How long do hard drives last?
Fleet data suggests most hard drives run for years: Backblaze's study of more than 200,000 drives found about 90% still working after four. Learn what the numbers measure, what warranties do and do not promise, how SSDs differ, and why a backup turns any drive's eventual failure into a chore rather than a crisis.
Longer than most people expect, but never indefinitely. In Backblaze's study of more than 200,000 of its own hard drives, about 90% were still running after four years and 65% were alive past six. The company's own conclusion is blunter: every hard drive will fail eventually, and it could be in one day or in ten years. A drive's age tells you the odds, not the date, which is why planning for replacement matters more than predicting it.[1]
The useful question is not how long your drive will last but whether losing it would hurt. If the files on it exist nowhere else, copy them to another drive or to cloud storage before anything else. Backblaze's own recommendation alongside its lifespan data is at least one backup, preferably two, kept separate and checked often. Once your copies exist, a failing drive becomes an inconvenience instead of an emergency.[1]
What the fleet data shows
Backblaze runs a very large fleet of drives and publishes what happens to it. Its 2021 lifespan analysis found survival falling at a fairly stable 2% to 2.5% a year for the first four years, with annualised failure rates below 2% for the first three and a half years before rising rapidly through year six. Extrapolating past that point, it suggested a median life expectancy of six years and nine months, while being clear it lacked the data to be confident beyond six years. Read it as a shape: uneventful early years, then rising odds.[1]
The most recent figures point the same way. Backblaze's 2025 report recorded an annualised failure rate of 1.36% for the year across 344,196 drives, down from 1.55% in 2024, and a lifetime rate of 1.30% across every drive it has ever monitored. That lifetime number averages brand new and nine year old drives together, so it is a background hum rather than a forecast for yours.[2]
| Figure | Period and fleet |
|---|---|
| 90% lasted four years | Study of 200,000+ drives, published December 2021 |
| 65% still running past six years | Same study, continuous datacentre service |
| Median life expectancy 6 years 9 months | Extrapolated past six years; low confidence |
| Annual failure rate 1.36% | Full-year 2025, 344,196 drives, published February 2026 |
| Lifetime failure rate 1.30% | All drives monitored, through 31 December 2025 |
| SSD lifetime failure rate 0.90% | Q4 2018 to Q2 2023, 3,144 SSDs |
What limits a spinning drive
A hard drive is mechanics: platters spinning thousands of times a minute, an arm skimming fractions of a millimetre above them. That moving parts eventually wear out is the assumption behind the wear-out region of the failure curve Backblaze plots. What is less expected is the other end: early-life failures in its fleet ran far below what reliability theory predicts, which is why the company described its curve as less like a bathtub and more like a shallow ladle or hockey stick. A drive that survives its first months tends to keep going.[1]
Age does eventually tell. In the fourth quarter of 2025 Backblaze flagged one 8TB HGST model running at a 10.29% annualised failure rate, in a fleet of 1,073 of those drives around 7.5 years old, with vibration sensitivity in the ageing drives suspected. One model in one quarter is an anomaly, not a trend, but it is the kind of anomaly that shows up at the old end of a fleet.[2]
What about a drive that sits unused?
The figures above describe drives running continuously in a datacentre, so they measure wear under constant running and say nothing direct about a drive in a drawer. A stored drive avoids running hours, but treating it as an archive is where people get caught: drives can be reluctant to wake after long storage, and the only copy is the one you made years ago. If a drive matters, its contents belong in your backup rotation, powered up and checked occasionally, not shelved as a second opinion.[1]
Does the warranty tell you how long a drive will last?
Only loosely. Warranty lengths vary by product line, and no single page lists them: Seagate's warranty and replacements portal publishes no terms itself, instead sending owners to check an individual drive by serial number, with a warning that other factors can affect the actual warranty and data recovery service status. That last separation is the telling part. A warranty is a commitment about the hardware, not a forecast of its life, and a replacement drive arrives empty. Treat a longer warranty as a sign the manufacturer expects the model to last, then arrange your backups as if it did not.[3]
What about SSDs?
Solid-state drives age differently because they have no moving parts: data sits in memory chips, so there is no mechanical wear and, equally, no click or grind to hear when something goes wrong. Backblaze tracks SSDs separately from hard drives and publishes its SSD figures in a dedicated report, so there is fleet data here too, just less of it.[4]
The numbers available are promising but young. Backblaze's SSD report covered 3,144 drives used as storage-server boot drives and found a lifetime annualised failure rate of 0.90% from Q4 2018 through Q2 2023. Its first look at SSD age at failure found an average of 14 months across 63 failed drives, against a fleet averaging 25 months, with Backblaze careful to call the dataset small. Even its check against the usual failure curve was only a loose fit, about a 70% match: nobody has enough SSD history yet for confident age-based predictions.[4]
What an SSD does have is a rated endurance: manufacturers publish how much can be written over the drive's life, listed as TBW (terabytes written) on the specification sheet if you want the number for a drive you own. The practical difference from a spinning drive is the absence of warning sounds, so the usual advice carries across unchanged: enjoy the silence, and keep backups as though the drive gave none.
The upshot
Plan on years, not decades, and never on certainty: drives are consumable, replaceable parts of a computer, and any that outlive expectations are a bonus rather than a plan. What makes a drive's eventual failure boring rather than painful is boring redundancy: copies in more than one place, checked now and then, so that when a drive does stop it costs you a shopping trip and a restore, not the files.[1]
Our guide to backups after data loss covers where to start if you are reading this a little late
If you are trying to judge a drive you already own rather than plan for a future one, the signs article covers the warning signs worth acting on.
Not sure what your drive is doing? Use guided help
Sources
Facts on this page are cited to the publishers’ own documentation.