I still have a working HDD from the first PC I ever built back in the mid 90's.

I have a 250GB external Seagate that is nearing 20 years old. Even made it through a house fire. Still works just fine.

I have some ancient Samsung spinpoints that still run...

I have ssd’s still in daily use that are like 12 years old. The only hdd’s I use are externals for my data backup though.

I have a 50MB HDD in my first computer, a 286 Digital VaxMate that still works, from 1989 maybe?

I have had many individual drives last decades at work and at home the problem is that the odds for failure are the same for each individual drive but if you have more drives the odds that YOU will see a failure increase.

It is like saying what are the odds or rolling a 1 on a 6 sided die

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1654073/probabilities-for-rolling-multiple-dice-and-getting-one-number-or-greater

1 16.67% 4 38.58%

So think of it like having a PC with one drive, vs having a NAS which typically has 4 drives. The more drives you have the more likely it is that you will see at least one failure during the life of the drive.

We had an old Hitachi 9200 disk array stay up for about 12 years with maybe 1-2 disk replacements. Those were very well built systems and at the time, Hitachi companies manufactured everything in them from the drives to the paint to the screws.

I have a 200MB Seagate coming from the 90s that still works fine and it was untouched from 2001 to 2019. Yes, I had to buy MANY, MANY, MANY drives in the meantime, even if that drive didn't die.

I'm in the same boat as others that have commented -- I've got some old IDE drives sitting on my shelf, and every time I've ever pulled them down to see what was/is on them, they always fire right up.

I've never had any in continuous use for decades, though...

Yeah every couple years I buy new hard drives.

I have about a dozen that are about 10-20 years old. It's getting hard to find a use for them, but so far I just use them as a 5th level backup, write once. I also destroyed a bunch that were too small.

Yes. And I've had various drives die without warning, including SSDs, flash media, spinning rust. You never know when a power spike (or corruption, or bad luck, or a spilled drink or...) is going to come along and smoke your storage.

My 1GB (=Pentium 100 era), 20GB, 200GB IDE disks still worked when I connected them. Some have been unpowered for decades and saved in my shed. (-5 to 35°C and 60-85% humidity) I could open every single file on them that I tested.

I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long...

Define long. Manufacturer R&D has shown that they can provide up to a 5 year warranty on some drives without the likelihood of excess RMA claims. During that period and beyond, for drives in consumer use, even for enterprise rated drives, there's too many variables of use.

...and to always have backups.

Mantra: Any storage device/media can fail at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently?

Yes. Without proper backups (i.e. at least two, ideally with one set offsite physical or cloud), you're at N-1=0

Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?

Unless you're never planning to add to your collection, you'll always come to a point where you need more storage space. I have some 40-200GB IDE drives that are over a decade old and would likely pass SMART, but the question is what would I use them for? Even the files I consider important are over 300GB and easily fit on single drives, so why bother splitting them up to multiple drives, increasing the likelihood of failure of one or more?

I keep hearing people say that cars won’t last long and to always have money for taxi. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying cars consistently? Has anyone ever had a car work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?

It depends on the POH (power-on hours) more than the actual age

I have buckets of tape drives that still work from the 90s, and my dad has some ST-225 drives in his old work pc that have been on 24/7 for ~30 years.

If I go and poke around some old servers at my work, I could easily find some 20 year old drives in production.

you should always have backups as all tech fails but yes, I have drives from the 90s. not spinning all the time but still working when required. why? ancient small scsi drives for ye olde samplers and an atari. will replace with sd cards eventually which, ironically, are much less reliable.

The drives do not have any expiration data and etc. They just work until the failure, so some of them can work for 10+ years, some of them can fail in a few weeks. It is more about luck and, I think, workload.

You want to have backups with any drive, if the data is critical to you and you do not want to lose it.

Bought a 2nd hand 2tb hitachi enterprise drive on ebay over 10 years ago. It's still going in my nas as the most busy disk.

Just like most things on reddit, overblown.... obviously we all have random failures. I have a Dell R510 with 12x4TB disks. I had one develop bad sectors and another have some kind of issue that was cause it to make the array lock up. I think it was an issue with its board on the drive.

At the same time I have another R510 that is my cold backup with 12x2TB disks... no problems. Almost all my disks are used pulled from the company I used to work for..... don't give a shit.

If you backup or have multiple copies of stuff, who cares if drives die.

Just have a few good practices and you should really only have to buy harddrives when they fail. I have drives that are from 2008 that I only turn on when I want to go down memory lane.

Have a few copies of your data. Original, backup, offsite backup.

Backups have parity or redundancy so if a drive fails you can replace it without completely rebuilding from backup.

Not all drives are from the same batch. This one’s more up to chance but if you get a bad batch of drives they will likely fail around the same time so it’s best to get them in groups if you are buying drives in bulk.

The only thing I notice about older drives is the speed. I would say the real reason most people constantly buy new drives is capacity. I could go out and double my capacity if I just replaced all my drives with 20TB drives. I have all 8tb drives in my setup but I plan on buying 16-20TB drives when they start to fail.

I still have old IDE drives (with the ribbon cables) that still work. I still plug them in on occasion to check the data on them because they hold a copy of very old cold storage data, and even though that's not the only copy of that particular data, as long as the drive still works and I have a means of accessing it, I'll still use it to store copies of data. The oldest drive I have is a western digital 4GB drive.

Well, let's see:

the smallest (and therefore oldest) Disks I have in my NAS right now read 9 years, 0 months and 23 days. Pretty sure I've got some in cold storage with higher power on numbers (and even older manufacture dates, of course).

I used to run my system from a 500gb drive I pulled from an old PC. When I retired it it was probably 15yo.

I have an 800MB Seagate that gets powered on every once in a while, still read/writes just fine. Also have a 80GB X25-M Intel SSD that is used as a boot drive for an old winxp system

I've got three drives in my NAS that are about 12yo

A laptop 1TB HD drive from a HP Pavilion laptop still running beyond 8 years (4 years heavy usage and 4 years left untouched), still has all the data and works great

In actual use? I've got two. An old 500gb and 1tb western digital drive that came from trash PCs In enclosures. They've been used as game storage drives for my Xbox 1 that I got around launch back in 2013. I feel old.

Have a Maxtor 250GB external from 2004, but it's been unplugged since 2008ish only being turned on and used maybe a dozen times since then

Hitachi 2tb HDD.

I am looking to replace them however.

I just now had to get some data from a Maxtor 120GB IDE drive, that I filled 100% in 2003 and never touched since. Figured I'd check every byte on it while I was at it (testable data), and not a single thing wrong with it.

I have a 40 MB Conner HDD thats 35 years old and still works.

All 6 of my Western Digital Red drives for my NAS I bought in 2009 are still going strong. I hope they keep going bc I hear all kinds of things about hard drive buying issues that Im lost on.

I think my oldest disk may probably be either a decade or close to a decade old.

It is a WD 1 TB HDD with 24798 h of usage (2.83 years=2 years 9 months, 28 days aprox).

I used to store frequently used programs and files there, as well as downloads, so I had it on most of the time.

Out of fear of it breaking, at the beginning of this year I moved all that content to a newer disk and now I use this one to run Stable diffusion. It has not broken yet despite using it daily.

I have a hard drive from 2008 that's fine.

I have four 2TB drives in a software RAID0 in my gaming rig. They were manufactured in 2011.

I have 2x 1TB drives from 2010 that are still functional, though I don't actually use them for anything important. They keep the latest disk image backup for a workstation, but the images are already backed up to a NAS.

I have a drive (wd green 3tb) that is now in like 12 years, and has a uptime of 7.5 years. It works but for me its in EOL hahah

I have a few IDE drives around for some of my experimental/ project pcs. 40gb or so.

I have also had to replace a 500gb or two in the raid5 array I use for main storage on my primary NAS.

I try to avoid buying things like 20tb drives on black Friday because if a drive is going to fail, it probably won't be while there is a sale going on and I do like have a spare drive on hand.

I did pick up two 2tb drives yesterday, but that is because I am finally at a point where I could replace a 2tb drive in an emergency. I still plan to run them mirrored.

8 years mark with my WD Red 3TB drives, still zero reallocated sector count. They were kept always spinning, I don't know if this influenced things for the better

Permanently Deleted

I had a launch 60gb HDD PS3 drive finally give up the ghost maybe 4 months ago... I believe that's from 2006

My 2012 Macmini with the Fusion disk setup SSD disk with HD running 24/7 still working till this day 😂

Now my 6.4tb P4610s will probably last till the heat death of the universe.

Yep, iv got a 1tb Seagate portable iv had since 2010. I use it a air gap driver and do weekly backups of my Doc files.

I have had a couple of drives die on me in the first year. And I have a few drives that are approaching 20 that are still working (though another one did die a year or two ago). You don’t know when a drive is going to die, only that nothing lasts forever, so that’s why to have backups.

These are all drives that were plugged in and constantly on. For drives in cold storage, I would be even more nervous about whether the drive would successfully power back on after years of being off.

I have come to expect about 5 years on average. Sometimes they go 8 years, which is great, and by then they are obsolete.

My 1tb wd black hdd from 2009 that I paid a lot for is still in my rig to this day

I have a drive from 2008 and it is still running, but it does make some weird noises from time to time, so I recently replaced it.  

While that drive lasted 15 years, most of mine dont even last 5 years.

I have 20gb drives that still work

I have a Seagate 4 TB drive that is a few months away from being 10 years old and is working flawlessly.

2TB WD Green from 2010-2013 are still running and running. My 4 have 98000h

I got 6 WD red 3TB that all still work. They have been run 24/7 since 2012/13 They are now retired and replaced by WD red 8TB drives.

40mb wd had drive in an amiga 1200, still works fine.. must say its not had much use in recent years. Think it was bought in 1993

I bought maybe 100-120 HDDs of all brands and capacities since ~2001 and I believe 3 of them have failed so far:
- One 2 TB WD Black from ~2010 died after 3-4 years (one out of 20)
- One 2 TB WD Red from ~2012 died in 2021 (one out of 10)
- One 8 TB Seagate Exos (NLSAS) from ~2018 died recently (one out of 10)

All others are still spinning or have been retired due to their small size. In particular, eight of the 2 TB Reds are still in the server which is sitting in a dusty, wet, and cold garage. As I said, one has died, and one is a cold spare that has 0 hours despite being made more than 10 years ago.

My oldest HDD in my main tower now has 40k Power on Hours and around 5k power on cycles, i think it's around 15 years old

Yes, the longest serving ones I've ever owned were from Hitachi. I've owned the Deskstar models from 1, 2, and 3TB capacities, which most were purchased as "gen 1" releases. All disks were in operation 24x7. Of them, from memory, looking at my purchase history and notes, are as follows:

• 2x 1TB - one purchased early 2007 on launch, and the other in 2008 - both were replaced with larger capacity disks before they died, probably between 2016-2017.
• 2x 2TB - one purchased in 2011 and the other in 2012 - one died on July 15, 2021, and the other was retired from active service in February 2023 for a Seagate Exos X18 18TB. The retired disk was used from May 2012 to February 2023 for mapped Windows Libraries and secondary program installations to offload the storage from the SSD boot drive.
• 2x 3TB - both purchased in April 2011 for use in a JBOD configuration with a QNAP TS-212 initially. In 2015, they were migrated to a TS-453A. In February 2018, one of them indicated abnormal sectors and were replaced with newer Seagate 10TB NAS disks in a proper RAID configuration. The non-errored disk was donated in late 2021 to my nephew in-law to use as a storage disk for games where it's still in use today.

Now for some more gory details that might make some people here uncomfortable.

• !All the disks were purchased in the US initially and used within the US. !<

• !The first 1TB disk purchased in 2007 was used in an external powered HDD enclosure for transporting FRAPS footage and other media related assets back and forth from uni. It was somewhat protected with a padded cushion lining the bottom of my backpack. After it served it's purpose, it was pulled from the enclosure and added into my tower with the 2nd newly purchased 1TB disk.!<

• !Both the 1TB and 2TB disks were shipped via UPS in the Spring of 2013 from the US to Germany along with my Desktop PC and accessories. The HDD cages with the disks inside were pulled from the NZXT Switch 810 chassis, wrapped in layers of bubble wrap, and packed into the same box as the tower, surrounded by tons of packing peanuts. The chassis got damaged by UPS during the shipment with the left door being too bent to be put back on, however the HDDs were fully functional. !<

• !Both the 3TB HDDs within the TS-212 were wrapped in a Corsair PSU black drawstring bag and placed, feet down, into my Samsonite soft shell carryon bag for my flight to Germany. !<

• !All the disks did a pretty good job under the circumstances including multiple moves within Germany over the next couple years, and while being in use nearly 24x7.!<

HDDs usually die with a U pattern - they either die very quickly, or after a very, very long time. There's plenty of working decades-old HDDs.