13 years of hard drive failures could tell us what age HDDs actually become risky

A 13-year study analyzing over 400,000 hard drives from the Backblaze dataset, published in an IEEE Xplore paper, found that the commonly cited 3-to-5 year HDD lifespan is outdated. Modern manufacturing has pushed the risky failure window to between 5 and 10 years, meaning drives that survive their first 90 days can generally be trusted well beyond the old 5-year cutoff. The study compared Seagate, WD, Toshiba, and HGST drives while controlling for temperature, capacity, age, and form factor, though it mainly covers commercial drives and notes Toshiba fared worse than competitors.

Source: https://www.xda-developers.com/13-years-of-hdd-failures-tells-us-when-drives-become-risky. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.