Hard drive reliability

[Heihachi_73]

Re: Hard drive reliability

I had a 60GB Seagate last 140000 hours before it randomly died (3/4 of the way through backing up no less) - never had any errors or bad sectors, was copying flawlessly, then suddenly dead, a few clicks upon powering up then power down immediately. The 40GB Seagate in the same PC had 160000 hours and was still good the last time I checked two years ago (no point as I backed it up before the 60GB).

Still got a long way to go with this PC - it's a 320GB Hitachi Deathstar HDS721032CLA362 with just 33684 hours.

[Pentium4]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Where the hell have you been?!~?!

I should probably make a thread about it. I felt like it hadn't been too long and then when I looked at the "Your last visit" I realized it was almost 4 years

[Topcat]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Thanks! Glad to see you're still around here.

Where the hell have you been?!~?!

[Pentium4]

Re: Hard drive reliability

It's a laptop used as a laptop (and its rs232 port), it still works, it's faster than my Atom 1.6GHz by a small margin.
Running Linux and currently trying to update to the rolling release's latest version...

Glad to hear it's still in use Is it a Dell?

Welcome back.

Thanks! Glad to see you're still around here.

I saw one of those 80GB 7200.7 drives run 24/7 for about ten years and even survive a real-life table flip while it was powered on. I didn't pay attention to power-on hours, but it had no bad sectors when it was taken out of service. I still know where it is, and it might end up in my junk pile eventually to replace other old IDE hard drives (like my previous spare 60GB Western Digital that didn't spin up reliably the last time I tried it).

How did that happen? Kudos to that drive though. That's impressive! Back when Seagate was good. I haven't touched new Seagate drives in a long time. I was fully moved over to Western Digital (for new drives) since 2016.

[lti]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Welcome back.

I saw one of those 80GB 7200.7 drives run 24/7 for about ten years and even survive a real-life table flip while it was powered on. I didn't pay attention to power-on hours, but it had no bad sectors when it was taken out of service. I still know where it is, and it might end up in my junk pile eventually to replace other old IDE hard drives (like my previous spare 60GB Western Digital that didn't spin up reliably the last time I tried it).

[eccerr0r]

Re: Hard drive reliability

It's a laptop used as a laptop (and its rs232 port), it still works, it's faster than my Atom 1.6GHz by a small margin.
Running Linux and currently trying to update to the rolling release's latest version...

[Pentium4]

Re: Hard drive reliability

sigh... annoying that they're dropping support of perfectly good hardware...

I know it I have so many PII/PIII/P4 S478 that I don't know what to do with.

Can Pentium-D's run 64-bit, thought they were Preshots or something of that vintage, though RAM might be another problem.

currently updating my poor old Pentium-M...

Sorry if I miscommunicated. The Pentium D was the system it ran in for 90k hours when I got the hard drive, but then I put it in the (pictured above) computer for my use. The board that the Pentium D in it smelled hot and even bulged some Rubycon MCZ caps, so I didn't really think it was worth sparing. My system pictured here is a P4 2.0A that was running my network. But yes, all Pentium D's are 64 bit.

I kind of want to run it in the corner on a battery backup just to see how many POH I can get on it

What are you doing with your Pentium M?

[eccerr0r]

Re: Hard drive reliability

sigh... annoying that they're dropping support of perfectly good hardware...
Can Pentium-D's run 64-bit, thought they were Preshots or something of that vintage, though RAM might be another problem.

currently updating my poor old Pentium-M...

[Pentium4]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Here's the highest hours I've seen so far. This hard drive is badass. It had 90,000 hours when I got it. It was in a, wait for it.... SFF case with a Pentium D! Ouch! And the fan PSU failed, but it kept chugging along with bulged caps for who knows how long. So I put it in my IPFire box even though it had reallocated sectors. From the 90k point to this picture (June 18, 2021), it only gained 6 more reallocated sectors. It's currently retired since IPFire is dropping x86 support. That P4 box moved over ~63TB of network traffic while in service.


Here's a picture of the computer it was in. Was only temporarily unplugged lol. Most of those caps were acquired from Badcaps here and installed back in the day. Those alone have given that motherboard at least another 35,000 hours of life! The original 02 date code HNs failed at ~18,000 hours.

[TechGeek]

Re: Hard drive reliability

My boot drive(Sandisk SSD)
https://pastebin.com/6UH20vF2
/home drive(WD Caviar Black 2TB)
https://pastebin.com/UGEd7L0t
Video Editing drive(same as /home drive)
https://pastebin.com/y0u51Azu

[goontron]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Well, with WD, I always check, even if it's a low-hours new drive. It all depends how it's been stored. If it's an OEM drive, ideally it wasn't shipped in bulk packaging without a seal or left by whatever OEM used it to sit too long in a damp warehouse before getting used.


Yeah, that's quite a lot. WD should have disabled whatever platter(s) were defective and the HDD sold as a lower capacity one.

The good news is that it's one of the mirror drives in my nested RAID 10 array. The other 4tb mirror "party" being two 2tb drives in RAID 0, so actual size is a little less than 3.9Tb overall.

[momaka]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Well, with WD, I always check, even if it's a low-hours new drive. It all depends how it's been stored. If it's an OEM drive, ideally it wasn't shipped in bulk packaging without a seal or left by whatever OEM used it to sit too long in a damp warehouse before getting used.

811 sectors... Over 56 events... Something tells me they didn't mark bad sectors at the factory.

Yeah, that's quite a lot. WD should have disabled whatever platter(s) were defective and the HDD sold as a lower capacity one.

[goontron]

Re: Hard drive reliability

^ You would think at only 41 hours they wouldn't be corroded. And, sadly, they aren't...

811 sectors... Over 56 events... Something tells me they didn't mark bad sectors at the factory.

[momaka]

Re: Hard drive reliability

There you go.
So how many reallocated sectors does it have now? Don't tell me none!

Also, I forgot to mention, but since you have a WD drive there - clean the PCB contacts that go to the heads / actuator, as they regularly oxidize on WD drives.

[goontron]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Just posting an update. Where proprietary software failed, FLOSS succeeded. I ran badblocks on it in destructive mode and the drive came good.

[momaka]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Well, so far so good.... /s

LOL
Ah well, it would have been a waste of time anyways. No matter what many softwares claim, I don't think you can properly ever fix any physical damage inside an HDD with some mouse clicks. At best, you can just map around bad sectors and hope the HDD doesn't hit that area, then go offline.

haven't read the thread but i think spinny disks will save data better than ssd . or does a head crash wreck the disks ? .

Head "crash" rarely does physical damage to the disk. Most of the time, the heads just get out of alignment or damaged to the point where they can't read anything on the disk - that is, unless the magnetic coating on the disks is marginal and the HDD starts getting bad sectors due to that.

But all in all, I too think that regular spinners are safer for data than SSD. With SSDs, your data is spread across many different memory chips, and when one fails, pretty much all of your data is gone. Think of it as a RAID 0 array consisting of many many discs. On that note, multi-platter HDDs also function internally like a RAID 0 array. So the safest bet is usually a single-platter, single-head HDD with a lower capacity. But who wants to use a 40-80 GB wonder from 10+ years ago?
... well, okay - I do. But that's only on computers I use for work (i.e. typing, storing documents and a few personal pictures). With my gaming/multimedia-oriented PCs, I don't care - I just back up start over when things go bad.

Looks like Barracuda 7200.7s are shit. In fact, the bad one I got from Wal-Mart on May 14, 2005, was most likely a 7200.7, I had weird squeaking when seeking a lot, and multiple SMART checkers were predicting an early HDD failure!

U MAD?

7200.7 is pretty damn reliable. I have seen very few truly failed ones (i.e. not detecting or clicking). Yes, a lot of them will accumulate bad sectors over time (some more than others). But despite that, they continue to work fine for many years. On that note, some of the WD's from the same time period didn't fare any better. Moreover, from what I've seen, WDs from that time tend to stop working at random on a cold boot - no warning signs whatsoever. With the Seagate 7200.7 and 7200.9, you usually get a lot of early warnings, like squealing/squeaking and BSODs, to name a few.

In any case, though, both WD and Seagate were pretty reliable back then. Just because you got a bad turd from Walmart shouldn't drive you to conclusions about all models from a particular manufacturer. I mean, anything you get from Walmart shouldn't surprise you if it fails.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Looks like Barracuda 7200.7s are shit. In fact, the bad one I got from Wal-Mart on May 14, 2005, was most likely a 7200.7, I had weird squeaking when seeking a lot, and multiple SMART checkers were predicting an early HDD failure!

Barracuda 7200.9=I dunno...

Barracuda 7200.11= It's possible that no other Barracuda gen got a worse reputation than the 7200.11! They reportedly have major firmware issues and possibly major hardware issues as well!

The Barracuda 7200.12s and what appear to be related, seem to be the best later Seagates (besides the Barracuda 7200.10s, where many of them are also made in Thailand.)

On June 2, 2005, at Staples, IIRC, got the Maxtor 6Y060P0, (Singapore, IIRC) which is a 60 GB (7,200 RPM) DiamondMax 9 series, IIRC and it lasted a long time!

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Ive been running Prime95 and S&M for the past hour... Its acting fine. Memtest is good.

Cool!

[goontron]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Ive been running Prime95 and S&M for the past hour... Its acting fine. Memtest is good.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Hard drive reliability

Well, so far so good.... /s

Ow! Looks like CPU might be unstable...