Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Hard Drive SMART Stats - from the BackBlaze Blog

<< < (3/3)

IainB:
@mouser: Yes, that's what I would have intuitively thought as well. I asked the Q of @4wd because of his experience - which I don't have.
His comment was 3 years ago, and with the subsequent fall in prices of hard drives and SSDs, I wondered about the relative economics/benefits.
BackBlaze's view seems to be "toss it out" at the first sign of a #187 error, but then they may see it as simply cheaper than the (for them) false economy of expending labour on recovering a drive.
Interestingly, the first #187 error on this drive was a few months after I had bought the laptop new (shop-soiled at 50% discount in a closing-down sale, with 2 months of its warranty already used up). The HP support people didn't see it as a valid warranty claim (under the terms of the warranty) at the time, so I left the drive in the laptop. I've since extended the warranty, but it rather looks as though I shall have to foot the bill for a new drive myself. I don't want to wait for it to fail.

wraith808:
With the price of hard drives my opinion these days is that the first sign of the smallest amount of trouble from a drive means the data gets migrated off it and it gets put into retirement.
-mouser (July 16, 2017, 11:32 AM)
--- End quote ---

I'm getting to that point.  It vies with the fact that I really don't like to work on computers anymore, however.  Just disconnecting everything, removing the box from the mount, opening it up and making the change fills me with dread now.

IainB:
@4wd: Hey, many thanks for your response and advice.

Fortunately, with HDSentinel's relatively early warning, I should have time to think about this and plan accordingly.

Shades:
With the price of hard drives my opinion these days is that the first sign of the smallest amount of trouble from a drive means the data gets migrated off it and it gets put into retirement.
-mouser (July 16, 2017, 11:32 AM)
--- End quote ---

While I agree with the point being made here, you can still put those drive to some use. By using software like MHDD you get a clear idea where bad sectors on the failing disk are located. If these occur near the beginning or the end, you can partition the disk to size that won't "touch" these bad sectors at all. That extends the life of the disk considerably.

For example, you have a hard disk with a capacity of 1 TByte and errors occur in the first 200 GByte of the disk. You can then use partition management software from companies like MiniTool or Eassus to create 2 partitions on that disk. The first partition will be 250 GByte in size, the other partition 750GByte. The first partition should not have a drive letter, just a label stating it contains errors.

Now the disk could be used as a backup disk (for non-essential data) in a USB cradle. If you have a few of these faulty disks, you can make several copies of such backups. Afterwards, disconnect them and store these disks properly. Then these disks will serve you for quite some time still.

Heck, even if the disk is completely toast, you can take it apart and use the platter(s) for a wind chime, the neodyn magnets (strong!) for whatever and the engine that drove the platter(s) can be re-purposed too. The engine is actually a very well manufactured stepping motor with extremely precise tolerances. You will be hard pressed to find better ones anywhere.   

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page