5 yrs and 7 months

That's how long my WD Velociraptor drive lasted from new. Warranty ended at 5 yrs.
I'd bought two at the same time and the other one still seems to be okay.

Of course this figure is not a very accurate yardstick as it does not reflect actual running time but thought it might be of general interest to people.

Very good always liked those drives

I've just re-cloned the O/S onto one of my new WD Cavier RE3 drives that'd I'd just bought to put aside for my new build.
My other velociraptor was begining to show signs of tiring so thought I'd better back up now before I lost the chance.
Although the new drive is theoretically slower everything seems more responsive so I reckon the other drive was getting near the end of it's life.

That is a decent lifespan for a drive, especially if it's been used a lot. Many of today's drives, while having huge capacities, are cheap, and that's precisely the reason they are guaranteed for one to three years. I would not purchase a drive with less than a five year warranty for any reason. My Caviar Black has a five year warranty, as well as my Seagate backup drive. They were a little more in price, but not much, the extra $10 to $20 was well spent.

And refurbished drives, stay away. Regardless of the type of drive, WD only gives a six month warranty, and the discount isn't that great.

Being that a hard drive will ultimately fail, regardless of length of warranty or price, it is critical to backup. At a minimum, twice a year, or whenever you add or remove a major program. This way, when you do have to purchase a new one, at least you don't have to start from scratch.

Cat

Yeah the starting from scratch is a real PITA. I'm quite surprised as to how sprightly this new drive has made my system, my Raptor drive must have been struggling for a while although it cloned perfectly and never tested hot.
I did not know you could purchase refurbed drives, sounds like false economy to me.
This new drive is also 5yrs warranty but as I mentioned was really intended to form part of my new system but it will have to be used to keep me going on this one for a while now.

WD sells a variety of refurbished drives from their main site. My first backup drive, I still use it with my notebook, is a refurbished 160GB WD Passport. All WD refurbs carry only a six month warranty. But I've had it for a year and a half, and it has performed well. At one time, I had 25GB of it partitioned to run Linux Mint on, it ran as good or better than my notebook drive did.

Their selection varies a lot, most of these drives were returned for warranty service, had minor problems, repaired, and resold. At the time, I was inexperienced on selecting backup drives, I recently bought a new 500GB Seagate Free Agent Extreme backup drive for only $10 more.

I doubt that I'll buy a refurbished pocket drive again, but I can honestly say that I've had no issues with it, other than it's capacity for the money spent.

Cat

My hard drives also seem to just scrape through the warranty period and then fail, typical . My drives are under a heavy workload, so I don't expect them to last too long. I've always got a weekly backup of everything, just in case they decide to fail unexpectedly. Thankfully the last few have shown some warning signs before giving up.

At the moment I've got a Samsung drive for my main OS (and in my NAS) and they are nice and quiet.

Even with the best brands I don't think they "make 'em like they usta". My first ever home build used 2nd hand SCSI HDD's. No idea how many hours they had already done but only one failed on me after 3 yrs of home use.

My drives I suppose don't get heavy use, after all I'm at work all week and everything is turned off all day. I know that turning them off and on is also supposed to shorten their life but I just don't feel comfortable leaving electrical things tunred on when I'm not at home. Except the fridge of course but no option with that.