Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?

<< < (3/13) > >>

TaoPhoenix:
Okay, this topic confuses me on so many levels, so the following are only opinions and should not be taken as advice.

1. What is a "powered up hour" and why is that different from simple elapsed time? My current desktop is doing okay per se, I haven't run any diagnostics but I haven't noticed any Flaking either. So the whole machine was custom built in 2006 by a friend, and it's basically been running steady ever since without any down time.

2. I am not initially inclined to just "randomly" decide "ho hum, it's been seven years, let's just retire my drive". Instead, at the time of designing the system I put in a dedicated backup data drive, opposite the OS, precisely to have resources against a hard drive failure. While my backups are far from as often as might be smart, let's just say that a random week's worth of a full copy-over plan would bring things up to snuff.

3. Let's suppose that my only data copy was on the D aka "Data Drive" opposite the OS on C, wouldn't the C drive with the OS actions and upkeep be the drive that fails first? Wouldn't the data be pretty safe since the D data drive does nearly nothing but sit there?

IainB:
Not sure if this helps or is useful:
Consider the old operational approach to not replace anything unless:

* (a) it is becoming a throughput bottleneck for newer/faster technology processors.
* (b) it shows signs of impending/potential failure - e.g., per HDsentinel and/or CrystalDiskInfo reports.
Other worthwhile considerations might be:

* The RAID approach. (As already mentioned.)
* Real-time backups to online backup/mirror hard drives - i.e., each production primary has a trailing secondary drive. I think this would be similar to the old Tandem NonStop approach. The secondary drive would automatically swop in, according to some set of rules, when the primary started showing problems. Built-in redundancy.

40hz:
^From my experience, drives fail when they fail. And each drive has its own probability of failing. Multiple drives actually increase the likelihood of having at least one drive fail in a given system. And a backup drive is no less likely to fail than a main drive.

Perhaps wear & tear from regular use increases the likelihood of a "busy" drive failing. But in my experience it hasn't worked out that way. I strongly suspect variations in manufacturing and quality control have more to do with a drive going south than wear and tear does.

One thing I've observed that does have a direct effect on service life is heat. Cases packed with multiple hard drives, inadequate airflow, and "hot room" environments do experience more drive failures than single-drive PCs in normal office or home environments.

Just my 2¢. YMMV. :)

mouser:
One thing I've observed that does have a direct effect on service life is heat. Cases packed with multiple hard drives, inadequate airflow, and "hot room" environments do experience more drive failures than single-drive PCs in normal office or home environments.
--- End quote ---


Yes, that seems to be very well established, which is why I now take hd overheating very seriously, when it's something i never paid attention to before.

In fact, that's why I love Crystal Disk Info, and why I linked to it in my first post -- it lets me put a separate icon for each hard drive temperature in the system tray (and it's free).  [If you have only one HD in your computer, there are lots of tray-based hd temperature monitors you could use].

TaoPhoenix:
I just downloaded it now.

I'm getting a "caution" in "reallocated sector count" - what does that mean?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page