I've seen several 15+ and 20+ years drives work fine after long inactive periods (months and years). I had a 10GB drive die after being inactive for just one year. I think there's no precise method for this - it varies greatly on model, storage conditions, normal wear from previous use, etc.

I've been using some 60-80gb IDE drives sporadically for various purposes since 2003/2004 when i've bought them, and all of them work perfectly, even after dozens of formats and inactivity periods of several months. In my opinion it depends more on storage conditions, temperature, etc.

Snayperskaya wrote:

I've seen several 15+ and 20+ years drives work fine after long inactive periods (months and years). I had a 10GB drive die after being inactive for just one year. I think there's no precise method for this - it varies greatly on model, storage conditions, normal wear from previous use, etc.

+1. I've had some drives die after a year or less in storage, and others pull out of boxes that've been sitting for a decade and still work. 😊

mmx_91 wrote:

I've been using some 60-80gb IDE drives sporadically for various purposes since 2003/2004 when i've bought them, and all of them work perfectly, even after dozens of formats and inactivity periods of several months. In my opinion it depends more on storage conditions, temperature, etc.

I asked this because i already had a small issue with a 40GB maxtor hard drive on a AMD k6-2 with windows98 installed. I recently pulled it out from storage (9 months give or take) and windows complained about issues on the hard drive and after a scandisk it marked some sectors as bad. Well as far as i know this only tends to get worse and worse over time.

Also a intel486 that was given to me didn't boot up after more than a decade, and the harddrive sounded like the motor bearings were stuck. I opened up the 400mb harddrive and helped the platters to spinup and it booted fine. Incredibly the harddrive still works to this day today after that. I guess i wouldn't be so lucky with a higher density drive.

My computers are stored at 22/24ºC and 50/60% humidity

I find that whatever reputation the specific model or series drive gained is a great way to determine how long they will last. Quantum's 40-120mb era IDE and SCSI disks are well known for the rubber bumper inside the drive to decay and gum up the armature, Connor drives had the rubber gasket decay and melt, allowing the HDA to become contaminated, Western Digital's early embedded servo drives have a stiction reputation and Kalok's have a famous failure rate of...oh, about 90%. Meanwhile other drives like Seagates ST506 and more famously their ST225 are pretty much bulletproof, Western Digital's later 4-20gb drives have an outstanding reliability, Fujitsu's SCSI disks have a great track record and IBM's pre-75gb Deskstars were also quite solid.

Connor drives

well, Connor (Macleod) drives die only by loosing their heads. 😀 Conner is another story. It is a great sum-up anyway.

I've had an old Seagate Cheetah turn up with stiction after it was stored for maybe a couple years, but once it got itself started, it was still working. But I also had a Maxtor D740X 40GB drive (a Quantum design) which spun up and worked great after being stored for much longer than that. I have wondered whether periodically spinning up old drives would keep them healthier, but I have no idea.

As far as the hassle of needing to reinstall everything, I suggest keeping clone images of the old drives. That way if you have to replace the drive, you can just copy back the image to the new drive. Typically the drives in question would be pretty small so the image files aren't too huge to retain as backups on a modern disk.

I think the best way of using storaged hard drives is before you going to use them to connect them on a serperate from the system power supply.. And let them spin for some minutes before going to stick them in your machine.. I think the highest possible failure rate happens because of bad bearing or dead printed circuit board.. I dont think that the rest of the harddisk parts would effect to much wear..
Only platters can go bad when there are to much bad sectors on it when they are older then MFM / RLL / ESDI drivers (for earlier drives bad sectors was a normal thing to deal with)
But on a normal later drives if the bad sector counting still goes up, then the drive would be very dead soon.

shamino wrote:

(...) But I also had a Maxtor D740X 40GB drive (a Quantum design) which spun up and worked great after being stored for much longer than that. I have wondered whether periodically spinning up old drives would keep them healthier, but I have no idea. (...)

Ain't this one affected by the firmware bug that makes the drive report the model's codename (SABRE, etc)? Had a 20GB that died that way after a year of inactivity. I've seen this before on some 5 or 6 drives, I've recovered some with a firmware repairing tool, but this one was outta luck. 🙁

Robin4 wrote:

I think the best way of using storaged hard drives is before you going to use them to connect them on a serperate from the system power supply.. And let them spin for some minutes before going to stick them in your machine.. I think the highest possible failure rate happens because of bad bearing or dead printed circuit board.. I dont think that the rest of the harddisk parts would effect to much wear.. (...)

That's a good tip. Also, bad power supplies tend to roast PCB componentes slowly. WD drives tend to be the most sensitive I've seen on this aspect - There was a 80GB, IDE, Caviar model with a very high defective rate by PCB burning.

I have a 400gb Hitachi Deskstar from 2004 with IBM chips on the PCB with over 450,000 power on hours that had 11 pending bad sectors. It recovered a sector this year and so far just refuses to die. Then I have had drives that are only 2-3 years old either die out of nowhere or get a bad sector or two and die within a week. Oddly enough I have noticed that pretty much every Seagate drive I have run across from 40gb IDE drives to newer 1tb drives have high amounts of read and write errors while WD drives rarely even have a few.

The oldest drive I had was from 1988 MFM Seagate in a Siemens PDP 286-12 machine. I sold it last year, but it worked flawlessly. I guess it wasn't used at least from around 1995 to 2013. My other old drives (up to 512MB in size) also work great - until they die of course 😉

Last year one 2.5" 4GB IBM in a Pentium-MMX 233 laptop died on me. I installed new copy of Win98, then put it away for a month. Powered it up, started booting Win98 and then just some clicking sound... and that was it 🙁

On the other hand I have one (from eight) 2TB WD Green from 2011 just for the archive. It has like 1000 working hours and 50 power ups. It started giving me CRC errors. I copied all the contents to another drive. There where around 20 files with CRC error and couldn't be recovered. I tried to run WDDiags on it and it immediately gives some error. Now I just reformatted it in Disk management but didn't yet copy anything on it.

Snayperskaya wrote:

shamino wrote:

(...) But I also had a Maxtor D740X 40GB drive (a Quantum design) which spun up and worked great after being stored for much longer than that. I have wondered whether periodically spinning up old drives would keep them healthier, but I have no idea. (...)

Ain't this one affected by the firmware bug that makes the drive report the model's codename (SABRE, etc)? Had a 20GB that died that way after a year of inactivity. I've seen this before on some 5 or 6 drives, I've recovered some with a firmware repairing tool, but this one was outta luck. 🙁

I've not heard of that before, but I guess I should look it up. I'm pretty sure drive controllers have always called mine a "Maxtor 6L040J2" - I saw it enough that I actually remembered that model number, and googled it, and apparently I remembered it right. 😀

As others have said, how long a hard drive lasts is essentially a roll of the dice; sometimes they work for years (even after a long period of inactivity), sometimes they just die suddenly. That's just how it goes.

Snayperskaya wrote:

shamino wrote:

(...) But I also had a Maxtor D740X 40GB drive (a Quantum design) which spun up and worked great after being stored for much longer than that. I have wondered whether periodically spinning up old drives would keep them healthier, but I have no idea. (...)

Ain't this one affected by the firmware bug that makes the drive report the model's codename (SABRE, etc)? Had a 20GB that died that way after a year of inactivity. I've seen this before on some 5 or 6 drives, I've recovered some with a firmware repairing tool, but this one was outta luck. 🙁

Funny that you mention this. I have an old Maxtor 84320AP 4.3gb drive that apparently has the same failure:

I got it back in 1999 from one of my sister's coworkers, and was told it just happened overnight. I couldn't recover any data so I told her to get a new drive and reinstall everything. Hard drive size is misreported and cannot boot or be read from; it has stayed that way ever since. I kept it as a curiosity item since I've never seen this happen before or since.

I have a 30gb Maxtor drive that looks just like yours that pops up as a bunch of question marks and exclamation points when it tries to identify it.

Part of my job is to routinely go round to various sites to check on their IT equipment every now and then.
It is not uncommon at all to find a server with a failed HDD. These would have been purchased at the same time, exposed to the same environmental conditions and being part of a raid have pretty close to the same amount of usage, yet 1 drive out of however many dies.
For sure some drives are better then others but it mostly comes down to chance in the end I think.

I think the more specific question from the OP is how an aging (but healthy) drive will react to long periods of being powered off. Does that keep them in good condition, or does it cause them to start sticking and not want to spin up? I've had both outcomes on different drives.
I wonder if the ideal preservation pattern for old drives would involve powering them up on some periodic schedule. How often and how long, I have no idea.

In terms of running hours, I believe leaving a drive running 24/7 will log the most impressive number of hours before failure. However, most of those won't be *useful* hours, so it's probably not going to yield the greatest amount of useful life to the user.

robin4 wrote:

I think the best way of using storaged hard drives is before you going to use them to connect them on a serperate from the system power supply.. And let them spin for some minutes before going to stick them in your machine.. I think the highest possible failure rate happens because of bad bearing or dead printed circuit board.. I dont think that the rest of the harddisk parts would effect to much wear..

I'm not sure I understand how this would make a difference. If there's no drive controller talking to the drive, is the idea that the heads won't need to move around as much, so the drive warms up more slowly?

shamino wrote:

In terms of running hours, I believe leaving a drive running 24/7 will log the most impressive number of hours before failure. However, most of those won't be *useful* hours, so it's probably not going to yield the greatest amount of useful life to the user.

Now that hit the spot! Indeed i would rather have a drive that lasted me 100000 hours than one that lasted me 260000 hous from which i only used a couple of hours!
Anyway, while in storage the thing that seems the fail the most is the platter motor bearing. The second seems to be the flash memory that holds the firmware in place. Flash memory has the reputation of loosing it's memorized bits after a few decades of inactivity (give or take a few years) depending on storage temperature, quality and level of "worn_ness".

If one thinks about it, pratically every piece of technology today has some kind of flash memory for one use or another, so if we keep any of them stored in a box in the atic for decades, it's a given it won't work again when we decide to power it back on again after that. Or am i exaggerating?
Correct me if i'm wrong. I would love to be wrong on this one!

Some drives just don't die easy, I've salvaged a few drives that have been out in the rain rust and all. The crappy ones always die fast and early no matter how well they are stored.

I got a few drives about 5-10 years inactive and they all test perfect. 20GB, multiple brands.