Your hard drive will fail on you. And if a study is to be believed, it’s sooner than you think.
Secure Data Recovery, a data recovery company based in Los Angeles, claims that on average most hard disk drives have a higher chance of failing after nearly three years of use.
With a sample of 2,007 failed drives it received from customers, the company examined two main predictable factors: the duration during the drives were in operation and the accumulation of bad sectors.
Per the study, these drives were powered on for 25,233 hours, on average, or about 2.88 years. Meanwhile, the average number of bad sectors found in these drives was 1,548. It seems rather insignificant when compared to the 1.907 billion sectors in a 1TB drive, but the study found that the risk of data loss and corruption increases at an accelerated growth once these bad sectors start to appear.
Six brands comprise the failed drive samples, with Western Digital and Hitachi making up the majority at 57 percent followed by Seagate at 28 percent. The rest of the brands are Toshiba (8%), Samsung (6%) and Maxtor (1%). SDR received all these drives, which ranged from 40GB to 10TB in storage capacity, in 2022.
If you’re thinking of switching to solid-state drives for increased reliability, cloud storage company Backblaze revealed in 2021 that SSDs are just as likely to fail as HDDs. Better to be safe by backing up your data. Otherwise, hope that data recovery software can salvage whatever remains of your failed drive.