Indefinite - depending on how you treat the hard drive.

I have a Buffalo Drivestation external USB 2.0 Hard drive 1TB that was purchased around 2007/2008. This had a Samsung F1 Hard drive.

Never heard of Buffalo? Never heard of Samsung Hard drives? (I know Samsung SSDs are common but not hard drives. This division was acquired in 2011 and is now owed by Seagate).

It still works and functions to date so at the very least, it is 12 years old.

This drive has survived being moved from house to house and computer to computer. At one point, I even took it on extended overseas trips were I feel I needed more storage and where a smaller 2.5″ drive would be too slow. It is still USB 2.0 but it works fast enough.

March 2011 I bought two Western Digital elements 2TB external hard drives. I believe these still had the Green drives in them. The first one failed in October 2011 (7 months) and the second one failed February 2012 (11 months). There were no initial signs of pending failure. It just suddenly stopped responding and then it said the drive cannot be initialized. They won’t even pass WD Diagnostic Quick tests - too many bad sectors detected. WD promptly replaced these two drives with newer Western Digital Mybook versions. These replacement drives have been issue free and are now about 8 years old.

On a relatively recent trip to Asia, (Jan 2017), I bought a Seagate portable external hard drive 1TB at the airport. It failed (rear errors and clicking sound) this March 2020, or about 2 months after the Warranty expired. This drive was seldom used and is kept inside the laptop bag that is usually inside a closet and free from being jarred and shocked. I’m not saying Seagate is bad. It could have happened even if it was a different brand.

So as far as how long an external drive will last, it always depends. You can be lucky and have it work for more than 10 years, or it could fail in the first 6 months of use.

The life expectancy of the external hard drives depends on the technology used in the drive.

For external drives with HDD’s (Ones which use the traditional spinning disk) it is about 3+ years depending on the quality and handling of the HDD

For one's with SSD’s (Ones that use high speed flash memory) it is anywhere from 1,000 to a 100,000 or more read/writes before they slowly decrease in performance. This depends on the type of flash memory used in the drive.

In your case if you buy a HDD from a respectable company it should last a long time. Buying a 2TB SSD can cost a lot even for the low performance ones and you can buy multiple HDD’s with that money. So it is better to go with the HDD plan if you are on a tight budget.

Another option for you is to buy HDD bays which accepts internal HDD’s. You can buy server grade HDD’s and use them with the bays. Server grade HDD’s have a longer life span compared to consumer grade ones.

Always good to have files that you “can’t lose” in two separate locations. I tend to try and keep those pics and videos that I never want to lose on a drive, in the cloud, and maybe an extra drive someplace just to be safe.

Life expectancy has a lot of variables:

dust, salt (near sea), and humidity will play a part
Amount of use is a big one. Lots of reading/writing and “always on” will reduce the life
Quality (brand)
and of course luck

In my experience, 4–5 years is “expected”. Afterwards, it is a matter of the items above. I’ve had a computer with the same HD (internal) running pretty much 24/7 for about 11 years now. I don’t do much with it. Mostly just my “PABX” for a home-based business, but it is actually spinning 24 hours a day and hasn’t had a problem yet. I had another external HD which was used weekly for backups off-site for about 3 years. I used it as a personal backup for about another 1 year. That one failed, but it wasn’t the HD, just the power. So I removed it, placed it in the computer as a secondary drive, and used it for another year until I left that institution.

So, 5 years is probably not something “urgent”, but it could be a problem at any time. Personally, I don’t “retire” drives, because I always have things backed up at 1 or 2 other locations, so if it dies, I buy a new one, copy from the secondary, and I’m back in business.

If you want to get really serious, look into getting a NAS with RAID. :)

External hard disk drives are mechanical, and they contain moving parts. This means that they will, at some point, fail. It’s not a question of if your external hard drive will fail, it’s when. Because external hard drives contain moving parts, this makes them more susceptible to physical damage. If you factor in the portable nature of external hard drives, the chances of a physical fault like a head crash or motor failure occurring are higher.

Your external hard drive will of course last much longer if you take care in handling it. Hard drives are delicate pieces of hardware, and one slight knock or bump can cause a great deal of damage. One of the most common problems our data recovery technicians see is external hard drives that have been dropped and will no longer power up, or will power up and make a ticking or grinding noise. This could be indicative of a head crash, which occurs when the read/write heads come into contact with the drive’s magnetic platters. Because the heads are positioned a fraction of a millimeter above the magnetic platters, even the tiniest knock or bump can cause a head crash. A grinding noise could suggest a motor failure. In these instances, the drive shouldn’t be powered up if you want to see your data again – but your hard drive won’t be of use again.

The conditions in which you store your external hard drive are important, too. Temperature and humidity can have a huge effect on your external hard drive’s lifespan. Humidity can lead to the oxidation of internal components, and even a tiny amount of internal rusting can lead to a head crash. High temperatures can lead to media degradation. While this is more of a concern with solid-state media, you should still store your external hard drive in room temperature conditions and not any higher.

The average lifespan for an external hard drive, assuming no physical damage occurs, is around 3-5 years, depending on the make, model and conditions it is stored in. If you’re using an external hard drive to back up your data, you might want to consider replacing it every few years to ensure your data is safe. Even better, perhaps consider backing your data up in the cloud, too.

It completely depends—I’ve had drives fail in weeks, I’ve had others that have lasted over a decade (and still truckin’).

I have A LOT of media and storage for a “consumer” (almost 100 TB) and thus a lot of hard drives. I don’t think there’s really a particular brand that is “better” than others, and I’ve personally noticed no difference in failure rate in cheap vs. enterprise quality drives.

I will say—I’ve had a higher failure rate for NTSF format (Windows) drives than Mac (HSF+ format) drives. My average windows HDD (external) I'd say lasts me 4 years. My Mac ecosystem has external drives that are over 10 years old… can’t say that for Windows. Again, just my experience, could be pure luck.

BackBlaze puts out HDD stats every year, you can check them out if u like…

2017 Hard Drive Failure Rates - What the Numbers Tell Us

Long Story Short:

• If you’re asking this question, run RAID and backup your data, both locally and with a cloud-based service like BackBlaze, CrashPlan, etc.

When my first external drive failed, I had no backup, and lost a lot of stuff. Don’t know how much data recovery costs these days, but back when this happened I had to pay about $1000 to recover my data.

I’m surprised that I’ve read through as many answers as I just did and heard no mention of the following: They don’t make ’em like they used to. Engineered failure is a thing.

I frequently shop for construction tools for my day job. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve read people talking about their 20–30 year old amazing tool that always just performs… and the replies to that review state things like ‘If you can find a 10+ year old one, buy it. If you find a newer one it will last 3–5 years’.

Failure engineering has become a major thing in consumer goods production. I’ve heard from engineering students that more time is spent learning to engineer targeted failure than success.

People who love their 30-year old items haven’t had to be a customer of that item again for 30 years. That would be 5 repeat sales of a 5-year warranty item that died at just over 5 years.

I’ve read that most flat panel displays could last WAY longer if decent capacitors were used in a few places… to the tune of less than $1 in cost increase in parts. I’ve been told the same thing by techs who fix flat panels… by re-soldering one capacitor.

I have been a Western Digital person for many years. I was a computer geek in the 90s and many of my classmates had seagate/hitachi deathstars/quantum fireballs fail. I still have WD drives from that period (and Maxtor) that got retired because their capacity wasn’t useful anymore. I still have my 150Gb WD Raptor that I used a boot drive for years and then relegated to being my VM drive when I moved my OS to SSD and then eventually retired due to heat (I found that when I didn’t have VirtualBox on and that drive spun down my case temp dropped by 6C). It still works.

The WD drive that spectacularly died on me was my first HDD failure. It was a Green drive that had been my storage drive for years and which had been relegated to bittorrent downloads. It made a grinding noise and occasionally ‘stuttered out of existence’ for many seconds but lasted in that state for most of a year BEFORE I added the OS to it when I eventually migrated my SSD to linux. After that it still made it a few months before its long-awaited and EXPECTED death (after which I went pure linux :) ),

I’m currently doing an RMA for the second time in two years on a WD 6TB Red. This one was barely used. I downloaded a bunch of audio samples/etc, to it once and filled it. I then had a rough few years and was never able to buy a good DAW computer (still haven’t, and I’ve bought thousands in VSTs/sample libraries). THAT DATA HAD NEVER ACTUALLY BEEN READ. The drive had effectively been idle for more than two years. The one last years was full of movies. Many of the movies in my collection are old ones that I’ve watched up to dozens of times over the years. I wanted them in my digital media library and accessible with Kodi but I hadn’t actually watched THAT FILE since it was ripped and stored. The majority of the data on that drive had not in fact been read once. It’s a data storage patterns I once laughed at being referred to as ‘Write Once, Read Maybe’.

The kicker? Back in the day I had the drives in overheated desktop cases complete with overclocked cpus and performance GPUs while gaming. Nowadays I keep a NAS in a rackmount enclosure with server fans and a SuperMicro 5in3. Logically, based on environment and usage, the new drives should last LONGER.

Engineered failure is a tragically abhorrent thing that has eroded my faith in the consumer marketplace.

Decades in some circumstances.

In 2012 I received a call from a former customer who needed to retrieved files that were created in the early 1980s from a Digital Equipment Corporation RK05 disk drive.

The RK05 used a single 14” platter in PVC enclosed cartridges that had a capacity of 2.5MB. I no longer had an oscilloscope or an alignment pack, yet had access to a maintenance guide, so I sent that to my customer.

After cleaning the heads, replacing the drive belt, and roughly aligning the heads using a metal ruler, they were able to access the files.

I know of a 35 year old Shugart ST506 that after having the heads gently unstuck from the platters, booted DOS and ran long enough to backup.

This is a photo of a 40 year old disk platter (0.5MB) that has a solution called MagnaSee coated on it to reveal the tracks made up of barcode looking slashes which on this platter can be seen with a magnifying glass eventually the magnetic charges will dissipate, yet it is more likely that the mechanical components (motors, actuators) of a disk drive will fail first.

It is becoming more difficult yet 800 bit per inch Nine track magnetic tapes from the 1950s can be read with a high success rate

You’re simply lucky!

I’ve been fixing computers for 18 years. I have a pet theory that at least some of the alleged instability of pre-Win 2000/7/10 Microsoft operating systems was actually due to subpar hard drives.

With that said, 18 years ago when someone had me set up a new computer and asked me, “how long with this last?” I replied, “roughly five years.”

Year over year, it seems that the average lifespan has decreased to about 3.5 years or so. That’s when they begin to get slower, application errors increase, etc.

The choices: replace the computer altogether - not such a bad idea, since they’re packing more performance and keeping price points reasonable. Another is to have me install a new hard drive, back up all the data, and use recovery media to reinstall everything. A bit of money, but it will result in a good-as-new computer. Another avenue, if the source drive isn’t rife with bad sectors or isn’t experiencing mechanical difficulties, is to use cloning software to make a mirror image of the PC onto a brand new drive. Faster and cheaper!

If possible swap an SSD for the conventional drive the computer came with. Much better performance. I’m typing this on an 8+ year old desktop that wasn’t high end to begin with.

I just got off the phone with a client whose lower-end desktop lasted all of a year.

Just like with living things, lifespans are on a bell curve - some die early, some die late.

Be happy you got so much life out of your computer - it doesn’t owe you anything at this point!

Edit… seriously - 0 net upvotes? Can someone who downvoted me at least explain why? I’m simply narrating what I’ve seen, empirically over 18+ years of fixing computers.

I’ve brought new life to older computers by “cloning” the internal drive to a brand new one with higher performance. If “WinRot” - the accumulation of “Windows Junk” were the main culprit of gradually declining PC performance, then why would cloning an old HDD onto a new one result in much higher performance?

I used to do “rebuilds” - I’d take a client’s computer home to my workshop, back everything up, install a new hard drive (usually faster and/or more capacity), load the OS using the recovery media, then reload their applications, and recopy their data. A lot of work, for which I charged a flat fee. But about 7–8 years ago, I realized that brand new PCs packed so much capability at decent prices that I’d strongly encourage people with super slow/failing drives to get a new computer.

I also stand by what I’ve said about swapping a conventional “spinner” drive for an SSD. It’s amazing how fast even an older machine can run with one installed.

The internal hard drive will not suffer being bumped and knocked around like the external hard drive will. Those knocks and bumps can shorten the life of the external hard drive considerably. You also have to consider the life of the USB connector, they can and do break as well.

In theory the internal hard drive will survive longer, but it depends how well you look after your external hard drive.

Hard drive manufacturers will give a warranty, a lot of them 3 years for example. The hard drive, no matter internal or external, should at least survive it’s warranty period, and should give a few more years of service after that. You can check the manufacturers specs to get an idea on the MTBF, mean time between failure, that the manufacturer quotes that the drive should last. We usually upgrade our pc’s long before the hard drive fails.

Hard drives these days are very reliable.

Most external hard drive are just the same drives uses as internal drives installed in an enclosure to protect them and to provide the USB connector. So they are going to have the same lifespan as an internal drive.

Except….external drives tend to get damaged more often because they do not have the PC or laptop case to protect them. They get dropped, damaged because you are carry them around, get knocked over, have thing spilled on them, have things dropped on them, etc. Dangers of not being inside the protect case of the PC or laptop. But that has nothing to do with the quality or durability of the drive itself.

Depending upon the number of its Power On Hours, Proper Fitment and Handling, the estimated duty cycle of a Desktop PC's Hard Drive may vary from 3-10 years.

In comparison an external Hard Drive is generally Powered On for fewer Hours, operates at a lower speed of 5400 rpm (to prevent damage to its Media and Heads while in use) but is subjected to more abuse in terms of shock, vibration and movement.

Keeping in view the shock, vibration and movement which an external Hard Drive is generally subjected to, an external hard drive should be replaced within 3 years.

It would also be a good idea to periodically test the external Hard Drive for Errors using its Manufacturer's Utilities or the Disk Error Check Utility in Windows (My Computer >> Hard Disk Drives >> Disk Properties >> Tools >> Error-checking >> Check-now)

Will a new external hard drive be intact for more than 25 years, if written once and kept forever in a safe storage?

Like anything technological, the answer isn’t all that simple.

On the one hand, hardware survival is subject to a number of factors, such as temperature, magnetic fields, shock, moisture, medium degradation, usage frequency, and manufacturing flaws (intentional and unintentional). These factors dictate how long a particular piece of hardware will continue to operate in an optimal fashion. For most modern technology, 25 years is quite a long time, but not impossibly so. For hard drives (a class of storage drives that utilize a magnetic disk), it’s theoretically possible to survive that long, as long as there aren’t too many limiting factors in play. For SSD’s and other drives of the like, there are time factors to consider, as well as certain susceptibilities which are more likely to degrade data storage over a shorter time. It’s less likely that these components are going to reliably store your data for that long.

Being the computer guy that I’ve been since the early 90’s, I can say that I do have some data on portable media, namely 1.44 meg floppy disks, which I’ve had for about that long, that are still viable. I pull old files on occasion for nostalgia’s sake. While many of those disks haven’t survived, most of them have.

But, and this is the big “but”, I have to have a legacy computer to spin them up.

Back in the 90’s, computers had at least 2 drive interfaces, the floppy drive and the hard drive, either “IDE” or “SCSI”. These were the internal connections used for storage, and they’re basically defunct now. USB floppy drives are still produced in small quantities, but the interfaces stopped being installed over a decade ago. IDE and SCSI interfaces also became obsolete, replaced by SATA.

In other words, a drive might maintain its data for 25 years, but the technology to utilize it won’t be available in that time. While USB 1.1 is still usable, it won’t be long before manufacturers stop supporting it, and USB 3 will even be obsolete. SATA has already been around in full usage for over a decade, which means it’s nearly time for it to be replaced by something else.

Remember when CD’s were standard? Most new computers don’t provide a CD/DVD drive anymore. Hell, Apple has even gotten rid of headphone jacks on their devices.

The point is, if you’re trying to save data for a long time, the best way is to continually transfer it to multiple media every few years. Move to a new hard drive or SSD, or put it on several flash drives. The long term viability of any one storage device is random, so having your information stored on multiples is a must, as well as checking on it regularly.

SSD and Flash are the “only media” I use for long term archiving …

I have gone through the spectrum of devices for archiving. I began using Archival Gold DVD, spent hundreds of dollars on the best archiving discs on the market. Everything including blu-ray archive discs, spent a small fortune on equipment to burn and read discs.

I have used HDD, I have ordered SSHD, HDD, large and small capacity (new) HDD, the gamut, the complete range and scope.

… I have finally realized that the only place I have never lost a single image or video over the past decade is using Flash and SSD. No corruption, no failures, … not a single loss.

I have lost precious photos stored in triplicate on HDD when all carefully stored drives have failed. Carefully archived in padded cases in temperature controlled settings. I have lost precious data on archival discs when the equipment needed for these items becomes harder to obtain, when the discs themselves .. despite claims, have failed. Discs stored in temp and humidity controlled space.

I have never lost a single item on either “quality” SSD or high end Samsung flash. I re-copy all data annually and keep the old SSD and flash as backup constantly increasing my archive.

…. no corruption, no loss and fast speeds.

I have now begun storing data on Sandisk Extreme+ “micro” SD cards in triplicate … with SSD and USB flash as backup. The quality seems amazing. The transfers are lightning fast .. duplicates and then triplicates are a breeze to make. All are only burned once on new cards and stored in appropriate cases … untouched. They are then re-copied annually.

HDD is gone, DVD and blu ray are gone .. archival gold discs are history. Disc readers are gone.

My oldest flash is 11 years in storage and everything is as fresh and useable as if I had written it yesterday. All data is stored in “triplicate and refreshed at six to twelve month intervals .. “

… years ago if someone mentioned archiving on SSD or Flash I’d have shaken my head. The thing is that as along as you refresh to new storage at regular intervals, the archive increases in size and becomes not only larger but safer .. and using SSD and Flash the transfer is so fast it is literally no work at all.

Just re-copy each year and you will not only have a perfect archive experience,

…. you will also be using the latest and fastest tech.

…. Cheers

I suspect that this varies quit a bit from drive to drive. Technically they are rated to run 100,000 hours. This works out to 11 years of 24/7 operation. I would not put much stock in that number. I had one 80GB IBM Deskstar that started getting bad sectors after about three years, every few months the system would start locking up and I’d have to do a full surface scan to mark the bad sectors and move the data. Every time this happened the scan would take about eight hours or so.

Even minimal airflow across the drives will keep them within acceptable thermal operating range. I will admit to having poor airflow in the case with aforementioned Deskstar and it always developed some serious issues in the heart of summer. That being said, the other, older (20 GB) IBM Deskstar in that system worked flawlessly for over 15 years.

As someone who has done precision manufacturing for 25 years, I know what a difference even one thousandth of an inch can make when tolerances are very tight. Tooling dimensions can change by several microns over the course of an hour of production. When a drive spindle is at the high end of tolerance and the disk that presses onto it is bored toward the low end of tolerance you end up with a spinning mechanism that is prone to warp at lower temperatures.

This type if thing is common even at places like AMD and Intel where manufacturing variances result in products that are notably superior and sold as a “K” series CPU and products that are partially defective and relabled as a lower end product such as the Pentium G4560 (google: silicon lottery)

I would estimate that about 90% of drives actually are built to run the full 100,000 hours but few of them actually do because of the obsolescence factor limiting their real-world operating time to something like seven or eight years. As long as a drive is refreshed periodically by defragging or system restore, I see no reason why a drive could not easily last twenty years or more.

If always kept with care, are external hard disks reliable for a lifetime?

Whose lifetime? Yours or mine? Or perhaps you mean the lifetime of the hard drive? “Technology" and "lifetime" are mutually exclusive concepts.

What a stroll down memory lane this is been! Is it possible that there are 20-30 external drives for me to consider? Indeed, it is the case.

Of those many drives the first that come to mind were the three the AcomData 160GB external drives that were acquired around November 2006. But of all the amazing things, newegg still has a listing for it. AcomData 160GB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive HD160U2E2-72 - Newegg.com

Of that group there were no failures due to age or overuse. The few failures that did occur took place at an early stage of life and were covered by warranty.

How long did the drives last? If one of those drives had been used long enough to test its lifespan, there might be an answer to that question. However, technology being what it is, most have been discarded because of obsolescence. The Western Digital 6TB My Book External Hard Drive that is a primary resource now is quite a contrast to that 160GB Acomodata.

The oldest unit that is still in-service is a Seagate Backup Plus Slim 2TB purchased April 2014, about 3-1/2 years ago. Eventually, four of them became necessary. Two of them are spinning right now attached to my laptop. The other two—the last time I went to Romania (one year ago), they were also working.

There is a reasonable chance that an external hard drive will become obsolete before it is out of warranty. But as far as “lifetime” is concerned…. Do you think we will be using external hard drives 10 years from now? Maybe so. But for sure, whatever is a lot of terabytes now will be tiny and slow compared to what will be needed and expected 10 years from now.