I keep a few old HDDs around as scratch disks for installing random stuff. I realized a couple of them I’ve been using fairly regularly in my Mac Pro are pretty old, so took at look at the SMART stats (smartctl) to see how old they actually are, and what their stats and uptime actually are:
WD Caviar Blue 500GB – this drive came installed in my 2008 Mac Pro when I bought it used. I’ve no idea if it was an original disk in the machine or added later, but it’s still chugging along with no errors and over 3.7 years uptime:
32,830 uptime hours
0 read error rate
SMART health: PASSED
Hitachi Deskstar 3.5″ 7200rpm P7K500 250GB – I have 2 of these disks that I used in a Linux server as a RAID1 pair when I used to self host my website from home. Still no errors and over 5 years uptime so far:
45,082 uptime hours
0 read error rate
SMART health: PASSED
I understand that both of these are on borrowed time and I don’t use these for anything critical, but it’s interesting to see how long some disks last. On the other end of the spectrum I’ve also had several disks fail within a year, and one (a Quantum Fireball I think) failed within a couple of weeks, but it’s interesting to compare the lifetimes and failures from a number of disks over time.