depends what breaks inside them ! any part inside them may malfunction, overheat, break (literally) etc. average lifespan depends on usage and can vary drastically.
Depending on what type of damage had been done to the hard drive you can usually get at least some of it back but it can be time consuming. There are a lot of places which will do it for you but they will charge you.
Paul B March 27, 2013
The shit hit the f…especially when you have not backed up.
Dont wait for it to happen – back up now
Andy L. March 27, 2013
There are a few things that can cause HDD’s to fail. A disk crash is the most common where the reader hits the disk. The data in an HDD is actually vertical across disks rather than like a DVD where the data is on each disk until it fills. In other words, the disks need a perfect alignment. HDDs can be rebuilt by professionals at large fees, and corporations sometimes do it for the data recovery, but it is cheaper to keep two disks and backup your files or clone a disk completely.
There is now cloud services that store your HDD data remotely. You can have a backup available from another location. Not sure if it is free or a fee, but they need to get paid somewhere.
Whether SSD or HDD, the rule is anything you don’t want lost needs a backup copy whether on DVD’s, or with a bluray writer, or a second HDD.
There are different reliability levels. A Caviar Black is better than a Caviar Blue from Western Digital. They sell it with a longer warranty for a reason.
As to how long they last, obviously, they won’t sell a disk drive with a three year warranty where even 15% fail in 3 years and there is an early life failure higher at the beginning.
Still, if you get 5 years without a fail you have done well enough on a 3 year warranty item.
HDDs sometimes give warning of issues, and sometimes all of a sudden just die.
The more critical data is, the more you need redundancy.
I worked at IBM for many years. The internal soft copy records had double storage, and some had three or four copies as part of disaster recovery, and the storage was in different global cities.
If a nuclear bomb hit Lexington Kentucky, the people are lost, but the IBM records data survives somewhere else.
What happens when a hard drive breaks?
depends what breaks inside them ! any part inside them may malfunction, overheat, break (literally) etc. average lifespan depends on usage and can vary drastically.
Depending on what type of damage had been done to the hard drive you can usually get at least some of it back but it can be time consuming. There are a lot of places which will do it for you but they will charge you.
The shit hit the f…especially when you have not backed up.
Dont wait for it to happen – back up now
There are a few things that can cause HDD’s to fail. A disk crash is the most common where the reader hits the disk. The data in an HDD is actually vertical across disks rather than like a DVD where the data is on each disk until it fills. In other words, the disks need a perfect alignment. HDDs can be rebuilt by professionals at large fees, and corporations sometimes do it for the data recovery, but it is cheaper to keep two disks and backup your files or clone a disk completely.
There is now cloud services that store your HDD data remotely. You can have a backup available from another location. Not sure if it is free or a fee, but they need to get paid somewhere.
Whether SSD or HDD, the rule is anything you don’t want lost needs a backup copy whether on DVD’s, or with a bluray writer, or a second HDD.
There are different reliability levels. A Caviar Black is better than a Caviar Blue from Western Digital. They sell it with a longer warranty for a reason.
As to how long they last, obviously, they won’t sell a disk drive with a three year warranty where even 15% fail in 3 years and there is an early life failure higher at the beginning.
Still, if you get 5 years without a fail you have done well enough on a 3 year warranty item.
HDDs sometimes give warning of issues, and sometimes all of a sudden just die.
The more critical data is, the more you need redundancy.
I worked at IBM for many years. The internal soft copy records had double storage, and some had three or four copies as part of disaster recovery, and the storage was in different global cities.
If a nuclear bomb hit Lexington Kentucky, the people are lost, but the IBM records data survives somewhere else.