Show me your highest mileage HDD?

[Captain Jack Sparrow]

From what I've seen around the web, most HDDs fail around 60k - 90k hours, assuming they are not cycled out or disposed of before this.

Towards the end of 2020, I purchased a joblot of liquidated HDDs that were advertised as "low hours". You know where this is going, the price should have warned me but I was too naive...

• 2 x WD 2 TB
• 2 x WD 4 TB

All drives had between 70k - 90k hours on them. Both 4 TB drives began to show signs of failure last year, which still isn't bad for nearly 5 years of usage. No data was lost because they didn't fail at the same time. I replaced them with brand new WD Gold 4 TB drives. Glad I purchased them when I did, the price has more than doubled nowadays.

As for the 2 TB drives... they're still going strong to this day. One of them has reached over 120,000 hours! Maybe a record? And yes it's still fully reliable, but it's backed up to the new WD Gold drives every day.



These 2 TB drives will be cycled out and replaced by SSDs before the end of the year. Not because of reliability, but because of their use case. HDDs don't like being read and written at the same time. The backup job runs every day, so the drives grind to a halt during this period. For cold storage, this wouldn't matter, but these drives are hosting a network share and may be read/written during the backup period. SSDs would handle this better as they have native NCQ.

I challenge you, do you have any HDDs with more mileage?