Hard drives have been around for quite a while, and every year the amount of data they can store grows exponentially. That means you can store more of your personal or business data on a single hard driver than ever before – but is that really a good thing?
After all, like anything, hard drives won’t last forever. This is especially true for hard drives that are always in active use (like those in your computer), but even external hard drives that are put away in storage may be inoperable by the time they’re used again.
How Long a Hard Drive Can Last
For all intents and purposes, the normal use of a hard drive usually means that data is written and accessed on a fairly regular basis. For internal or external hard drives, this can be every day or a few times a week. The point is that the hard drive is powered up on a consistent basis.
Traditional Hard Drives
A traditional hard drive (HDD), right now, is by far the most common and affordable type of hard drive on the market. Although solid state drives are becoming the norm in new computers, traditional hard drives still dominate the external hard drive market.
A lot of factors go into the life expectancy of a traditional hard drive. Things like its brand, storage size, and interface method matter. Typically, though, you can expect a traditional hard drive under normal use to last about four years before experiencing issues or failure.
This outcome is not guaranteed, but the chances for problems with your hard drive begin to significantly increase around its fourth year of use. Much of this has to do with the condition of the actual disc with written information on it as well as all of the components of the hard drive that it relies on to work. This means that around your hard drive’s fourth year, you should have moved your data to a newer hard drive or to a cloud for safe storage.
Solid State Drives
As mentioned above, solid state drives (SSDs) aren’t exactly new, but they’re also not as cheap as traditional hard drives. Solid state drives lack an internal disk to store data, which makes them faster for reading and writing data. It also means that there’s less going on inside of one, mechanically, that can break down.
Under normal use, solid state drives are actually pretty hardy. A TechReport endurance test showed that even consumer SSDs can read and write over 700TB of data. Despite the multi-year warranties that come with these drives, you could read and write 40GB of data every day for 50 years before you can expect your SSD to give up the ghost.
Still, you shouldn’t rely on even a single SSD to store all of your data. You should consider having at least one backup and also backing up your data to the cloud.
Interested in Cloud Storage? We Can Help!
Acro Photo Print Inc. offers digital document storage solutions. By adding our cloud-based digital archival system to your data storage plan, you can rest assured that your personal or business documents will be protected no matter what happens to your hard drives.
We also offer professional printing services that can help you create high-quality hard copies of your most important documents for physical storage.
Learn more about everything Acro Photo Print Inc. can do for you by getting in touch with us today! Contact us online or call (929) 244-4322 to learn more.