Reply 460 of 1008, by TheMobRules
Tetrium wrote on 2022-04-13, 17:04:As I mentioned above, we thought you meant to say that 90% of all the drives you got, died during 1st spinup. Not that IF a harddrive dies, it will then die during first spinup at/after POST 🤣.
You gotta admit, it would have been really bad if mechanical harddrives were really this bad 😜
I also interpreted that 90% in the same way as you, so it didn't make sense to me either, if they had that failure rate there would be no working old hard drives by now! But these things have MTBFs of around 100,000 power-on hours (and about double that number or more for SCSI drives), that's quite a lot unless the drive is used 24/7 non-stop for years on a file server or something like that! So that's why I was saying that concerns of healthy hard drives suddenly dying are overblown. I would guess that most of the HDD deaths for those who buy loose drives from eBay and such are caused by shipping violence, much like CRTs and other fragile things.
I also got most of my retro HDDs from entire systems which i picked up in person, so the cost of the drives themselves is practically zero in most cases. As I said before, it doesn't make sense to me to spend $$$ on used hard drives on eBay, you don't know what kind of abuse they were subjected to during their lifetime and then they're going to be kicked and thrown around like footballs by the shipping company on their way to you. The only reasonable use case for buying old HDDs from eBay is when the following conditions are met:
- It's NOS in its original packaging
- Either the original packaging has enough protection/padding or the seller is willing to add it
- Price is reasonable, who in their right mind would pay a 3 figure price for 100MB of storage????