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How long do hard drives actually live for?

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I'm no expert here but unless it's extreme I suspect temperature isn't necessarily a good measure.

obviously it needs to be monitored but I was always of the understanding that it was the hot/cold cycle that does the damage, so using a data centre where everything runs at a pretty steady rate 24/7 isn't going to give you a good comparison (unless perhaps you're looking to build a data centre ;D)

And while there are going to be natural variations between components (see the graph in the previous post) I would assume a higher but steady temp in a stable system was 'acceptable' unless it was extreme.  Sudden spikes or significant increases over time would be cause for concern, otherwise...

superboyac:
it seems my paranoia of watching my drive temperatures are still warranted
-mouser (May 20, 2014, 08:08 PM)
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This is a good moment to enjoy.

IainB:
Well, from an engineering perspective alone, theory would presumably support the significance/relevance of heat to hard drive life.

ewemoa:
SO.. it looks like the lesson is, IF YOUR DRIVES ARE ALWAYS RUNNING RELATIVELY COOL, trying to run them cooler won't improve reliability.
-mouser (May 20, 2014, 08:08 PM)
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Nice obvservation!  So there's a data point that in favor of keeping drive temperatures between 14 and 38 C -- so if it's too hot for us, perhaps it's too hot for them?

f0dder:
Uh-oh...here comes f0dder!-40hz (November 26, 2013, 05:32 PM)
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Where did he get off to? I haven't seen him in forever.
-Stoic Joker (November 27, 2013, 07:21 AM)
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Real life - and it looks like I'm only a couple of years late to the party ;)

I got the impression that it could/would be an extremely time-consuming process, since, in bad drive sectors, Spinrite apparently goes down to the level of individual bits of data on the disk, and then resorts to an almost analogue-type approach where the bit has an indistinct magnetic polarity.-IainB (November 27, 2013, 08:12 PM)
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This is nonsense, but it's what Gibson wants you to believe, supported by the nonsensical "ooh! magic!" display of the user interface.

Fact is that you could do some interesting tricks back when harddrives where MFM - but that's so long ago that I haven't ever seen one. Claiming you can tweak bit patterns and repair the drive on anything made in the last, oh I dunno, 30 or so years, is snake oil.

What SpinRite can do is repeatedly trying to read a sector, which might eventually succeed. This is one of the most dangerous things you can do to a failing drive, though, since it involves a lot of head movement, and that's not a very nice thing if your drive mechanics are bust - you want to do a quick single-pass ignore-error read of the disk to an image file before doing anything else, if you're interested in saving data.

Another thing SpinRite can do is trigger the drives sector reallocation, but that's not magic either - drives do that automagically when you try to write to a bad sector. This doesn't mean the bad sector is "repaired", simply that this sector on the drive is remapped to a (relatively small) pool of reallocation sectors. And as I mentioned, it's not magic - all it takes is a write to the sector.

Friends don't let friends use SpinRite.

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