I'm shopping for a Hard Drive and noticed on the specifications that one of the drives claims it has "2 million hours" of MTBF, and so I take 2,000,000 divided by 24 hours equals 83,333 days divided by 365 days (in a year) equals 228.3 years, and yeah I call bullshit, because there is NO WAY that any hard drive is going to last 228 years.

So, then what does it mean, and how long will a hard drive last that is spec'd at "2 million hours"?

It is the average time between failures in a large population of drives. In your example, a population of 1000 drives can expect a failure every 2000 hours (2 million hours / 1000).

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time ... n_failures

Helium disks have more platters as the friction is lower. Servers with millions of disks can use MTBF to estimate how many spare drives will be needed before a forklift upgrade is needed.

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Not sure how upgrading server with forklifts would work... is this because they 'hold' more data? or because you 'drive' a foklift? Storage on Pallets instead of platters is an interesting Idea, but I have not heard of drives coming from CHEP or Loscam as yet. Also would be quite cumbersome for a home user. Bunnings could store a lot on their shelves, maybe they are the next Data Centre?

Which, according to my 8th grade math means that 2 million hours PER DRIVE is average, and that some get less and some get more. I don't see why the point of the thread had to be clouded with the introduction of a "million" drives (multiplying both sides of an equation by a million) and then reducing the number to 2,000 hours out of those million drives. Multiply by a million, then divide by a million, "TA DAH! Lookit what I did, aren't I clever."

Yeah, no. Point was clearly made that I think the 2 million hour average time for failures is bullshit. Made up. False. Lie. Marketing horseshit. Unless someone knows something I'm missing, because I think it's 100% bullshit. Take a 2 million hours, divide by 24 hours, then divide by 365 days in a year means that on average a drive lasts 228 years. Complete bullshit. Now multiply that 228 years by a million hard drives, then divide by the number of hard drives and PRESTO! it's 228 years. Utter horseshit.

Why is it that I'm on HDD Guru, THE place online where you find supposed "experts" in hard drives and they pull rabbits from hats, multiple by a million, then divide by a million, wave a magic wand, shout "ABRACADABRA", and then stand around proud of themselves like they just DID SOMETHING, and somehow magically have the illusion that they KNOW SOMETHING that the general public might not know. Meaning it's not just the MTBF factor that's utter horseshit, but it's the supposed "answer" to my question that is also horseshit. If I wanted a retarded, low-IQ and dumbed down response to my question, I would have asked ChatGPT or the nearest Somalian.

Unless I'm missing something, and if so, what is it?

MTBF actually reflects drive.hours, not hours. It reflects the total operating time of a population of drives.

MTBF does not remain constant throughout the entire life of a drive. That should be obvious to anyone with at least two neurons. At 10 years, the MTBF could fall to 20000 drive.hours rather than 2 million, in which case a population of 1000 10-year-old drives would be failing every 20 hours.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.