VOGONS


First post, by TheAbandonwareGuy

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This can't be remotely right can it? I have a Hitachi Deskstar that i pulled from an e-machines that had enough dust in it to jam the CD Drive and fans outright and to turn the entire inside earth tone that reports via S.M.A.R.T. 62000 hours of Power On time. For reference theres 8500 or so hours in a year and 70080 hours in 8 years (the age of this drive) which means this drive has been powered on in that PC for over 7 years worth of time. Are hard drives suppose to last that long? I tested it with Seatools: Passed with flying colors. SMART error maybe? I don't understand how a drive can still be operating correctly (although based on the amount of dust it had the PC could very well have had that much running time...) Should I just toss this drive before it fails or this a normal lifespan for a drive?

Anyone else have a drive with that much power on time?

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Reply 1 of 15, by ODwilly

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I have a few 40gb Seagate drives with 90k that all pass smart pulled out of HP DC220 work stations. Sometimes you just get lucky and get good drives. The less power on and offs the better I have noticed.

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Reply 2 of 15, by stamasd

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I have a few DVRs; one of them has had the HDD changed for the last time in 2007. Since then it has been powered on constantly, and still works well. That's close to 9 years of spinning continuously.

I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O

Reply 3 of 15, by SPBHM

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my main hard drive (Samsung 1TB) has been running since 2009 almost 24/7 so it also have lots of hours.
I wouldn't be surprised if it just failed tomorrow, but still, hard drives can last a long time... some months ago I powered on a Seagate 40MB for the first time in maybe 20 years and it worked perfectly, not sure if it will last long if I keep it running for extended periods of time now, but still...

Reply 4 of 15, by clueless1

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By default, the total expected lifetime of a hard disk in perfect condition is defined as 5 years (running every day and night on all days). This is equal to 1825 days in 24/7 mode or 43800 hours.

This from http://www.hdsentinel.com/help/en/54_pot.html
Hitachis get exception reliability ratings from backblaze.com, so I'm not surprised yours is still going strong after 62000 hrs.

I have a few Western Digitals (all same model) with buggy firmware that report anywhere from 500,000 to 1,000,000 plus POH. They still report healthy in other SMART fields, but I don't trust them except for short-term testing. 😀

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Reply 6 of 15, by Errius

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In my experience, heat is the great killer of hard drives. Keep your drives cool and they should run indefinitely.

Last edited by Errius on 2016-07-18, 09:55. Edited 1 time in total.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 8 of 15, by pojo

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Errius wrote:

In my experience, heat is the great killer of hard drives. Keep your drives cool and they should indefinitely.

That's a common misconception.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/res … sk_failures.pdf

Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.

Reply 9 of 15, by mockingbird

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Many of the newer drives fail prematurely because of built-in head parking in the firmware, which is guised as a "green" feature, but in reality serves as a method of effecting planned obsolescence. Couple that with the Windows setting of turning off the hard drive after X minutes in the default power scheme, and it's no wonder modern drives don't last as long as they used to...

The only good thing about the mode of failure that I've observed with most modern drives is that a lot of the data is still retrievable after the failure. It's rare that I see an outright head crash these days, or a drive that is no longer recognized at all.

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Reply 10 of 15, by SPBHM

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RacoonRider wrote:

SMART is far from the most reliable source of information. What you see does not have to be true.

in terms of hours used I found it to be quite accurate on the drives I have (the ones from mid 2000s and higher at least)

Reply 11 of 15, by nforce4max

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Stojke wrote:

I have an laptop hard disk that reports 16000 power on hours. I think its a smart error.

2.5 and even some 1.8 drives can last if they are not of poor quality or abused, seen a lot of drives come and go but one thing that ruins a lot of 2.5 drives is people using up all the available space except for the little bit that is reserved so the media ends up wearing out and developing bad blocks. I have seen drives that had up to 50% of the drive was almost completely dead media just from wear 😵

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Reply 12 of 15, by nekurahoka

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If the original emachines system was used for a business, I wouldn't at all be surprised by that number. All the systems at my place of business are on 24/7.

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Reply 13 of 15, by archsan

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An OS harddrive from a 2010 laptop (it's got 2 harddrives) of mine went noticeably slower lately (I know, should just slap in a SSD already), for a moment I had suspicions that Win10 is doing a lot of swapping and compressing when RAM usage goes beyond 80% (which I'm sure it does), but then it might be exacerbated by the drive being worn out.

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Reply 14 of 15, by TheAbandonwareGuy

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nforce4max wrote:
Stojke wrote:

I have an laptop hard disk that reports 16000 power on hours. I think its a smart error.

2.5 and even some 1.8 drives can last if they are not of poor quality or abused, seen a lot of drives come and go but one thing that ruins a lot of 2.5 drives is people using up all the available space except for the little bit that is reserved so the media ends up wearing out and developing bad blocks. I have seen drives that had up to 50% of the drive was almost completely dead media just from wear 😵

Yeah, good advice right there. That's percisely what killed my Vaio's SeaGate Momentus (I was usually red lining at 2-3MB on that thing xD, tiny ass 300GB drive)

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I used to own over 160 graphics card, I've since recovered from graphics card addiction

Reply 15 of 15, by ynari

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SMART isn't perfect, and I have had drive failures where there were no warnings. On the other hand it's not useless as more than one drive has started warning its due to fail, and has been completely backed up, prior to a failure.

There's some servers here that will have had a truly colossal number of hours usage, probably well into six figures at this stage.