It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven’t noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven’t noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.
Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?
If you don’t have backups then yes you should be worried.
Same goes for any storage.
of any age. brand new disks fail too.
The majority of HDD failures happen in the first 1-2 years (see Backblaze data). I have a NAS that has the same 5 drives running since 2013 and in all that time those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total.
That said I assume that any drive can fail at any time and anything I don’t want to lose has 2 backup copies, e.g. stuff I am working on on my PC gets copied to that NAS, that in turn backs it up online.
those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total
This is actually a good thing for longevity. Start up and stopping is the hardest part of a drive’s life. So you will see more failures on a personal PC that you turn off every night than a server drive running 24/7. Laptop drives will typically fare the worst as they may be power cycled many times a day, often fully stop when idle for power saving and get shaken much more than other drives.
Always assume your data is in N-1 places at all times.
Any drive can and will fail at any time, no matter how well it was working yesterday.
I’ve had people in with their entire PhD and years of research on one single drive, with no backup - just gone.
If your data is only in one place, it will be in zero places soon enough.
Disposable or replaceable data - which honestly is going to be 90% of your stuff - meh.
But anything that you need and couldn’t replace, that shit needs backing up to AT LEAST one other place.
As for the rest - drives can fail slowly, or they can fail fast. When they fail slowly, you start getting a couple of disk errors here and there, and you may just be able to order one in time to replace it.
When they fail fast, they just drop like a heart attack.
There’s no way to know in advance. If your data is safe, then you’ll either be out a few days while a replacement arrives, or you’ll be just about able to copy stuff across. At that age, I wouldn’t trust it farther than I could spit it. It could work fine for years more, but the moment you rely on it for something important, it’ll give out on you.
As others have said, you don’t have to be concerned about anything if you keep good backups. Disk storage at this time is very cheap compared to what it used to be, you could probably find a 5200 RPM 5 TB disk for ~100 dollars USD, or even better, two 2 TB disks which you could configure with software RAID.
First rule, always have backups. Especially with an older drive, make sure anything you might need is duplicated somewhere else. Ideally off-site to prevent loss in case of things like burglary or a fire. Even something as simple as Google Drive or OneDrive.
Personally, I’d take a look at replacing it with an SSD if you can afford to, not only because of the age, but better performance. You may not notice slowness, but making the jump from a HDD to an SSD is still at least a little noticeable even on secondary drives from my experience.
- Follow the 3 - 2 - 1 backup rule.
- You can use SMART to see the health of your drive.
