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Should I be concerned that my HDD, which seems to be working fine, is 8 years old? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven't noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven't noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.

Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?

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[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Have backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule.

All drives fail, at any time, and you will eventually lose data if you don't have good backups in place.

[–] brokenlcd@feddit.it 1 points 1 month ago

I have old 500 gb drives from 2009 that i ripped out of beaten laptops still working 24/7 and i've had new drives grenade themselfs two weeks in use, there are too many factors to properly gauge how long of a life a drive has, the best option is to have backups, even something as simple as a copy on a flash drive is better than nothing.

I get people saying follow the 3-2-1 rule, but there are places like mine where storage is prohibitively expensive, so just do what you can, anything is better than nothing in this cases.