[pixl97]

> not doesn't indicate much about its likelyhood of working. T

Statistically I would say it does very much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

Also drives can start building up bad sectors that you cannot write to, but may be able to read data from.

[toast0]

The bathtub curve is real, but it's hard to know where it is for a given model and production date. My personal experience is that hard drives often continue working past their warranty date, so I'd guess the other end of the bathtub is closer to ten years than five. I've run server fleets with a few thousand drives, and didn't find the other end of the curve because five year old drives are both out of warranty and relatively low capacity; we would retire systems with old drives because a new system would have much more capacity, rather than because the drives were old, but we still didn't run too many old drives.

> Also drives can start building up bad sectors that you cannot write to, but may be able to read data from.

Bad sectors are a pre-failure indicator. It's totally reasonable to stop using drives when they collect enough bad sectors. My threshold is 10 for drives you don't regularly monitor and can't easily replace, and 100 for drives with automated monitoring and simple replacement procedures.

I wasn't ever able to figure out reliable pre-failure indicators for ssds. In my experience they work nearly perfectly, until they disappear, never to respond to commands again. Thankfully, at a much lower rate of failure (per drive) than mechanical disks.