How old are your mechanical hard drives?

Ian

Ian

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I run a couple of servers in the house which use mechanical hard drives, and after about 2 years of ownership, I've had 3 x Seagate 3TB drives fail in the space of two months. I bought 8 of these in total, so that's a fairly high failure rate! Thankfully they were under warranty and they were in a RAID system, so there was no great cost to fix this.

It did however get me thinking about how long I'd expect a mechanical drive to last. I've got some that are 10 years old and still working, but I would only trust drives that old for low priority stuff. I think my oldest drive is 15 years old, but I've only held on to it in case I ever needed an IDE drive (unlikely, so will end up in bin soon!).

How old are your HDDs?
 
I swear by WD drives personally. Got a black as my Steam drive that's got to be >5 years old. My media drives are all WD green's and they are a couple of years old, touch wood, I've not had one fail on me yet.
 
I've had a couple of Seagate and a couple of WD internal drives that failed less than two years old, all under warranty. I only got replacements for two of them because there was personal information on the others that and didn't want to send off for a replacement.

I've had a few Maxtor externals, varying from five to fifteen years old fail.

I've had three WD My Book drives fail in less than a year, under warranty, and had them replaced with refurbished ones that have been OK for a few years now.

I have have several external enclosures of different brands fail, but the drive inside was OK.

I have about thirty external drives (mostly Lacie and Seagate, some WD My Book) that vary in age from two years old to about twelve years old that are still running OK. Those are used for archiving and backing up archives.
 
I have in all 6 hard drives, 3 internal (1 desktop and 2 laptops) and 3 external from 2 years old to all the way going back to 2004. The oldest one is Lacie portable 80 GB external and the newest is Toshiba Canvio portable 750 GB external from about 2 years ago using as my main data back up drive.
 
1 x Hitachi Travelstar 60gb date 2005. Still in use in an old Acer Travelmate 4150
5 x WD Scorpio Blue 500gb 2.5 inch in USB enclosures from 2008
 
EvanDavis said:
1 x Hitachi Travelstar 60gb date 2005. Still in use in an old Acer Travelmate 4150
Click to expand...

My old and trusty IBM T43 Laptop from 2004 has the Hitachi Travelstar 40GB drive which still runs perfectly and has no bad sectors. It has the Linux operating system on it now. I am not using it regularly now but from time to time when nostalgia hits me hard I use it and update it. My other laptop is the Samsung Ultra series 5 which also has the Hitachi drive in it which is 750GB variant. Very reliable indeed. :thumb:
 
Looks like there are a fair few of us running old drives then :D. I hope I haven't jinxed it :lol: .

Peru Bob said:
I have about thirty external drives
Click to expand...

Wow! Do you have them in some sort of enclosure, or just swap them round in a PC as needed?
 
Half of them are at home and half are kept at my business.

I use the 3 drive system:
One drive stays at home. The second drive is at my business. The third drive is at home and gets updated when the first drive is updated. It then is brought to my business where it is swapped with the third drive and the third drive then goes home and gets updated. Some data is also on DVDs. Some of the DVDs and hard drives have data transferred from 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 floppies.
This assures that there is always an on site and off site copy of my data.

I use a different method for backing up my business data which includes hard drives, DVDs, thumb drives, external hard drives, and data stored on my home computer.

I edit video as a hobby, so I have a lot of media and source files archived. I copy the data to my computers as needed.
 
@Peru Bob

You spend a lot of time on those videos so it really makes sense what you do. I have to agree with Ian, your method is foul proof.
 
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