Hard Drive Life

[crossnet]

Just had my first HD failure. It was a 2TB WD Green drive with over 49,000 hours of operation. This unit was the video storage drive and has run 24/7 except for occasional maintenance. Testdisk found multiple errors and listed the cause as "old age".

The read errors occurred only on recent recordings. It was being defraged daily and probably writing over and over in the same region. All other files were fine and fully recovered. Its companion (1 TB WD Green) is even older, with 67,000 hours. I replaced both drives, this time with WD Blue 5400 rpm drives and looking for another 50k.

Does anyone else have data on drive life with NPVR?

RIP WD

[pBS]

you're probably better off with purple or red WD drives as they are made with just this purpose in mind, being on 24 hrs and storing video...[better bearings,etc]
blue's are generic desktop drives, not made for 24/7 operation, and maybe less life span...
go check out WD's site for description of the drive colors for WD...

[greens are for low power use...not 24hr operation or video]

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articl...inbow-674/

[psycik]

Just had my first HD failure. It was a 2TB WD Green drive with over 49,000 hours of operation. This unit was the video storage drive and has run 24/7 except for occasional maintenance. Testdisk found multiple errors and listed the cause as "old age".

The read errors occurred only on recent recordings. It was being defraged daily and probably writing over and over in the same region. All other files were fine and fully recovered. Its companion (1 TB WD Green) is even older, with 67,000 hours. I replaced both drives, this time with WD Blue 5400 rpm drives and looking for another 50k.

Does anyone else have data on drive life with NPVR?

RIP WD

49,000 hours I'd have thought was pretty good. I had a couple of 2tb greens go at 30,000 and one (must have been a bad batch) 4tb green go under 10,000 hours. They were Seagate.

I now get WD Reds.

[pBS]

i'm still running a 2tb & 1.5tb samsung drives from 2007..
[Samsung sold their drive business to seagate a while back and are hard to find now]
I chose them cuz they only run at 30-35 degrees C and have never let me down yet.....
tho i added a purple 2tb [surveillance cam drive] recently..
the purple drives are made for constant video recording, and are a bit cheaper than reds..

oh and daily defragging isn't necessary, i'd suggest weekly at most.

[crossnet]

i'm still running a 2tb & 1.5tb samsung drives from 2007..
[Samsung sold their drive business to seagate a while back and are hard to find now]
I chose them cuz they only run at 30-35 degrees C and have never let me down yet.....
tho i added a purple 2tb [surveillance cam drive] recently..
the purple drives are made for constant video recording, and are a bit cheaper than reds..

oh and daily defragging isn't necessary, i'd suggest weekly at most.

Thanks to all for the info. I also thought that defragging was hurting disk life so I changed it to a monthly schedule. I heard that WD had discontinued the variable speed Green drives and came out with these low speed Blue drives as an alternative. So there are two series of Blue drives now, the 7200 and 5400.

The red and purple drives are more expensive and I was concerned about noise. I use a WD Black drive (a laptop 7200rpm) for the OS, which is fast, cool and quite. My big drives only store videos and other non-critical files.

[crossnet]

Any thoughts about letting drives power down (sleep) to extend life? My drive failed from surface deterioration and Green drives slowed down when not active. But the Blue drives stay at rated speed. Would it be beneficial to let them sleep when idle?

[pBS]

a noisy drive is defective if you ask me, none of mine make any noise, whether fast or slow...mainly when seeking noise is a bad sign..
the only thing staying spinning does, is wear on bearings, and that shouldn't make surface go bad any faster...unless the head is seeking over them doing something that whole time.
when idle and still spinning, the head is away from platters, so they are just spinning..nothing else...

heat is my #1 concern, it fortells a friction/wear somewhere...that's usually always bad..and heat can make surface go bad...[causing surface metal to flake]

i've seen drives go bad from too frequent sleep/wake cycles..the constant torque and heating/cooling cycles can make it go bad quick..

[crossnet]

There are many variables here, so, I'm digging further.

I found a series of studies regarding HD life by the Backblaze Datacenter. Backblaze has over 60,000 consumer grade drives in operation 24/7 for over 5 yrs. Many of these are the same models we commonly use. They have published details of failure rates vs life, which follow the classic "bathtub" curve. The data includes manufacturer, model, size, etc. Here are some highlights:

For the first 1.5 years, drives fail at 5.1% per year.
For the next 1.5 years, drives fail LESS, at about 1.4% per year.
After 3 years though, failures rates skyrocket to 11.8% per year.
78% of drives are still alive after four years.
The median lifespan of a drive will be over 6 years.

They have a number of quarterly reports listed on Google with data you can download. Here are some links: (look at the prior years for smaller drives)

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-...ives-last/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-driv...s-q1-2016/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-driv...s-q2-2016/