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Should we pre-emptively retire old hard drives?
Stoic Joker:
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.-40hz (August 02, 2012, 09:47 AM)
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That tracks with my experience also. The head/platter relationship is zero contact, so nothing there can really "wearout". But if the thing is spinning, the bearings are making physical contact, and are indeed wearing slowly out.
Only exception I can think of is if something is being badly overused so the read/write lifetime is exceeded in a localized fashion. Like an XP SP2 machine with 256MB RAM from the factory ... They seemed to have an odd habit of blowing a hole in the drive wear the pagefile wasn't anymore.
Stoic Joker:
I'm getting a "caution" in "reallocated sector count" - what does that mean?-TaoPhoenix (August 02, 2012, 11:02 AM)
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You are running out of spare sectors, which is one of the signs of the end for the drive.
TaoPhoenix:
I'm getting a "caution" in "reallocated sector count" - what does that mean?-TaoPhoenix (August 02, 2012, 11:02 AM)
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You are running out of spare sectors, which is one of the signs of the end for the drive.
-Stoic Joker (August 02, 2012, 11:39 AM)
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Maybe you can give me a little more detail. Like xkcd's jokes about graphs with no axis labels, the caution drive is listed at "97" (of what?) reallocated sectors, with the "threshold of 36" (of what?). But the data drive is listed as "good" with reallocated sectors at "100" (of what?) with a "threshold of 5". Why So Different? So how is one Caution and the other good?
Stoic Joker:
I'm getting a "caution" in "reallocated sector count" - what does that mean?-TaoPhoenix (August 02, 2012, 11:02 AM)
--- End quote ---
You are running out of spare sectors, which is one of the signs of the end for the drive.
-Stoic Joker (August 02, 2012, 11:39 AM)
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Maybe you can give me a little more detail. Like xkcd's jokes about graphs with no axis labels, the caution drive is listed at "97" (of what?) reallocated sectors, with the "threshold of 36" (of what?). But the data drive is listed as "good" with reallocated sectors at "100" (of what?) with a "threshold of 5". Why So Different? So how is one Caution and the other good?-TaoPhoenix (August 02, 2012, 01:07 PM)
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I was responding to only the "caution" and "reallocated sector" parts. I know nothing about the software other than this morning I learned that Mouser thinks it's really cool. HDDs keep a pool of spare sectors that can be reallocated when one of the normal use sectors (fails/dies/expires) goes poof. Once that starts happening it's generally best to go shopping for a replacement. The intricate details involving how many are where and what's the magic number for too many I've not a clue on ... I'm a network guy...not a hardware guy. But I have seen a lot of disk failures, and they're generally not real slow...
40hz:
^all modern hard drives ship with more usable data sectors than advertised. These extra sectors are used to hold data automatically moved from sectors that exceed read/write validation error thresholds. Think of it as a built in spare drive area. Once a sector gets reallocated it's old location is marked as bad and never reused.
When you start running out of spare sectors it means more and more live sectors are experiencing serious read/write errors and being removed from allocable storage space. If you run out of spare sectors you are at risk of data loss since there won't be any place to move your data before the sector it is on gets a "hard" or non-recoverable read/write error.
Small numbers of such errors are normal and usually due to problems with the media. Large numbers, or increasing numbers, are more usually caused by the mechanical part of the read/write mechanism wearing out or going out of calibration. That's much more serious because that affects the entire drive.
Hope that explains things. :)
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