Hardware experts -- what's the MTBF of a typical decent HDD these days.

Hi folks
With really cheap "Old fashioned" Spinners available these days -- great for data backups, media streaming etc and really large capacity (16 and even 20TB) for affordable prices -- is there any reliable data out there on the MTBF ("Mean time before failure") of these.

I don't read of many experiencing HDD failures so often these days - particularly if used in domestic home servers (NAS type things) and left running 24/7. Frequent power off and on is the major problem I'd imagine. Note of course it's best to have SSD's for the OS and scratch areas for video editing etc but for some purposes old fashioned spinners byte for byte still offer excellent value for money.

If these things are reliable it seems silly not to use them in cases where vastly more expensive SSD's or NVME's of 10 X lower capacity are used.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi folks
With really cheap "Old fashioned" Spinners available these days -- great for data backups, media streaming etc and really large capacity (16 and even 20TB) for affordable prices -- is there any reliable data out there on the MTBF ("Mean time before failure") of these.

I don't read of many experiencing HDD failures so often these days - particularly if used in domestic home servers (NAS type things) and left running 24/7. Frequent power off and on is the major problem I'd imagine. Note of course it's best to have SSD's for the OS and scratch areas for video editing etc but for some purposes old fashioned spinners byte for byte still offer excellent value for money.

If these things are reliable it seems silly not to use them in cases where vastly more expensive SSD's or NVME's of 10 X lower capacity are used.

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

Pretty much the same as always in recent years... between 1.2 and 1.5 million hours.
For the top models from various manufacturers. (3.5" drives)
Enterprise grade... maybe 2 million hours. (2.5")


At 8,760 hours/yr. and 1.5 million hours MTBF, is about 171 years.
But honestly, they've been listing the same MTBF since like 2005-ish, maybe even earlier.



The only really bad hard drives, I remember were the Hitachi Deskstars, aka, deathstars.
Back when Hitachi owned themselves.


All this is about 7200rpm drives.
Before SSDs, I used to run WD Velociraptors (10,000rpm), and they had about the same MTBF.

MTBF is a pretty poor metric.

I've been running an ASUS M52bc computer from their business line since 2016, has a Toshiba 1TB drive split 150GB and 780GB, no issues. It's on 24/7 attached to a UPS.

cereberus said:

MTBF is a pretty poor metric.

How Long do Hard Drives Last For? Here's What the Statistics Tell Us

How long should a hard drive last? That depends on factory defects, vibration, utilization, heat, and what brand it is.

www.comparitech.com

Click to expand...

Or any other decent method -- no problem but it's just an idea of what to expect from these devices.

These days 7200 RPM and a decent fast and decently sized cache are pretty standard even for "consumer grade" HDD's. Toshiba ones seem to work pretty well. I'm not using these as "Everyday" work drives file sharing with zillions of users. Saving 4 TB of music files is a good start for these things. Never going to re-rip a zillion CD's again !!!.


Cheers
jimbo

I simply don't remember the last time I had a hard drive, or SSD for that matter actually fail on me at home. I do have 1 box on my network that I utilize as a lightweight file server. It has a pair of 2TB hard drives installed. The data is stored on drive 1, and on the 2nd physical drive I run a robocopy job every day (Monday through Sun) which duplicates my data onto the 2nd drive. This gives me a 7 day rotatio that I can fall back on in the event I do something dumb.

For me, I don't "store" a lot of data at home. I don't download TV shows and movies. I haven't purchased music in years that I rip down, instead all of my music these days comes from Amazon Music Unlimited. My pictures and videos all come from our cell phones which backup automatically to our OneDrives where we each have 1TB from my Office 365 subscription. I have an 8TB external WD drive that I use for storing my Macrium backups.

On my desktops, I'm only using SSD's and NVMe's. Reason #1, I don't like the noise from the HDD, Reason #2, I don't need tons of space, so I don't need a physical HDD. The things that take lots of space on my desktops are VM's and Games....and I prefer to keep these on SSD or NVMe for performance reasons.