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    Hard drive lifespan and other

    Hi, I just need to know some stuff that I looked up ages ago but not sure what's accurate. 1. If you leave a drive without checking it, will it die due to no usage? 2. Is the SMART (?) data not reliable as far as health is concerned, I read that they still die for no reason 3. How then can you roughly predict it's lifespan? 4. What would be a good backup or storage strategy offline, and are SSDs better? Does Smouty no longer post on here?

    #2
    I would suggest perhaps a forum like Overclockers UK may garner more responses than here. Generally far more PC/technical people on there.

    1 & 2. Not sure. Although my understanding is that mechanical platter drives last a long time before they can lose data and it's far more likely that a disk drive experiences mechanical failure of some kind. I've been building or playing with PCs since the 90's and the only failures I've had are sudden and in both cases around 18-months. My HP Microserver (Unraid OS 6.8) has 4 HDDs that don't see much use but the performance hasn't degraded over time.

    3. Not sure again, although most articles I've read state to expect 3-5 years from consumer disk drives. Certainly my Microserver is running 2 x WD REDs which are 5 yrs old, another WD Green which is 4.5 years old and a 2013 2TB WD Seagate Barracuda. Not the heaviest of users which helps, but this doesn't seem untypical of the drives I have. I also have a couple of even older 1TB Seagates which still work and are in use (nothing critical mind). Unraid is set to do monthly parity checks although I the drives are set to spin down. I use an SSD as a cache/docker storage but isn't really required.

    4. Isn't it meant to be in 3-2-1: so master > backup > offline. Personally I categorize everything as critical or not critical. So the personal photos, documents are backed up and stored in the cloud. Where as my FLAC or media generally just have the redundancy on Unraid. Risky but I can always re-rip the CDs. This makes it more manageable than storing GB of data in the cloud. Personally I manually store everything on the server and cloud at the same time.

    Not sure if that helps.

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      #3
      Originally posted by shinobi7000 View Post
      Hi, I just need to know some stuff that I looked up ages ago but not sure what's accurate. 1. If you leave a drive without checking it, will it die due to no usage? 2. Is the SMART (?) data not reliable as far as health is concerned, I read that they still die for no reason 3. How then can you roughly predict it's lifespan? 4. What would be a good backup or storage strategy offline, and are SSDs better? Does Smouty no longer post on here?
      The drives are usually ok, but bearings can stick and stuff like that. You are best powering them up and trying to make another copy of the data.

      Comment


        #4
        1. Yes, both mechanical and solid state drives can die due to not being use. For mechanical drives it's a matter of magnetic fields on the platters attenuating, and arms and bearing not having the proper self-lubrication over a long period of time.
        But you can use mechanical drives for long-term storage if once a year you power them up and maybe run a chkdsk or a defrag, just to "refresh" both magnetic tracks and mechanical parts. However, if you are going down this way always keep multiple copies.
        Reasons why SSDs die when not in use are a bit more complicated, but essentially SSDs are built for speed and short-term data retention, so you should never use them as long-term powered-down backups.

        2. SMART data gives you a general idea on the status of a drive. It cannot monitor certain aspects of the drive (like if bearings are failing), but it's a decent indication if a drive is going to die. For example I have a drive in the backup NAS that is reported as "problematic", SMART figures are good but the OS detected a few too many bad clusters and alerted me.

        3. You really can't. I have PATA mechanical drives still alive and well, while I had brand new SATA drives within a month or dead on arrival. That's why you keep backups

        4. The best way for long-term backups? Tapes. However tapelibs are big, noisy, expensive, and can't quite match mechanical HDDs in size. I store all my data on a NAS (RAID 6, eight HDDs) plus a backup NAS (RAID 6, 6 drives) with automated copy procedures. And I'm thinking to implement a cloud service for more peace of mind.

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          #5
          Thanks very much for all the replies. They were all helpful. I can't multi quote. The issue about having to power them up is a slight pain if you want to just store them long term. Also, I've seen people's drives that were a decade or older and still working without regular usage. Matter of numbers I guess, many would have died. I would like to have multi drive bakckups but the cost might be prohibitive, as well as the effort needed.

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            #6
            Can only agree with bk, he talks a lot of sense.

            Stay away from SSD's for long term storage, last time I read they require normal use to keep the data intact almost as if they had some sort of battery to keep them going, apparently memory cards are the same. If you don't use them for ages they may have gone to RAM.
            When SSD's fail they basically turn from ROM to RAM and forget everything unlike an HDD which starts to fail bit by bit, that's why SSD's come with a management utility which tells you the health of the drive, once it drops from 'Excellent' I'd get wary.

            Tape's are easily the best but expensive, if you are using HDD then better to have multiple smaller HDD's rather than one huge one for backup. It's the same for memory cards for a camera. Rather than take one mega sized one on the holiday of a lifetime it's better to take a few smaller ones. If the one big memory card dies then all your pictures are lost, if one of the smaller ones dies then you've still got pictures on the other cards.

            I have an HDD enclosure and a couple of HDD's for my needs along with a couple of fast USB drives as well.

            Comment


              #7
              With the above replies saying it's the moving parts that die, it's not possible to remove the platters and read them though? Unless someone had a lab and some other stuff I guess.

              Comment


                #8
                Data recovery firms do just that as the platters are normally okay in a drive unless they've been physically damaged.

                But if you're worried about data loss -> 3-2-1 back up:

                3 different mediums
                2 locations
                1 off site

                Amazon's AWS Glacier is dirt cheap for long term back up so long as you're okay with Amazon having your stuff.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by shinobi7000 View Post
                  With the above replies saying it's the moving parts that die, it's not possible to remove the platters and read them though? Unless someone had a lab and some other stuff I guess.
                  That's what recovery firms do, and that's why they charge so much. HDDs are not hermetically sealed (unless it's helium drives) but they don't let any kind of dust in, open one outside a white room and you've kissed it goodbye.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Most Drives i have had you usually get some warning when its starting to go wrong like bios warning, drive not appearing or just running slower than normal so i have had time to back up.

                    Though years ago had issues with Fujitsu drives had a couple and they just did not last long and not going back to them.

                    I tend to keep stuff spread over several hardrives and also have a big external one for back up

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                      #11
                      If anyone's still reading, with a quote of 4-5 years average life span, what about externals that are rarely used? Also anecdotal, but I've seen drives last a decade or more.

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                        #12
                        Internal or external, an hard drive is still an hard drive. Same recomendations apply to both.

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                          #13
                          No, what I meant is an internal will always be getting some use, at least powered up and down. An external can be unplugged and unused for long periods, so does that mean they may last longer?

                          Comment


                            #14
                            That's a shot in the dark. Yes, it could last longer thanks to shorter and less numerous activity periods; no, it can last as long or less for exactly the same reasons.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              I've never had an issue with my backup methodology, I just use a USB stick and cloud storage. Despite some saying that flash storage is unreliable, I found that as the space of my backups have increased every few years, I buy a new flash drive as the space needed increses and as such, never had an issue.

                              Current setup is:

                              My PC with a single Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB M.2 Drive
                              128GB USB Flash Drive (With all documents and photos backed up)
                              Google Drive (All important photos backed up)

                              For me, that does me fine.
                              Last edited by Wools; 23-03-2020, 12:22.

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