Just wondering what people's experiences are with hard drive failures. I looked on the web a bit most sources said around 5 years one said 5 million years or something LOL. Anybody experience a drive failure? Mines coming up on 4 years been using it all the time.

 

my 500GB Samsung 860 EVO died suddenly after 14 months of very light use, warranty service gave me new one

 

This is maybe interesting watch

 

I haven't had an SSD die on me since I started using them (2012).

 

So SSDs or hard drives?
Hard drive medium does not have a theoretical lifetime. Its mechanical wear is a complete lottery, i.e can break in a month, can break in 25 years. It is, however, very susceptible to mechanical damage. You can shove your tower accidentally and get a bunch of damaged sectors if HDD has been spinning at the moment.
Nobody but God Himself can really answer how quickly will your HDD die.
SSDs are different. Each SSD is effectively on a timer, because NAND Flash memory can withstand a limited amount of rewrites. That amount is pretty high tho. It's not uncommon for a 1TB TLC SSD to withstand 700 (!) terabytes of rewrites, even tho the manufacturer only specifies it for like 300. It also can lose data if it stays without power for a year or more. It is also more prone to lose a lot of data to power outage, due to how data is being written to it. It's way less prone to fail seemingly at random, however.
It seems that in mass market conditions, SSDs die and lose data overall less frequently than HDDs, due to a more clear and deteministic failure conditions.
I'd advice to pay attention to S.M.A.R.T. self-assessed Health parameter and heavily consider a replacement when it reaches 0%. Will take you around 5-7 years if not heavy in use. Boot drive and/or a SSD with pagefile on it will deplete its resource faster due to constant writes the system is making.

Oh, another thing. If mechanical parts of a HDD die but the disc itself is intact, a qualified repair lab might restore all your data. Rarely happens tho, as mechanical failure tends to take the disc with it, sometimes turning your HDD into a shrapnel bomb :D
If SSD dies, that's it. It would literally take a quantum computer to restore data from a perfectly intact NAND chip with a broken controller. It won't blow up, it will just be dead. Not even being recognized by the system.

 

Last edited: Sep 12, 2023

So when an SSD dies, is it the controller that always fails or the NAND chips, or both could?

 

It can be both, either due to (rare but still) defects or mechanical damage (i.e. you stepped on it and it got bent). Controller can also be damaged by heat or improper voltage.

 

I replaced a SSD last month in my Mac, because it had dozens of bad sectors marked as "Pre-Fail" and "Old Age" by an app called Drive Scope. The SSD was 8 years old and had according to that app almost 6000 "spin-ups" and a zillion of read/writes. I do a lot of audio and video stuff. It was also in a PC and the standard drive test of Windows and macOS didn't report any errors. If I had a computer with a drive soldered to the board, then I would have a new door stop.

 

I had my very first SSD go a bit wonky on me a couple years after I got it. I don't remember what year that was, but it was a long time ago, and it was back when SSDs were more of a new thing... it was also a cheap drive, and some brand I don't normally get (I forget what kind).

Since then, every SSD I've owned have had no issues at all. It might become an issue if you do a whole lot of writing to said drive. My oldest SSD (aside from a hybrid SSD, which I don't count) in the system is a Samsung 840 Pro. The drive is reporting a power on time of about 5 years.. seems a bit low, by my memory, but my memory also sucks, so maybe that's right. That one isn't my main drive, but I usually change my main drive somewhere around every 3-ish years.

 

Ya thats why i dont usually buy a zing wong, usually get samsung hoping it will be a little more reliable, although come to think of it i had my macbook SSD fail after only 1 year of use back in like 2013

 

Yah, Samsung is my go to for most SSDs. I have one Crucial that has been great too (and was cheap). I also own a Seagate SATA3 SSD, against my better judgement, but it's actually been pretty good.. Knock on wood. For its purpose, I just needed something cheaper though.

 

The answer is probably along the lines of "it should last decades unless for some reason it doesn't".

How much do you trust the quality standards of the Chinese 12 year olds on the assembly line...

 

In essence, SSD's or even NVME's are basically random access memory. I have ram sticks here running in some of my infrastructure machines that are almost 20 years old. Theoretically the life expectancy of SSD/NVME devices should be no different than than of any ram stick. However, modern manufacturing is far from perfect (or efficient) so you will have right less than optimal results in this area. Plus there's the new corporate capitalist credo that consumers must deal with - build in short life expectancy and the reap the rewards of resultant re-purchases of replacement devices...

 

In my experience, SSDs seem to last longer than HDDs, insofar as the drives themselves, disregarding the controllers of the enclosures. When a drive fails, it's most often the controller circuit. Replacing the enclosure restores the drive to use, in this case. The controller is the first line of defense against a drive's getting zapped by a power surge.
If HDDs are dropped, especially while spinning, and especially while power is still flowing to them, the physical medium can be damaged, causing data loss. SSDs have no moving parts, so this is not an issue. The mechanical parts of HDDs can fail, from wear, so there's that, too.
SSDs do have a finite "write-to" lifespan, but a feature such as TRIM can help with the housekeeping necessary to prolong the drive's life.
Another thing about SSDs is that recovering data from them is difficult, if not impossible. This is debatable, but I never count on data on an SSD to be recoverable if the disk gets zapped or accidentally wiped. That's why I keep data that I want to remain recoverable resident or archived on HHDs, and whatever I have on an SSD backed-up somehow. (Disk Drill does an excellent job of recovering data, by the way.)

 

A study by Backblaze found that the annual failure rate for HDDs was 2.3%, while the annual failure rate for SSDs was 0.8%. This means that SSDs are about three times more reliable than HDDs.
But my experience with USB flashes is terrible. Within 10 years a half dozen of them went dead, each time all of a sudden.

 

This might be helpful to understand SSDs

https://www.ionos.co.uk/digitalguide/server/security/ssd-life-span/

HDD demagnetise like the magnetic tape. It is given 5-year lifespan.

You can read about most reliable ways of archiving files. SSD is much more reliable than HDD. Check M-Disc by the way.

 

There's the manufacturer specs like MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) and TBW (TeraBytes written). Usually these are so high it's extremely unlikely you would ever hit these limitations and so theoretically would last decades.

And then there's reality, where an SSD sits in your computer at some pretty high temperatures under load in all sorts of read and write scenario's, for years on end, gathering dust. Inevitably some will fail way before the MTBF or TBW limits due to statistical variation in manufacturer quality and/or wear and tear sitting in your particular system.

My personal experience reflects this: I have an old Samsung 850 Pro still working after 8 years. I also have a Gigabyte Aorus Gen 4 that failed after 4 years. And then my new PC has the recent Samsung 990 Pro's which idle at 50C+ and under heavy load approach 70 degrees Celcius. My idea is that these temperatures - while within standard operating spec - will cause more wear and tear, so I don't expect these to last 8 years.

For me SSD's provide performance, not necessarily reliability (one can hope though).

So I also have a Synology NAS with 2 x Western Digital REDs in them (in raid 1, so they're eachother's backup) . These are server spec HDDs that are much slower than SSDs, but they have a proven reliability track record and have all my important data on them. Technically you could simply drop a WD RED into your PC for use as backup and skip the complexity of a NAS setup. Another option is to have OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/etc... with all your important data, then you don't have to manage your backup hardware at all.

So there you go

 

Last edited: Sep 14, 2023

In 2020, I bought a Samsung SSD for my computer. It ended up corrupting itself in about 6 months, but my other Samsung SSD that I got after that has been going for quite a long time. From my experience, you'll be okay if you get a good tier SSD from a reputable brand, like Western Digital.

edit: General reliability shouldn't be too much of a worry. Just keep backups of what you deem most important, and in a worst-case scenario, you won't lose your things.

 

The worrying part is that with a mechanical drive you'll often get some warning (bad sectors, clicking noises)... with an SSD I assume smoke comes out and that's it.

 

If it gets too much voltage sure. Usually when the NAND memory starts going bad, it starts corrupting data. Weird shit starts to happen you can't explain until you figure out its the drive (reinstalls don't help, etc), until eventually it just can't read it anymore and it's finally toast. Seen plenty of it go bad in the Android 'smartboards' we make at work, but never seen a fire or any sort of smoke unless it was a PSU.