When do you start replacing your hard-drives?

[Martin Berisford]

I always get concerned with data loss, especially as in my life and dayjob I deal with a ton of photos and videos (many of which I can't really take again!) but also I've got to consider all my game files and stuff that if I lost, I'd be mortified. I remember once when I managed to get rid of my L4D2 files and lord it was a nightmare getting all my fave mods back and that.

I know it's a bit easier now with Steam Cloud and that but how often are you replacing your drives? I try to replace them at maximum every 2 years but if they start going bad they'll be chucked sooner. Luckily I already keep everything on the cloud but it's always just in case!

 

[Nova]

I would say 4 years is the max you can rely on the hard drives. After the 3 years or say 4 years, things start to go down in terms of the quality too. In past SSD used to be better and you didn't had to worry much because it could take the performance consistent for years. But now a days I'd say for laptop assume 4 years limit and for desktop say 6 years or more.

 

[Martin Berisford]

Yeah I'm sure they are built to last a lot longer - my first hard-drive actually lasted me 5 years I believe but then the ones I had after that failed quite quickly hence my choice to replace a lot sooner. I'd rather pay for the peace of mind knowing it's newer and so if it fails a company will get a nice mouthful. I like to have all my data backed up in several places though so I shouldn't lose things again but it's just that unnatural fear of doing so lol.

 

[Nova]

The previous generation of hard disk used to last longer. But I can't say the same for SSD unfortunately. The reason being many people see failure in SSD rates these days. Reason could be anything, like gaming etc which caused heat. And so. But I guess for each one of us the usage could be different and so the device can last longer accordingly.