I recently had my external HDD that I kept movies on die and when I tried to have the data recovered the tech guy said that regularly accessing files on external HDD's reduced their life span. He obviously tried to upsell me an external media player.
I've never heard of this before, does regularly accessing media on standard external HD's degrade their lifespan? Is it actually better to use an external media player?
I'm sure he is technically right, but that sounds more like a "if you use this thing, it will eventually die" rather than actual advice that is unique to a HDD. I'm not a tech guru, but if you are constantly deleting things from that hard drive, then I believe it does impact the "life span" of the hard drive. As for the media player, unless that media player has a ton of flash memory, wouldn't it also use an HDD or SSD? Why not just buy an SSD instead?
That's more an issue for SSDs than HDDs, I believe. A hard drive is a mechanical system that will fail eventually, but individual memory locations don't have their own write cycle limits.
External hard drive enclosures get hot even while reading, but especially writing, so using them regularly will actually decrease the life a lot.
Get an external enclosure with a fan that actually blows air and the hdd in it will last forever no matter what you do to it. Good ventilation or an open one is okay, but hdd can get hot even with just convection cooling it.
They were just small external HDD's that did get hot and were moved a lot, so I'm assuming it was just normal wear and tear.
I was definitely leaning towards replacing with another normal drive anyway.
Kind of - drives automatically stop spinning and park their heads when they haven't been used for a few mins. This is what tends to wear them out.
The solution isn't to stop using them, though (that's obviously idiotic). What you can do is either disable the sleep function if you're tech savvy, or better yet, you can use a program like this to keep it from going to sleep. All the program does is write a few bytes of text to a file on the drive every X minutes (I recommend setting it to 2 mins).
Depends on the drive. And of course, unless you're using the drives every 3 minutes and then stopping for 3 minutes, this is actually good for the drive. You don't want it to be spinning for 3 days when it's used once.
Obviously, this guy just wants to sell something to our user. The whole claim is ridiculous.
Yes you do. Drives should ideally be spinning 24/7 if you want it to have the longest possible lifespan.
Traditionally the thing that causes HDDs to fail is powering them down. As a general rule if they're on and spinning they will continue to run. And in that regard the reason an external media player would be more reliable is it would generally stay powered on and therefore keep the HDD on and spinning.
I have an external HDD that I've been using since 2007. It's mostly MP3s and TV shows.
External media player? That’s going to have a hard drive in it too. Perhaps it’s a better grade hard drive for such things, but I doubt it.
There’s nothing special about media playing that is going to do any different to a hard drive. My network storage that I use for my Plex has been up for 3 years now, 24/7. Of course now that I said that a drive will fail, haha.
Hard drives are notoriously reliable. You just had bad luck or did manage to totally wear a drive out. Backblaze, a cloud storage provider, has been posting hard drive stats for years now. Here’s their report from last year. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/ 200,000 drives up for 78 million days and less than 3,000 of them fail. These are drives that are up and working constantly in a data center environment. They aren’t super special industrial drives, they are generic NAS drives.
So I think he was trying to sell you something, and if you’re happy with how what you had was working get a new external drive and carry on.
Is it an HDD or an SSD?
In any case, it will last a really long time and while more accesses may slightly degrade its lifespan, most people won't notice it. The drive dying was almost certainly bad luck. Although its important that you don't move or vibrate external HDDs too much, especially when they're spinning
External HDDs are just internal HDDs sitting in an enclosure. You can literally buy each component individually to build your own.
Not specific to external enclosures, but something I didn't know for a long time is all drives will get bit errors or corruption when left in storage.
HDDs will get uncorrectable bit errors if cylinders are not read for a while (the drive does error correction while reading and rewrites the fixed data). So leave windows defragment on or once a year have read everything on it (cat/sha1, backup elsewhere).
SSDs will get uncorrectable bit errors unless they are powered on for a substantial time. If you have old ones that you use for backups every 6 months or so leave them plugged in for a good while.
Now something affordable for the average user. ;)
I meant the NAS and file server. I suppose I should have also said, 'something practical'. ;)