This is a great question, and a state of the art kind of thing.
HDDs are sold with a lifetime drive read/write amount and power cycle warranty, along with usually some environmental operating envelope. read/write relates to the quality/space of the platter, power cycle is usually the actuator & read/write head being reseated/wearing out. Environment is the same as all other devices in a DC.
Most folks replace drives when they die (reads/writes stall or return garbage), or when the warranty runs out. Some will pay for a warranty exception, and some will just use the drive outside of warranty. Depending on how you use the drive, what environment it's in, etc changes how much you can push things.
I'd say anywhere from 4-8 years, depending on how it's used. In many cases it can be cheaper to have a worse environment for your fleet (thus using less power on hvac) and replace devices more frequently.
I tried for 6 weeks. Eventually, it just stops functioning. The same program and arguments spits out "segmentation fault" 33% of the time I run it, with the other 67% working perfectly. The only way I could explain it was that it was in a function outside the main, because when I put the exact same code in the main, compiled and ran, it worked.
I have no other explanation. At some point, having too many nested loops and variables causes segmentation faults, whereas less complex code functioned without error. I needed to have certain things performed, and it only functioned in the main.
Why would you try to do this in C of all languages? It's one of the worst choices, especially for a self-learner and a beginner like you. Consider: choosing another language could, on its own, 100% eliminate any possibility of getting a segfault! With just that, you'd be spared from having to produce an abomination of many thousands of loc inside a single function, which is never (unless you're Donald Knuth) a good programing practice.
Python is slower but easier, and less likely to segfault out of blue! You don't even have to have a main() loop. If you just have an idea worth demoing quick, I'd recommend switching to Python 3.
There's also the fact that hard drive capacities keep increasing and increasing significantly faster that the power required, and sooner or later for very long term storage it'd become cheaper to migrate all your data from those 5 year old 4TB drives to more modern 16TB ones. That's assuming you want hot access to the data and don't plan on spinning them down as soon as you've written to them, like you'd do for a cold backup of the whole IA.
I remember for a long time (I'm talking 20-ish years back here), every hard drive I bought had double or more the capacity of every drive I'd ever bought previously combined. My first ever 40MB (yes, megabyte) drive got upgraded to an 80MB one, that got updated to a 250MB one, then a 750MB, and then a whopping 2GB drive (how would I _ever_ fill that up???) - and so on. That's slowed down some, but I'm currently starting to think about upgrading my 8TB drives (Raid1 pair) with 20TB drives when the prices start to drop a bit more.
Drives do 140-220MB/s depending on the LBA distance of the readhead, and that's not really changing. 160MB/s is very common.
So your 8TB drives, assuming 1MiB writes with a 20ms latency and 160MB/s, you can rewrite the drive ~155 times/year. At 20T this drops to ~62 times/yr.
Do people really replace their drives when the warranty runs out? Hard drive manufacturers won't provide data recovery on drives that fail under warranty[1]. It makes more economical sense to just run a drive until it dies. You'll end up paying the price for a new drive either way, but less often if you ignore the warranty expiring.
1: I discovered this myself when a Seagate drive containing some important data failed under warranty. If you're foolish enough to send them a failed drive with data you need recovered (like I was), all they'll do is throw it in the bin and send you a replacement drive.
This is a great question, and a state of the art kind of thing.
HDDs are sold with a lifetime drive read/write amount and power cycle warranty, along with usually some environmental operating envelope. read/write relates to the quality/space of the platter, power cycle is usually the actuator & read/write head being reseated/wearing out. Environment is the same as all other devices in a DC.
Most folks replace drives when they die (reads/writes stall or return garbage), or when the warranty runs out. Some will pay for a warranty exception, and some will just use the drive outside of warranty. Depending on how you use the drive, what environment it's in, etc changes how much you can push things.
I'd say anywhere from 4-8 years, depending on how it's used. In many cases it can be cheaper to have a worse environment for your fleet (thus using less power on hvac) and replace devices more frequently.