Should I be concerned that my HDD, which seems to be working fine, is 8 years old?

If you don’t have backups then yes you should be worried.

There are only. 2 kinds of people:

1. Those who have lost data
2. Those who will lose data.

Plan accordingly

a HDD can fail at any given time. It could fail within a week of buying it, could last over a decade.

What I'm saying is, if you have data you don't want to lose, yes you should be worried. Keeping backups is the only safe option.

Have backups, follow the 3-2-1 rule.

All drives fail, at any time, and you will eventually lose data if you don't have good backups in place.

Hdd can live a long and happy life, but absolutely don't trust a single drive ever, independently of how rugged, old or expensive it is.

My main hard drive lasted 5 years with 1 year of power on hours, working fine and suddenly failed. It was a good fail because I was able to get all the data from it, but it took almost one month for how slow it was.

Always assume your data storage is going to die tomorrow and be ready to replace it.

1. Follow the 3 - 2 - 1 backup rule.
2. You can use SMART to see the health of your drive.

Always make sure that important files and folders are backed up at least twice! Even when drives are new, they can and do fail at random without warning. My HDD's are the better half of a decade old and I had no issue with them at all until last year. They're now starting to experience random corruptions that will sometimes compromise entire folders.

2 of my main system drives have been powered on for 5 and 7 years respectively and are therefore much older.

Just don't wait for them to start clicking before thinking about backups.

I had an external HDD that I was using for years. Some of that time it was attached to a Server basically running 24/7 definitely dropped that thing a couple of times. That HDD has been out of use for years now but I'm sure I could just plug it in tomorrow and it would spin up fine. HDDs can last forever untill they don't.

So Backups! And don't worry about the rest.

Also as others said if you're interested how long and hard it's actually been working check out the smart data if there are any fail criteria you might wanna get a new one just to avoid restoring from Backup but if all's green just let it keep chugging until it doesn't and remember Backups!

As long as you have multiple backups of your data, you shouldn't be concerned. HDDs as well as SDDs can potentially fail at any given time.

The key is to have more than one backup. You shouldn#t rely on only one backup alone.

I have old 500 gb drives from 2009 that i ripped out of beaten laptops still working 24/7 and i've had new drives grenade themselfs two weeks in use, there are too many factors to properly gauge how long of a life a drive has, the best option is to have backups, even something as simple as a copy on a flash drive is better than nothing.

I get people saying follow the 3-2-1 rule, but there are places like mine where storage is prohibitively expensive, so just do what you can, anything is better than nothing in this cases.

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.

If you're not seeing anything of concern in the SMART info then there's little to worry about. You could install/run smartctl from the command line, or for something with a gui try gsmartcontrol / any other app that can interact with your hard drive diagnostics.

Hard drives can last a long time, as a general rule if your hard drive made it through its first 1-2 years without issue then there's a good chance it'll keep chugging along for years. I personally haven't found that hard drives consistently die in 5-7 years, not too sure where you got that info from.

In any case backups are your friend, not just in case the hard drive dies but there's always the possibility that your entire OS blows up somehow or you get a bad case of malware.

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.

backup. backup. backup.

then also check the SMART stats on it and run the internal tests. if you don't know how, gsmartcontrol is a good place to start.

i've had a couple disks fail right away, and others that just go forever--and one of those is a deathstar, even.

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.

I had a drive fail two days after purchase. I had just copied all my data to it and erased my primary drive to copy everything back and clean it up. I spent (rather, my father spent (I was barely an adult and he helped me out)) ~$3000 for data recovery) to get everything back. Despite recovery, the experience caused me depression at how fragile my digital life was.

Storage is comparatively cheap compared to at that time. I was depressed because I was young and not making much money and storage was expensive. I could hardly afford to pay to protect my data. It's much easier to do so now.

Have multiple backups. Have one be offsite in case of natural disaster. I mailed an external drive of all the music I'd made on my computer to a family member in another state. Cover your ass.

If you can afford to eat out on occasion, you can save enough to protect your data. Backblaze is currently $9 / month. It's stupid-cheap. An external disk and some open source backup software is stupid-cheap. Run both and you have your data in three places: source, external, cloud.

Always do backups using the 1-2-3 method for any data stored on any media includi g cloud storage if sensibly possible. You WILL need it eventually and you WILL hate your past self for not checking if your backup actually works. Include your phone, too. If opensource is wanted, syncthing is a no-brainer. rsync pr freesync for personal bulk backups without cloud. (There is no Cloud. It's just someone elses computer.)

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.

I've got a 300gb WD velociraptor 10k rpm model that has been running almost non stop in every computer I have built for the last 20 years. I only use it as an extension of my steam library though so when it does die I won't lose anything.

Hard drives can last a long long time. I have test equipment with hard drives from the 90s that still run fine. That said when hard drives fail they fail quickly

I run a 15 drive nas. You’ll often see a few smart errors one day then total drive failure the next day. Sometimes the drive fails completely without any smart warning, especially if it’s that old. I try to retire drives from my nas before they fail for that reason (if they hit 7 year service life, and that’s pretty long but my nas is just a home server thing)

i have a 1tb hdd that i've taken with me over a few different pcs now, it's 10 years old and whined about dying to me like 7 years ago.

I only use it for backup stuff, but it's still going strong. Mostly I leave it just chilling like the old veteran it is.

You should get a new drive when yours breaks - its usually pretty obvious when that's happening.

You absolutely should ensure your important files are backed up though, even on a brand new drive.

Who knows. A few years ago my main drive (seagate 1TiB 10kRPM) exploded in use. It was only 4 years old. The company I sent it to for recovery told me all was left of the disks was dust. I live my life thinking it might happen again any time. This means regular backups (backupS plural).

it could easily last a few more years but after that long you should assume it could fail any day and either don't keep anything critical on it or make regular backups of anything important.