Nothing lasts forever. Sometimes, the most expensive and reliable equipment can get out of order. Unfortunately, your external hard drive can also stop working suddenly. How can you get ready for this? Unfortunately, it’s hard to predict when this will happen to you. However, there are several factors affecting the lifespan of external hard drives. By learning them, you can try to predict how long your gadgets will serve you and get ready to take the right steps on how to protect your precious files.
Be Forearmed with Reliable Data Protection
Before we move to the discussion of the factors affecting the lifespan of your external hard drive, let’s see how you can prevent yourself from losing data. Using external hard drive data recovery solutions is the surefire approach to keeping all your precious files safe and sound. You may choose the most reliable and expensive external hard drive with dozens of positive customer reviews. However, you cannot predict when it will stop working because of glitches or other failures. To prevent losing your data, we recommend you do regular backups. Besides, it’s always a wise move to store a carbon copy of your files on several devices. If any of your gadgets stop working, you may rest assured that nothing happens to the data stored on another device. If you used only one external hard drive for data storage, you would restore your data with the professional help of data recovery experts.
Factors Affecting External Hard Drive Lifespan
On average, the lifespan of external hard drives is 3-5 years. Here are the main factors affecting it:
Configuration plays a major importance. External hard drives use mechanical arms to read the data kept on the storage platter. The external hard drive’s lifespan mostly depends on the wear of that mechanism.
The brand of the external hard drive also matters. The most popular developers of such gadgets include Toshiba, WD, Hitachi, and Seagate. The external hard drives manufactured by these companies have proven to be the most reliable and long-lasting.
Surprisingly, the size of the external hard drive also affects the lifespan. After analyzing customers’ feedback, we found that external hard drives with capacities of 4TB and 6TB are more vulnerable than 3TB and 8TB devices.
The environment where you have placed the hard drive is also important. Unlike the hard drive installed in your desktop PC. External hard drives can be moved, which makes them vulnerable to temperature, humidity, dust, and other factors. Speaking about the effect of temperature on the external hard drive, both too-hot and too-cold temperatures are not allowed. The components could be oxidized when wet air gets inside the external hard drive. When it comes to dust, the device can overheat when it gets inside.