Would you trust a 6/yo wd green as a backup drive?

[rchunter]

I have a few 1TB WD green drives (both EAVS & EADS models) most are around 6 years old. Clean smart data. Just wondering if I should use them as a cold storage backup or not. Or should I just go ahead and buy new ones?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Cold storage? Sure - but:

1) That implies you also have "hot" storage backups, so this is a second backup
2) Best practices include verifying _all_ your backups on a regular basis

You can't just throw the only copy of your data on an HD in a safe deposit box for 10 years and expect a miracle, regardless of whether the HD in question has some power-on hours or not.

 

[rchunter]

Cold storage? Sure - but:

1) That implies you also have "hot" storage backups, so this is a second backup
2) Best practices include verifying _all_ your backups on a regular basis

You can't just throw the only copy of your data on an HD in a safe deposit box for 10 years and expect a miracle, regardless of whether the HD in question has some power-on hours or not.

No, I don't. My main server is parity protected but this would be my only backup.

 

[Brado78]

Sure i would, as long as you backup , Greens aren't is scary and fragile as some people think. I am speaking from experience. I have 5 Greens still operating since 2010, and they ALL are still in excellent working condition. They are monitored with Hard Disk Sentinal. Each drive shows 100% health and they are used a lot..

 

[rchunter]

Sure i would, as long as you backup , Greens aren't is scary and fragile as some people think. I am speaking from experience. I have 5 Greens still operating since 2010, and they ALL are still in excellent working condition. They are monitored with Hard Disk Sentinal. Each drive shows 100% health and they are used a lot..

I'm not exactly scared of greens but after a certain amount of years in cold storage the motors in them might not spin up right. I think I will use them as backup drives but I will make sure to get them out and do a long smart test at least once a year on them.

 

[lehtv]

Sure i would, as long as you backup , Greens aren't is scary and fragile as some people think. I am speaking from experience. I have 5 Greens still operating since 2010, and they ALL are still in excellent working condition. They are monitored with Hard Disk Sentinal. Each drive shows 100% health and they are used a lot..

5 drives isn't exactly enough to draw any statistically significant conclusions from. If one of your drives was having problems, you wouldn't claim that 20% of WD Greens malfunction in 5 years...

 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there.

Age is something that doesn't always matter - I have drives that I still use after 10 years. So for the two Green drives you have - you can still use them as a backup, but first I would suggest to run a test to check what their health is with Data Lifeguard Diagnostics as well:

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=Rq7IFU

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

 

[therealnickdanger]

My oldest hard drive still in regular use is a 320GB WD (I think), but I know that my dad's XP workstation is still using a drive from 2001 or so. I don't think that age is really an issue - other than the potential feature and performance shortfalls. I have a stack of five Seagate hard drives that are less than three years old that are all scrap. Build quality and luck, it seems. Use it until it breaks.

If it reports SMART data, then certainly use that and any other utility (like Mighty_Miro_WD suggests) you can to verify its integrity.

 

[rchunter]

Thanks guys. I will definitely use them and use that wd diagnostic tool. They've been laying in a desk drawer empty for a long time now. I figured it's a shame to not use them for something. I've got 5 of them.

 

[AlienTech]

I have the same 1TB green drive and it is over 6 years old and still going fine. I use it for cold storage and every few years I copy the data off to check the drive and it is still clean, just finished doing it again. No errors or corruption. Usually keeping a drive unused for an year would get a couple of read errors but these came out fine.

 

[tweakboy]

Heck no. Dont do it...... the drive will eventually die then your in trouble. Save all your important stuff. let us know..