Some of the drives in this thread have impressive power on hours...
I think the oldest drive I have in daily use is a 1TB WD black from the early 2010s that got mothballed for years before being repurposed as a drive for a security cam DVR:
Still, 32k+ hours with 28k of those with near constant writes is nothing to sneeze at. Interesting how some models just seem to go forever, while others live and die by the bathtub curve.
My personal suspicion is that a lot of it has to do with their operating environment- stable temperature, infrequent vibrations or shocks, clean power, and few power cycles being conducive to long life. That and maybe just some models have design flaws.
I don't have any old HDDs other than that one WD black in the DVR. Maybe a pair of WD reds from 2015/16 time frame that I infrequently use for secondary backups, though that's hardly old. Most of my really old ones were pillaged for their magnets and recycled years ago.
The bulk of my HDD storage drives are all from the last five years; the ones in my RAIDZ 2 pool stopped accumulating hours when it became far too costly to run my NAS 24/7 (or even frequently). Now I only power it on when needed, or once a month to perform a scrub, run smart tests, update the os, and perform backups to/from it. Sadface.
I think the last time I personally experienced a bona-fide HDD failure was probably in the late 2000s- one of those late model Maxtors that were half-height, probably about 40GB, and manufactured right before or around the time they sold to Seagate. EDIT: I'm pretty sure I've lost more data from RAID array failures and botched ransomware than actual drive deaths lol.
