There's been a few times in the past where an external hard drive (HDD, not SSD) has randomly stopped working for me but I blame this on rough handling by me. What's the likelihood that an external HDD will randomly die if I treat it carefully?
How stable are external hard disk drives?
- Thread starter toolazytosearchitmyself
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who knows!? just check with crystaldiskinfo if you suspect a problem.
No one can really say, there are multiple factors which go into HDD failure.
I've had multiple HDD failures including potential issues with my most recent one which was static in a desktop, but I also have a 30 year old 40MB from an old Mac which only has one bad sector when I did a RAW dump last year.
One thing I'll note though, I've recovered a few external HDDs by removing them from the enclosure, so unless you have a drive with an integrated one I'd always try removing the drive itself first.
I've had multiple HDD failures including potential issues with my most recent one which was static in a desktop, but I also have a 30 year old 40MB from an old Mac which only has one bad sector when I did a RAW dump last year.
One thing I'll note though, I've recovered a few external HDDs by removing them from the enclosure, so unless you have a drive with an integrated one I'd always try removing the drive itself first.
Dependend on the circumstances a hdd can live 10-15 years. Best check sometimes the s.m.a.r.t values with crystal disk info.
There exist statistics with a 3 to 5 year lifetime
from a server farm like Blazblade as Cloudservice where are 25.000 drives run 24/7/365 around the clock. They are permanent under heavy load like spinning up and down, reading and writting, high heat and worst for the machinal parts. Backblaze uses Consumer HDDs, not Enterprise HDDs that are especially created to run 24/7 and more reliable to run in such Server farms.
So you can easy imagen, as home user that doesnt have that load like a Cloudservice. If you would run the drives daily between 8 and 12 hours, There is a theoretical 80% chance that the drive livetime take about 8-12 years.
There exist statistics with a 3 to 5 year lifetime
from a server farm like Blazblade as Cloudservice where are 25.000 drives run 24/7/365 around the clock. They are permanent under heavy load like spinning up and down, reading and writting, high heat and worst for the machinal parts. Backblaze uses Consumer HDDs, not Enterprise HDDs that are especially created to run 24/7 and more reliable to run in such Server farms.
So you can easy imagen, as home user that doesnt have that load like a Cloudservice. If you would run the drives daily between 8 and 12 hours, There is a theoretical 80% chance that the drive livetime take about 8-12 years.
Depends.
In my experience, 2.5" (laptop) drives die more often than 3.5" (desktop) drives. I've also experienced Seagate hard drives dying more than my old Western Digital drives (all 3.5" drives), but some have experienced the complete opposite.
It also depends if it's a stationary or portable drive. Since mechanical hard drives spin, either it'll have to compensate more when being jumbled around, or the heads will literally eat the hard drive up. See this YouTube video. Note that this does not reflect EVERY drive, just a certain bunch from a certain manufacturer...
(You probably won't need to care about this last paragraph)
Then it also depends on how well the factory made the parts, assembled, and packaged the hard drive, assuming it's not all done by robots. This happens very often in car factories. Some cars will be built top notch one day, and some will be completely off the next. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/...uilt-on-a-monday-or-friday-have-lower-quality
In my experience, 2.5" (laptop) drives die more often than 3.5" (desktop) drives. I've also experienced Seagate hard drives dying more than my old Western Digital drives (all 3.5" drives), but some have experienced the complete opposite.
It also depends if it's a stationary or portable drive. Since mechanical hard drives spin, either it'll have to compensate more when being jumbled around, or the heads will literally eat the hard drive up. See this YouTube video. Note that this does not reflect EVERY drive, just a certain bunch from a certain manufacturer...
(You probably won't need to care about this last paragraph)
Then it also depends on how well the factory made the parts, assembled, and packaged the hard drive, assuming it's not all done by robots. This happens very often in car factories. Some cars will be built top notch one day, and some will be completely off the next. https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/...uilt-on-a-monday-or-friday-have-lower-quality
Realistically, I'm only going to use said hard drive once a week. It's purpose is to store files which I don't want to lose but don't access on a regular basis.
External hard drives are about as durable as an internal drive so long as you don't abuse it and throw it around. They are essentially the same thing, except one has a USB controller, and the other has a SATA controller. Don't really try to move it if it's active and hooked up either, and if you do, move gracefully and slowly so you don't bounce the read head on the platter and scratch the disk.
If it's an SSD-based external drive, you won't even have to worry about that. I also highly recommend this, because A.) it's faster and will saturate USB a lot easier, B.) No moving parts means it's better for portability, and C.) again, for portability, you don't have to worry about anything magnetized going over the platter and destroying your data
If it's an SSD-based external drive, you won't even have to worry about that. I also highly recommend this, because A.) it's faster and will saturate USB a lot easier, B.) No moving parts means it's better for portability, and C.) again, for portability, you don't have to worry about anything magnetized going over the platter and destroying your data
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NormalCatelol:
i know that there is a forum for this question but, what would you guys name the switch successor? -
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The Real Jdbye:
don't mind me, just liking all of SDIO's posts, they deserve it for https://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-partition-use-partitioned-usb-hdds-with-the-wii-u.656209/ -
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