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so, I know that the SSD's lifespan only has to do with the amount of data writing to it. But how about regular HD?

is the lifespan of a spinning hard drive only related to the number of hours it's spinning? in other words, does it matter if it's being written, read, or as long as it's spinning (even if no read/write at all), the hour counts to it's lifespan?

thanks a lot

HDDs and SSDs are obviously quite different. An SSD has memory blocks and each block has a limited number of writes before the blocks start being moved out of the controllers list of available blocks and replaced by spares. Once the spares start getting depleted, to be honest, I don't know what an SSD will do. I know that at that point some of them become write-only devices, sort of like a USB memory stick does.

An HDD doesn't have that write limit, but as was reported by others above, can fail for a number of other reasons.

I've got an HDD that was installed in 2003 and it's still working after all these years. I have to imagine it's only a matter of time, though.
 
The most likely things that will kill an HDD will be:

  • Excessive heat
  • Impact damage
  • Stray particles entering the drive chamber causing a head crash
The following can also occur, given enough time:

  • Component wear out (it takes a very, very long time for this to occur)
  • Electronic component burn out/failure (it rarely happens unless there's an inherent bug in the design, and if there is it usually occurs early)

Unlike an SSD the HDD will not start re-allocating blocks once a certain number of writes has occurred.

Modern hard disks are sealed units - there are no air filters, because no outside air gets in. The only way you could get a head crash would be if something went astray from inside the drive (unlikely). It's more likely that dropping it while operating would cause a head crash.
 
I have had a hard drive fail within a month of installing it, and the 20MB HDD in my Macintosh SE is still going strong almost thirty years later. It's a matter of chance, mate.
Same thing can happen with the SSD, just because it's all digital, doesn't mean there won't be defective units.
 
Modern hard disks are sealed units - there are no air filters, because no outside air gets in. The only way you could get a head crash would be if something went astray from inside the drive (unlikely). It's more likely that dropping it while operating would cause a head crash.

I'd beg to differ:

http://www.howtogeek.com/127433/wha...e-do-not-cover-this-hole-hole-on-hard-drives/

I know that WD or Hitachi (or both, maybe) now have sealed drives with Helium in the chamber, but to the best of my knowledge that's the only truly sealed drive around.
 
In a "real world" setting, I've been using computers daily since 1983, both at work and at home. I've had only three hard drives fail during that time. Ironically, two failed on the same day, and they were in different computers. In every other case, I've either replaced the computer with a newer model (with internal drives), or I've replaced the external drives with bigger ones as prices came down and my storage needs increased. SSDs are faster than HDDs, but I don't know whether they're more reliable over the useful lifespan of a given capacity.
 
But by the same token drive technology has progressed so far, that I think the design, and manufacture of the units are such that dust infiltration is probably not a major issue.
No, but it only needs to get one tiny particle in the chamber to cause problems. Keep in mind that the drive heads float over the surface of a hard drive typically at 3 nanometers. Damage isn't really from "particles" as much as maybe molecules:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height
 
We have computers in the company I work for that was overlooked in a hardware replacement census that had somewhere around 80,000 to 90,000 hours of runtime. These systems were on 24/7 for years and were pretty
beaten up by the time they got retired. That's assuming best case, they were pretty slow that's for sure.
 
We have computers in the company I work for that was overlooked in a hardware replacement census that had somewhere around 80,000 to 90,000 hours of runtime. These systems were on 24/7 for years and were pretty
beaten up by the time they got retired. That's assuming best case, they were pretty slow that's for sure.

Out of curiosity were the drives actually active all that time or were they allowed to sleep when in use?
 
It really doesn't matter. I have had hard drives fail after a few weeks of getting them from Newegg. Just make sure you have a good backup.
 
I've only personally had two hard drives ever fail on me. One started developing bad sectors so I yanked and since learned I could have probably easily fixed it since the problem wasn't that serious. The other was some refurb I got on the cheap with a 3 month warranty. It locked up, seriously, two days after the warranty expired.

I've retired almost all my drives not because of problems but my space needs keep growing and growing. I'd guess the average amount of time I keep a drive is 3-4 years.
 
SSDs are now to hard drives as hard drives used to be to optical drives. People used to use optical drives for critical data storage and backups. Optical drives were too slow for anything else. Now, the hard drive has become the backup drive and SSDs are primary drives. Just today I got a flyer from some company selling 240GB Samsung SSDs for about $80, and 2TB hard drives for about $60. I'd think the vast majority of people don't need anymore than 240GB of storage, but they do need lots of space for backups, so for them the move to an SSD is obvious. I'd also state that IMHO hard drives are much more reliable than optical drives ever were. To those that really need tons and tons of storage, a nice thought is that HDDs seem to be getting even more reliable and much faster as well.
 
No, but it only needs to get one tiny particle in the chamber to cause problems. Keep in mind that the drive heads float over the surface of a hard drive typically at 3 nanometers. Damage isn't really from "particles" as much as maybe molecules:
Conversely it only takes one errant voltage fluctuation to cause problems with the SSD.

What you write can only be considered wildly speculative and highly unlikely.
 
Conversely it only takes one errant voltage fluctuation to cause problems with the SSD.

What you write can only be considered wildly speculative and highly unlikely.

Do you have any examples of this "errant voltage fluctuation" causing problems with an SSD? What type of damage occurs? I've heard/read about them dropping dead after a sudden power loss or disconnect, but I don't consider that a fluctuation.
 
Conversely it only takes one errant voltage fluctuation to cause problems with the SSD.

What you write can only be considered wildly speculative and highly unlikely.

I don't think so……...

From ACS Data Recovery:

"A head crash can be initiated by tiny particles of dirt or other debris. In modern hard drives the read-write heads can float as close as 6 nanometers above the platter. That is only slightly more the twice the width of a strand of DNA. which can cause the head to bounce against the disk, destroying the thin magnetic coating on the disk. The disk read-and-write head is made using thin film techniques that include materials hard enough to scratch through the protective layers."

Source: https://acsdata.com/head-crash/


From Wikipedia:

"The disk read-and-write head is made using thin film techniques that include materials hard enough to scratch through the protective layers. A head crash can be initiated by a force that puts enough pressure on the platters from the heads to scratch through to the magnetic storage layer. A tiny particle of dirt or other detritus, excessive shock or vibration, or accidentally dropping a running drive can cause a head to bounce against its disk, destroying the thin magnetic coating on the area the heads come in contact with, and often damaging the heads in the process. After this initial crash, countless numbers of fine particles from the damaged area can land onto other areas and can cause more head crashes when the heads move over those particles, quickly causing significant damage and data loss, and rendering the drive useless. Some modern hard disks incorporate free fall sensors to offer protection against head crashes caused by accidentally dropping the drive."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash


From PC Magazines Encyclopedia:

"The physical destruction of a hard disk. Misalignment, faulty parts, contamination with dust, as well as excessive jostling and temperatures, can cause the read/write head to collide with the disk's recording surface. The data are rendered unreadable, and the drive has to be replaced. However, in some cases, the data can be recovered (see data recovery)."

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/44170/head-crash
 
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What I would love to see is more data on SSD failures, like percentages, how long they can hold data if connected to nothing, why they fail, how they fail, etc. It seems they're simply too new for this type of data to be available. Everyone (or at least most) know the symptoms of an HDD failure.
 
What I would love to see is more data on SSD failures, like percentages, how long they can hold data if connected to nothing, why they fail, how they fail, etc. It seems they're simply too new for this type of data to be available. Everyone (or at least most) know the symptoms of an HDD failure.
You might be interested in this test where they ran an SSD right into the ground.

I think many people operate under the assumption that for example a TLC NAND chip SSD is rated for 1,000 write cycles, that when it hits 1,000 cycles it will just stop working. This test shows that is not the case at all.
 
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I have had 2 HD failures over the years. One was on my 6220 and it failed within a day of buying it new. Apple back then sent someone to my house to fix it. Then I had a failure on my 2010 iMac at about the 2 year point. It has been running fine ever since. I think it is just a crap shoot.
 
SSDs are now to hard drives as hard drives used to be to optical drives. People used to use optical drives for critical data storage and backups. Optical drives were too slow for anything else. Now, the hard drive has become the backup drive and SSDs are primary drives. Just today I got a flyer from some company selling 240GB Samsung SSDs for about $80, and 2TB hard drives for about $60. I'd think the vast majority of people don't need anymore than 240GB of storage, but they do need lots of space for backups, so for them the move to an SSD is obvious. I'd also state that IMHO hard drives are much more reliable than optical drives ever were. To those that really need tons and tons of storage, a nice thought is that HDDs seem to be getting even more reliable and much faster as well.

I need lots of data space and to the best of my knowledge there are no SSDs on the market that can give me that much…at least not without paying a fortune. This is probably why the Fusion drive was invented in the first place.
 
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I've never actually had a hard drive failure myself. I have some old Macbook's that are still used by various members of my family still - which have been going for years.

I did have my friends laptop running Windows XP fail though, but that was also very old.

I think generally the lifespan of the HDD is long enough that you won't need to worry about it unless you're constantly running intensive tasks on it.
 
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