How long do external hard drives last?

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MathematicalPhysicist
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I have an external HDD with a lot of information stored in it, my question is what exactly the life span of an external HDD?

Thnaks in advance.
 

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The practical answer is "the time to failuer is usually shorter than the time you wanted to keep the data for".

In other words, if you don't have a strategy for making backups, start one now!

FWIW, we once had a situation at work where we changed workstation suppliers, and installed a few hundred identical workstations at the same time. Aboot 3 years later (after running 24 hours a day 365 days a year), they started dropping like flies with disk failures. After about 10% failures within a few months, we decided to replace all the disks - it was less disruptive to do that in a planned manner than fixing them one at a time as they crashed.
 
I have a 1995 pentium 200 on a Iwill ultra fast and wide scsi motherboard and the entire system still runs fine...even with two sound cards and a video capture system in it's slots.

I turn it off multiple times per day and have never left it on constantly.

The system drive is ide 1.6 gig and the other drives are scsi.
 
I have also many mathematical pdf files, and I have stored in a Sony External HDD but Recently I move these all to Skydrive. Skydrive and iCloud seems to be the best way to store your important data.
 
ANY hard drive can fail at any time--or could last for decades. If you have any information on a drive that you cannot afford to lose, be sure to copy it to another drive (and perhaps to a drive that you can store off-site as well).
 
In recent years, I have not had a single hard drive failure. And I work with a lot of computers. But over the last 30 years, I've had several drives fail.
 
I just lost 750 GB drive this month. Not that I have lost any valuable data.