Wetlook World Forum

Current time: Sat 20/04/24 13:48:58 GMT

Translate page FROM -> TO

Translate page TO <- FROM

Message # 65062.1.2

Subject: Re:OT techhie question

Date: Tue 18/08/15 21:17:46 GMT

Name: Malvineous

Email: mrnemesis@ntlworld.com

Website:

Report Abuse or Problem to Nigel at Minxmovies
If you enjoy this forum, then please make a small donation to help
with running costs: (you can change amount)

Honestly, it's pure luck. Most of them seem to last forever, but they can also die shortly after being bought. In business use, I tend to see failures occur around the 2-4 year mark. The drive in my previous PC started to play up after four years, though it does still seem to work -- it suffered a dropout (that corrupted the video driver, which is why I discovered the problem: really laggy display after rebooting for updates), and drives that have experienced that fault still seem to stay running.

Lifetime is a combination of luck, and how the drive has been used (operating temperature, number of stop/start cycles etc). RAID 5 in servers seems to work hard drives to the grave: the activity level in the RAID 5 algorithm stresses drives no end. I've only seen one or two drives die in RAID 1 configuration, but plenty die in RAID 5 configurations (both Dell and HP servers).

I thought I'd killed the drive in an old laptop by leaving it running for weeks on end with the lid closed. However, after letting the drive cool down--as it had got extremely hot--it started working again and has been fine since.

With external drives, the IDE-to-USB or SATA-to-USB adapter is far more likely to fail than the drive itself; those circuit boards are awful. However, I've seen the actual drives fail, too (pulled them out and put them into a drive dock to test them). Even the power supply failure rate is several times the drive failure rate when it comes to mid-2000s Freecom drives.

I would personally be extremely concerned about data on a hard drive that's 10-12 years old.

In reply to Message (65062.1)

Re:OT techhie question

By soggybottom - Tue 18/08/15 16:35:20 GMT

Website:

Buy the new damn drive. They make external drives in teribites now and they don't cost that much. If you value the content, spend the little money that one costs and store all your material on it. I do photography and have three separate external drives for redundancy.

In reply to Message (65062)

OT techhie question

By Ngawa - Tue 18/08/15 16:13:11 GMT

Website:

Can anybody tell me how long a hard drive can last? I have a load of stuff stored on an old drive that I pulled out of a laptop when the motherboard died about 10 or 12 years ago. It's quite full now (it's only 50Gig) but there's stuff on it going back to 1997 when I first got onto wet look sites. I put it in a special casing that I got quite cheaply and I can plug it into any pc as an external drive but I dread the day that I plug it in and it doesn't work. I suppose I could buy a purpose made one with lots of space but I'm a cheapskate and anyway this drive has been such a good old friend...

Report Abuse or Problem to Nigel at Minxmovies
If you enjoy this forum, then please make a small donation to help with running costs: (you can change amount)