dbfalconer Loc: Salida CO

A speaker at a recent photo club meeting was describing the importance various redundant backup options. He mentioned that external hard drives (like Seagate and WD) need to be replaced about every 18-24 months.

I understand any such device can fail, and one needs a backup of the backup, so to speak. But I was shocked at his assertion. I keep adding more WD units as my collection grows...but I had not considered constant replacement too. Thoughts? Thanks.

47greyfox Loc: on the edge of the Colorado front range

What’s the basis for that 18-24 replacement claim? It seems overly cautious to me. I have three 2Tb WD drives that house my backups. One is four years old. Unless two self destruct at the same time, I won’t lose a thing. I think your club speaker is on a drive manufacturer pay roll.

xt2 Loc: British Columbia, Canada

Snake oil!!!! I have four external drives over 10 years old and functioning well.

Cheers!

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

All depends on your risk tolerance and your degree of duplication. I would say the speaker was being excessively cautious.

If the MTBF of a disk were 18-24 months, both duplication and maintenance (proactive replacement) would be supremely important. My experience with disks is that the MTBF is over 10 years, but I'm dealing with personal experience and a very limited sample size.

If the probability of disk failure is 50% in 24 months then I would estimate that by duplicating the disk, the probability of failure of both disks at the same time would be 25% in 24 months. If the disks fail at different times, you have the opportunity to copy the good disk to another before the good disk fails. That, of course, assumes you pay attention to the health of the disks on a regular basis.

If you duplicate the disk several times, the failure probability decreases. If you use a cloud service as backup backup, your failure probability decreases significantly because the cloud services recognize the problem and assign professionals to the maintenance of their storage media. They are also widely duplicated and distributed.

Depending on your shoot rate, buying a set of disks that contain 2X the size of your filepile (remember, you're backing up everything, not just your photopile), then by the time you get enough files backed up that your disks contain 1.3-1.5X your filepile and it's time to buy larger disks, it's also time to buy new disks based on aging considerations. Of course this is just a rough approximation and will depend on where you are in your file generation history.

Of course, "when it comes to backup you can't be too paranoid".

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

It depends on one's level of fault tolerance.
Mine are old also.
Replacing drives, in whatever time frame, simply reduces the odds of it failing later.
(Like replacing light bulbs every year so they don't burn out during use.)

My desktop HD has over a 2,000,000 hour MTBF.
I'm not worried about it, and my computers usually wind up getting replaced before the HD goes.
I've ONLY replaced drives when they fail, which has been VERY rarely. (Two in over 15 years.)
Besides, even though a hassle, I'm covered by multiple backups. (I also clone my system HD every month or three.)

I'm still using a 1Tb drive that was pulled out of an old computer over seven years ago. It's one of my backup drives. I ain't skeert {sic}.

FL Streetrodder

I have a 500 GB Western Digital external hard drive that I purchased over 20 years ago that is still going strong! No problems whatsoever with it.

Jimmy T Loc: Virginia

I have three large (4-5 and 8TB) Seagate HDs that are in constant use. Two are over ten years old, and the 8TB is several (?) years old.
I think that a lot has to do with how they are treated.
Two back up my files nightly and the 8TB is "constantly" backing up.
Power is provided through an APC Battery backup.
They are set apart from each other, well ventilated, and away from anything that produces heat.
They are RARELY Moved, and NEVER Handled until they have a chance to spin down COMPLETELY.
Always have at least two back-ups in addition to your internal HD.
With that being said I full well expect all three to suddenly burst into flame, sigh.
Smile,
JimmyT Sends

PS: I also have a 1 TB Maxtor HD purchased and placed into service in 2008 that is still running fine.

stogieboy Loc: Marlboro, NY

External drives will definitely fail, its just a matter of when. Better made drives will last longer, but will still fail at some point. I had 2 drives fail on me recently, completely coincidental. One was for my xbox, but I'd been using it for over 6 years. The other was a backup of my hard drive, though I also have Carbonite, so I am not going to replace that one. The actual hard drive in the computer is fine and healthy.

While I have physical backups of my photos (hard drive, plus 2 external drives), I also have the Carbonite subscription. Overkill? Yep, probably, but the external drives are in a small, fireproof safe. So, God forbid something ever happen and we need to exit the house quickly, I can grab that and know my photos are safe. Of the people I know who have experienced a catastrophe, photos are the one thing they wish they could have saved.

Oh, and as inexpensive as drives are now, there really is no reason not to have one at the ready.

Scruples Loc: Brooklyn, New York

I have found it highly unlikely that a hard drive will only survive such a short time before it needs replacement. What do you do with the one that was replaced? I have an unused closet where I can store the used ones.
I do know that if you remove the external hard drive suddenly by pulling on the cable, you could fry the memory chips. Before removing the cable, be sure to eject all hardware. This is known as “parking the hard drive.”

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

If you wind up with too many, you can send some of the drives 1Tb & over to me.

dbfalconer Loc: Salida CO

Thanks to all for clearing this up for me! Your experiences make much more sense. A relief I don’t have to invest over and over again.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

insman1132 Loc: Southwest Florida

I would think how often you access a drive would have a lot to do with its longevity.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Statistics are a funny thing. There will be many who will attest that they own external drives that last more than 6-10 yrs, and I don't doubt their words for a minute. However, if you look at the customer reviews on some of these drives a 5% or higher dissatisfaction rate (1,2 and 3 star ratings), usually due to premature failure, is not good. The warranty on a lot of these consumer drives is 1-2 yrs, which indicates that even the mfgr's don't have confidence in them. And finally, it's hard to think of something that costs $100 as a disposable product, but that's the state of the industry these days.

I always advocate buying better quality drives (5 yr warranty) and putting them in an external enclosure. Better drive, cheaper than recovering a failed drive, about the same price as buying drive pairs for redudancy, and fewer sleepless nights.

There is a reason why data centers and corporate server farms don't use the cheap stuff. It's because they fail with alarming regularity. So 18-24 months on a consumer drive is not all that unreasonable, unless you like rolling the dice with your data.

We used to have a saying in the industry - there are two kinds of computer users - those that have lost data due to drive failures, and those that will.

mwsilvers Loc: Central New Jersey

I back up everything including photos work data, and financial data to four external hard drives. Every once in a while a hard drive will fail, but of my current four drives, two of them are over five years old, one of them is over three years old and the fourth one is almost two years old.

In all the years I've been backing up to external hard drives, I recall only one drive failing in less than a year and one other which started to have difficulties in less than three years. However, since external hard drives first become available, I have owned a couple of dozen for use with a number of computers. While all hard drives will fail eventually, my experience is that their MTBF is much greater than 18 to 24 months. More often than not I retire older drives after several years and replace them with newer models because of the amount of data they can store or the speed of their data transfer.

My personal experience is that WD drives are more reliable than Seagate's, but I'm sure there are people who have the opposite experience