7 yrs HDD, replace it ?

[Anaksy]

Hello guys, happy new year to all!

I have an external HDD, Hitachi XL 1000, i have it for about 7 years, its main purpose is to store my backups, so it has not being accessed a lot of times like a HDD that is used to hold the O.S. for example. So, i would like to know from you guys, if because of its age i should consider replacing it ?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hard to say. Eventually, the bearing lubrication can dry out. Less duty-cycle extends longevity, but only to a point.

When you say "backups", you mean secondary copies of everything? Such that if it died, you would have your primary copies still?

Or is this an "archive" of older stuff, and some of it is the only copy? (In which case, it's not a "backup".)

 

[lxskllr]

I'm from the 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' school of thought. New drives can fail, and old drives can go forever. I'd get a new drive to keep the old drive backed up, or if it's economically feasible, add offsite storage to your routine, but I'd keep using the old drive til it starts throwing errors.

 

[Anaksy]

Hard to say. Eventually, the bearing lubrication can dry out. Less duty-cycle extends longevity, but only to a point.

When you say "backups", you mean secondary copies of everything? Such that if it died, you would have your primary copies still?

Or is this an "archive" of older stuff, and some of it is the only copy? (In which case, it's not a "backup".)

it is both, secondary copies and archives.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

it is both, secondary copies and archives.

Then you don't have a backup. Shame on you. Shame! Shame! Shame!

Anyway, whether you use new or old HDDs is kind of a nonissue. What matters is that you have two copies of everything, on two different devices, which you verify regularly, and the spare $$$ to buy a replacement HDD if one of them goes south.

If you don't have that kind of money, look into a cloud backup plan like Crashplan/Backblaze/Carbonite. They're all decent, and they all cost like $60/year per computer. So in the short term, they're cheaper than buying a new HDD, although in the long term an HDD is probably cheaper (assuming it lasts 3-5 years.)

 

[Puffnstuff]

Hello guys, happy new year to all!

I have an external HDD, Hitachi XL 1000, i have it for about 7 years, its main purpose is to store my backups, so it has not being accessed a lot of times like a HDD that is used to hold the O.S. for example. So, i would like to know from you guys, if because of its age i should consider replacing it ?

Considering how inexpensive new drives are these days I would replace it with a new one so you'll have the peace of mind about it to stop worrying and move on to other things.

 

[C1]

Pre-flood drives are shown to be incredibly reliable.

I have many (probably 20+ units) that I use for back up which are 15+ years old. (The last one that failed, like 1 out of 40, was so long ago I almost dont remember.)

Oh, ya. I run a couple of 120GB 7.2K WDs every day (2 hrs) & that's been going on since I bought them new at Fry's.

(The 320 Maxtors are even better. Those drives are stated to run like enterprise level.)

The approach is to just keep doing what you do as from a probability standpoint, it is not likely that the backup will fail at the same time that the source drive fails.

The probabilities are not additive, but multiplicative. Hence, if the probability of one drive failing is 0.01 then the probability of two of them failing simultaneously is more like 0.01 X 0.01 which is 1 in 10 thousand ! So replace the drive that fails when it fails or shows evidence of failing.

The other thing is that drive reliability follows the famous "bathtub curve" (ie, high fail probability in early and late life with a long low failure probability mid-life).

(Checkout how many DOAs or early failures are reported on Newegg by users.)

You can buy inspected & tested pre-flood drives from DiscTech (www.disctech.com). Because they are older vintage/technology, their performance will be less than current versions (but that's okay for backup). However, oddly enough, they will be more reliable than brand new having demonstrated run hours past the early failure point (of the "bathtub curve").

 

[C1]

Duplicate post deleted.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, ol' Duckster-Blowhard has to get in his licks here.

Various utilities will access the full SMART data-set stored on those drives. The SMART data should include a simple time-odometer showing the number of hours the drive has in accumulated, powered operation.

I have about four Hitachi 500GB IDE drives I've configured for hot-swap bays and backup of selected folders on my server. They all still have a low hour-count.

A drive, running on a system powered a good part of 24/7, on the other hand, probably has a lot of hours accumulated.

But as someone already said: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are times, however, when the accumulation of items in the parts locker would make you choose whether to keep too many of an item with relatively small unit capacity, obsolete interfaces or speeds, etc. You're not as likely to be able to sell a hard drive to compensate your trouble in selling it. You could probably use the SMART data to promote a used sale.

And of course, you can probably find a 1TB SATA-III disk brand-new for -- what? -- $50? So what are you going to sell a used 160GB SATA-II drive for? And to whom could you likely sell it?

Get out the old Weatherby .457 Magnum bold-action elephant gun; take the gun and your disks down to the gun range; have some fun, and then drive by the county electronic recycling depot.

 

[JimmiG]

The drive could go on for another 7 years, or it could die tomorrow. However a brand new drive could also fail within days of buying it, so buying a new drive is no guarantee and might even be counter-productive. At least your old drive has proved itself, and doesn't seem to have any serious manufacturing defects, considering it's still working fine after many years.

However if it's USB 2.0, getting a USB 3.0 drive would be a huge improvement in terms of transfer speeds, so there's that to consider.

The best you can do is make sure that *when* (not if) a drive fails, the data is securely backed up. A back up is a huge improvement over no backup at all. A backup of the backup is even better.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

OP, run a non-destructive read test using something like Western Digital's WinDLG, then check the _RAW_ SMART values.
If the reallocated and pending sector counts are 0, you should be good for awhile yet.

I still have a few industry first 1TB, first gen HGSTs running perfectly fine 24/7/365 since 2007.
Not SMART transfer errors, not a single reallocated sector, no weird noises.

 

[Puffnstuff]

While its true that many hdd's will last for many years its also important to consider the emotional discomfort that the OP has concerning the age of his current drive. I personally don't like keeping drives in service for more than several years myself and have a wd black in my pc right now holding the majority of my software that's approaching 5 years of age that I want to replace with a ssd.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Fair enough. And the OP's drive is a clunky, 3.5" USB2.0 monstrosity.
Better to replace it with a portable 2.5" USB3.0 drive since they're dirt cheap nowadays.

 

[Anaksy]

Thank you very much for all the answers guys! Since this HDD is a mix of backups from my laptop and archive,
that is, data that only this HDD contains, i will buy a new one to be a copy of this one.

Thank you again!