless you just don't care about the data or use of the laptop. Besides, it must be painful to use once one gets used to using an SSD. Even for IDE laptop drives, you can get an IDE to SATA adapter, take a half-length PCB size SSD out of its casing and fit it with the adapter into a typical 2.5" bay. Been there, done that, though I also updated to the latest Windows version that had driver support for the hardware too, which at the time was Win7, not sticking with XP.

[@lockdot2]

@@stinkycheese804 Thanks for the suggestion Cheese! I am still on XP with that hdd. I probably will just get another IDE HDD for it due to I am used to the HDD (and IDE is not very fast anyway so getting a ssd isn't going to help much if at all). On my desktop I have windows 10 and a 1tb ssd, it is quite a bit faster. But for the most part, I don't really care about the data on my laptop. If the hdd quits I'll probably try to get another 60gb hdd or 120gb hdd with that adaptor you mentioned & stick xp back on. Also if you were wondering what laptop I have, its a Dell Inspiron 1300, when it was new it had 256mb ram, 1.7ghz pentium m, and a 60gb hdd. I have maxed out the ram by putting 2gb in. It does struggle but is still getting by in 2021. Also, the reason for sticking to XP is lack of driver support. The graphics drivers are only for XP as far as I can tell. (its been a while since I looked, I think the newest drivers were ether XP or Vista. By the way, how is your day? Sorry for such a long message lol.

[@weakestpakistani9730]

Damn i wish i knew that hdds do eventually die. I had a pc that fried its motherboard so i stored the hdd. After a few years i got a new pc but my old hdd is not working :( I also had an external hdd with thousands of pictures and it failed too very recently. So if you have an hdd with your valuable data in it, do yourself a favor and make a backup.

[@captainkeyboard1007]

This story is a great forum about hard disk drives. I hope to see a show about flash memory drives. I enjoy your program very much.

[@CommanderCrash]

Excellent video

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

For testing a drive, I use the “badblocks” utility that comes standard with Linux. It can do read tests and write tests, and also keep repeating the tests as long as new errors keep showing up. And it’s not vendor-specific--it works with *all* drives. SMART is a waste of time.

[@harveybc]

This is an old video but I'm going to comment anyway. Singer Janet Jackson did a song in the late 80's called Rhythm Nation. It was reported that a certain place in the song created internal vibration in that would cause the drive heads to hit the platter. It was apparently a real problem because the manufacturers modified their sound system to attenuate the guilty frequencies. was suppose to be really bad on laptops and desktops with high level audio.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Very interesting. :)

[@maza6357]

Thanks for the nice content

[@neilbertram1922]

Of particular interest to me was the concept of data fade, and refreshing your data to prevent that. I had never heard of that. Thanks! I'm also about to run the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic (after I close this browser window) :-)

[@adus123]

I had a hard drive fail on me it was overheating for some reason and crashing all the time. so i put it in a bag in the deep freezer overnight got it out the next day and managed to recover my data befor it overheating again. WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostic is very good tool used it for years. I run backups to a network drive evry week and sometimes to a off line harddrive. as you never know when it going to fail..

[@andrewrichardsuk]

Most things are designed to break!

[@kameronswan4152]

like anything apple and anything with secureboot in mind like ios/android devices and hopefully we can avoid the storm is windows 10 s devices

[@FullFledged2010]

Like people ;)

[@mwbgaming28]

anything that stores data should be designed to last as long as possible (what if you are working on some groundbreaking research and you lose EVERYTHING because your drive was designed to fail)

[@kameronswan4152]

it should be designed to last as long as possible but that is not the mind set, its to have more of an guarantee of an "upgrade" cycle so you buy more drives more regularly, and freak people out and make them use raid 1 instead of 0 for their personal desktop that does have a backup

[@bryangl1]

Andrew - possibly but not universally true and everything is subject to inevitable 'wear & tear'; but a wasted comment I'm afraid as the critical aspects are WHEN and UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, (also, I guess, what can be done to delay the inevitable?)

[@zaphodb777]

Kinda shocked SpinRite 6 by Gibson Research wasn't mentioned. Probably because it's pay to play, but it does almost all the things the other utilities do, including refreshes.

[@ExplainingComputers]

I cannot cover everything in a short video!

[@Bobcat665]

Unfortunately, Spinrite has become far too long in the tooth and is way overdue for an update: When you try to scan a drive that's much more than a half TB with Spinrite, it will literally take WEEKS. Gibson either needs to increase its scanning speed tenfold or retire the software for good.

[@longrunner258]

People also tend to abuse it, attempting to revive irretrievably dying drives and often making them worse in the process.

[@Adi-kz5cx]

My Toshiba hdd fully dead just in 3 years.

[@Beos_Valrah]

RIP - Rest In Platters

[@shakirbukhari]

Excellent Teacher with amazing teaching style and methodology.

[@KameraShy]

My Western Digital Caviar 2.1GB Hard drive manufactured 1998 is still going strong. Just did a CHKDSK - no bad sectors.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Great to hear!

[@dinkisatinki]

Never trust a hard drive

[@FinalLugiaGuardian]

Indeed. Trust 2-3 hard drives instead. Redundancy is rather important.

[@TheNZJester]

The advert I got on this was for a company (Payam Data Recovery) that specialises in retrieving data from hard drive failures. They showed them opening the hard drives in cleanrooms and doing temporary fixes to an HDs controller board by replacing a chip.

[@DueM]

AdSense my friend, they know more about you than you realise. Illuminati lizard people everywhere

[@TheNZJester]

I have never needed a company like that. I always have duplicates of all my important files and make backup images of my hard drives. They would be using the name of the video and its tags to target this video with those kinds of ads.

[@DueM]

adsense is the software used for tailored ads. i only backup pictures but i was here because i just removed a 2tb seagate drive that was 5 years old and am wondering if i was a little hasty in its removal.

[@shadowfan982]

FIRST!!!!!

[@ExplainingComputers]

You get this week's gold medal then. :)

[@macdonalds1972]

Congrats on the first time achieving anything in your life.

[@PinguimFU]

i also read on a sandisk article some time ago that data fade can also happen on SSD,s due to the eletrical charge on the cells being lost.. do you think this ultility should also work on a ssd?

[@dearmingsacayanan]

today is Nov. 24, 2017 and my 7yo WD green HDD still works. The power and sata cables where replaced as it lost it's gripping strength eliminating it's blue screening problem.

[@jankerson1]

Depends on the type of drive, I normally use Enterprise level HD's because I leave my machines on 24/7. They last for a very long time. The one I have in the machine now has 59,000 uptime hours on it and still fine.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

“Enterprise” drives are a waste of money. Says who? Says a company which makes its livelihood from safeguarding other people’s data: arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/01/8tb-hgst-disks-show-top-reliability-racking-up-45-years-without-failure/

[@-JonnyBoy-]

I didn't think to rewrite data onto a stored drive. I will set back up for all files instead of just changed files once every year or two on my NAS from now on.

[@notsoseagatey]

SMART existed before 2004, although quite rudimentary, like the WD Caviar 21200 from 1997-98 and Seagate-connor Medalists from 1997-1999

[@newecreator]

This happened on my first 1 TB external HDD and it was ROUGH to recover that data.

[@AdnAwd24]

Three years ago, my external 750GB HDD failed, I didn't have backup strategy back then, it had the only copy of critical files. I wish that I had this information about hard drives and life expectancy

[@consciousmachine6246]

Wished you were my high school teacher.....such a detailed video...awesome.

[@ExplainingComputers]

Thanks.

[@fakofakoson1667]

HDDs in my experience are tough resilient beasts. I have a bunch of really old drives from the 1990s ranging from 10 to 80 GB that I have submitted to constant full erase/ write cycles performing back ups on a close to daily basis for 9 years now. Intending to test their durability I even have had them operate with poor cooling becoming really hot, reaching almost 70c and operating like that for hours. half of those drives were reported as imminent failure by monitoring software with less than 12 working hours left on them when I first got them. other than re magnetizing a handful of sectors via software on a couple drives None of them has given me any trouble and all have worked way longer than the predicted 12 remaining hours, even the "crappy" IBM travelstar drives.

[@MasterRegan]

I've been using some hard drives for years I'm glad they never failed

[@Beos_Valrah]

Same