How long does a hard drive last?
I have hard drives from the late 90’s that still work and I have had family members buy some last year and already had to replace them. They typically last as long as you take good care of them unless they have some factory defect or don’t have a surge protector/ups setup. It’s just like any other piece of hardware…a simple shock from your finger tip could fry it, but it could also survive getting shocked by a cattle prod. Some warning signs: Drive clicks or sounds louder than normal when doing lots of reading/writing. You receive disk corruption errors. Computer won’t boot because of missing or corrupted system files. If you hear clicking coming from the drive, back up your data ASAP. Also run check disk (chkdsk /r) to fix corruption and/or remove unusable blocks from the drive. Often times when people bring their laptops in because they won’t boot (I work at a laptop support desk), we run chkdsk /r and it fixes the problem. My mothers hard drive was clicking and the computer was ra
Laptop drives are generally less reliable than full size hard drives. You should definitely make sure you have a backup of everything. Also, look for some S.M.A.R.T. software for your OS. It monitors the hard drive’s self-test mechanisms, and can give you a little early warning of imminent failure.
