“No backup? – No pity!” – many people in IT circles are familiar with the saying. If the hard drive is no longer recognized by the system, this initially means a lot of stress for those affected. Holiday photos, important business documents, or the music collection are then gone for the time being. Of course, there are service providers who can save data from broken hard drives. However, there is no 100 percent guarantee for this. So that the worst case scenario doesn’t occur in the first place, the question arises: How long do hard drives actually “live”?
In order to be able to answer the question of the lifespan of a hard disk in the best possible way, we limit ourselves to two popular storage media: SSD and HDD. These two types are the most common in computers, sometimes at the same time. Both variants can be used both internally and externally.
Lifespan of a traditional hard disk drive (HDD)
The hard disk drive, literally hard disk drive, is the mother of all storage media. Development has continued to progress in recent years. Above all, the storage capacity has increased enormously in the recent past. Today’s HDDs have a memory of up to 26 terabytes (TB).
How it works hasn’t changed much over the years. Inside the drive are one or more magnetic disks. The data is stored on it. When the computer accesses data, the disks begin to rotate. The data is read out by a reading head and transmitted to the computer. With modern HDDs, this is lightning fast, but technically it can hardly be accelerated any further.
In the past, there were mostly only internal hard drives. External drives can now also be connected to the computer.
A simple HDD with 1 TB of storage is now available for just over 30 euros. There are of course no upper limits. Of course, better quality and higher storage capacity cost more money.
The rotating magnetic disks are actually the weak point of the HDD drive. The rotation creates friction and heat, which accelerates the aging process. The reading of the data is also clearly audible.
A consumer external HDD has a lifespan of ten years. An HDD installed in a computer, on the other hand, only lasts for five to ten years. This is due to the increased heat applied to the hard drive inside the computer case.
Lifespan of a Solid State Disk (SSD)
While SSDs have been around for a long time, the technology has only really picked up speed since the early 2000s. With the further development of flash memory, the first commercial drives come onto the market. Today, SSDs mostly come in 2.5-inch or M.2 format.
An SSD drive contains one or more flash memories. In contrast to the HDD, these work without rotation – that’s why “solid”. Therefore less heat is generated. The power consumption is also lower than that of an HDD.
However, there are price differences. For a 1 TB SSD you have to pay almost twice as much as an HDD, namely 60 euros or more. There are also qualitative differences in reading speed or storage capacity that drive up the price. Faster NVMe SSDs are usually a bit more expensive than models with the older SATA standard. For private use, the capacity limit is 8 TB, which is significantly lower than that of traditional hard drives – although sizes of up to 100 TB are theoretically possible.
SSDs are installed internally in the computer or as an external disk. An SSD is quite shockproof because there are no moving parts. Nevertheless, they can only tolerate a certain number of write cycles. Early models were therefore no longer usable after just a few years. However, most manufacturers guarantee a term of up to ten years for modern SSDs.
The industry stacks rather low when it comes to age. Because SSDs work flawlessly for much longer with normal computer use. Normal use includes daily mail traffic, writing texts or streaming music or films from time to time. Anyone who makes daily backups of several 100 GB on an SSD will shorten its service life considerably. However, this rarely happens in the private sphere. Therefore, experts assume that an SSD can even work error-free for 20 years or more. However, there is no guarantee for this.
Also interesting: How to build an external hard drive from an old hard drive
Which is better: HDD or SSD?
As with many things, the answer is: It depends. It is not for nothing that computer manufacturers offer both variants in one system. The SSD is then suitable for opening programs faster or accelerating processes. The HDD to safely store photos, music or other large amounts of data.
Either way, you need to check the functionality of both systems. A traditional magnetic-write hard drive will make a noticeable rattling noise before it reaches the end of its life and the data is lost. If you notice unusual noises, you should backup your data on another storage medium as soon as possible.
With an SSD, there are no external characteristics that indicate an imminent end of life. However, there are programs like CrystalDiskInfo that can display the number of write cycles. If the value approaches the manufacturer’s specification, a defect is likely to occur soon. In any case, you should regularly check the drive for errors, regardless of whether it is an SSD or HDD.
In Windows, this is done using the system’s own means:
- Open Explorer.
- Right-click the drive to be checked.
- Select “Properties” from the menu that appears.
- Tabs appear there, please select “Tools”.
- Then click on “Check”.
- If errors occur, click “Automatically fix data system errors” and “Find/recover bad sectors”.
- The errors or bad sectors will then be fixed.
If you notice regular drive errors in your SSD while working on the computer, you should move all data to a new storage medium.