I have purchased quite a few NOS or near new (less than 1500 hours) older drives (up to 25 years old) over the years and have never had any issue yet.
My last NOS sealed box purchase was a 160GB IDE from 2005 (so only 16 years old) but works like it was made yesterday. Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
I say go for it if the price is right !

^^^^^^^^What Horun posted.

I have a rule for buying new new HDD, and it's never get one that's shipped unless it's retail packed. I would usually buy bare drives in person when I could be sure a store sold enough that it came straight out of the master crate. This is because if they get whacked around they are useless quickly, in a year or two, just inside the warranty if you're lucky, but still all your data is toast.

So, that's your problem with NOS, how has it been treated?

Edit: Your lube problems will also vary by storage environment. If it's been sitting in a container outside in Arizona for 15 years it will have had some severe heat cycles.

You'll probably get a lot of answers claiming IDE drives are extremely unreliable, even NOS. I don't share that opinion, in particular for the era that you are aiming for (late 90s - early 00s), when it comes to Brand New/NOS stuff I have seen many more early failures on CF/SD cards than on HDDs > 1GB, and by the late 90s noise was nowhere near as annoying as it is for older drives. SSDs are fast, but not exactly cheap (also, add the cost of the SATA-IDE adapter).

Some IDE drives are known to be problematic (like certain Quantums with rubber stoppers that disintegrate, or Hitachi Deskstars that just like to die), but in general if an unused drive has been stored properly it should be OK. Never experienced any "dried lubricant" issue on NOS drives from that era. I'd say most of the problems you can encounter are probably due to either improper storage in damp locations or the drive being damaged during shipping.

What I would advice against is paying more than a few bucks for a drive, even NOS. I've accumulated a considerable number of NOS IDE drives, more than I will probably ever need for retro computing purposes... not long ago you could get them almost for free, but now everyone finds an old item and they think they're sitting on a gold mine. Personally I see retro drives as disposable objects, never store any critical data in them and if one fails then it goes in the trash and gets replaced by another one.

But that's just my opinion, as I said I already have plenty of old IDE drives and would rather not spend my money on hundreds of GB of modern SSD media for stuff that's only going to see light/medium use.

TheMobRules wrote on 2021-07-19, 01:19:

You'll probably get a lot of answers claiming IDE drives are extremely unreliable, even NOS. I don't share that opinion, in part […]
Show full quote

You'll probably get a lot of answers claiming IDE drives are extremely unreliable, even NOS. I don't share that opinion, in particular for the era that you are aiming for (late 90s - early 00s), when it comes to Brand New/NOS stuff I have seen many more early failures on CF/SD cards than on HDDs > 1GB, and by the late 90s noise was nowhere near as annoying as it is for older drives. SSDs are fast, but not exactly cheap (also, add the cost of the SATA-IDE adapter).

Some IDE drives are known to be problematic (like certain Quantums with rubber stoppers that disintegrate, or Hitachi Deskstars that just like to die), but in general if an unused drive has been stored properly it should be OK. Never experienced any "dried lubricant" issue on NOS drives from that era. I'd say most of the problems you can encounter are probably due to either improper storage in damp locations or the drive being damaged during shipping.

What I would advice against is paying more than a few bucks for a drive, even NOS. I've accumulated a considerable number of NOS IDE drives, more than I will probably ever need for retro computing purposes... not long ago you could get them almost for free, but now everyone finds an old item and they think they're sitting on a gold mine. Personally I see retro drives as disposable objects, never store any critical data in them and if one fails then it goes in the trash and gets replaced by another one.

But that's just my opinion, as I said I already have plenty of old IDE drives and would rather not spend my money on hundreds of GB of modern SSD media for stuff that's only going to see light/medium use.

^^^^^^What theM0bRules posted as well.

Brawndo wrote on 2021-07-19, 00:20:

So I've been accumulating hardware for several retro builds, period correct around the late 90s - early 00s, windows 98 and XP, and considering buying NOS IDE hard drives as I prefer legit hardware. I am aware of the CF adapter option, and I will also use those in some builds.

I'm curious to hear about others' experiences buying and using new IDE hard drives after having been sitting for 15 years or more. I have read about issues with bearing lubrication "drying up" or degrading as it were but I don't know how much truth there is to that. As I understand it spindle bearing assemblies are sealed systems. Does bearing lubrication degrade in a sealed environment? If I buy a 15 year old sealed NOS hard drive can I reasonably expect it to work as new, barring any damage from having been moved around or shipping?

I've done this a handful of times. In addition, I have some early 2000s 40GB drives. All of them have started with that head-seek-retry clicking sound stuff sometimes. I wouldn't put a whole lot of faith into it.
On the bright side, I've had a lot of luck with mechanical drives through a SATA-IDE converter. The only thing you will miss is the HDD access noises. There is even a way to connect even a 1TB drive up to another machine temporarily and set a Host Protected Area to limit the drive's capacity e.g. to 32 GB if there is a buggy Award BIOS involved.

Do you have a link to these NOS IDE drives.
Personally, I like to use hard drives over CF cards. I just like the sound and capacity of hard drives.
It just does not feel like a real retro computer using a CF card.

Also the performance of a Hard drive is okay if you use it with a computer and CPU the operating system is designed for.
Some CPUs and hard drives are designed for DOS and Win3x computers
Some CPUs and hard drives are designed for Win95 computers
Some CPUs and hard drives are designed for Win98 computers
Etc…

You just can’t mix any IDE drives with a certain CPU and motherboard and expect it to perform well.
These are NOT legos.

Certain hard drives are engineered to perform best with certain CPU’s and Motherboards.

For DOS and Win3x a 5400 rpm drive is okay.
But not for a Win98 computer.
It Might be okay for Win95 computer.

For Win 95 or 98 computer I would look for a 7200 rpm drive.

The only unused old drives I have are SCSI, everything else has seen some time or a lot of it in use.

I have stacks of old IDE drives for both desktop and laptops because I like to use them in vintage machines. Stuff from the 1xx MB range to 256GB+ and they all seem to work reliably after sitting around for years.

A long time ago a local recycler would let me take as many old drives as I wanted home to test and then bring back any dead one and only charged me $1-2 each for the ones I kept (his guys dismantled the rest). This was back when he would actually get a lot of old machines by the semi load to dismantle. Worked out well for me. He of course kept anything SATA to stick in machines he would resell.

These days most places have a policy to destroy HDs so the supply of later larger capacity IDE drives is not what it could be.

IF you are worried about the drives dying you can just make an image of the drive once you have set it up and dump it on a server. I don't do anything critical on my old machines so if a HD bites the dust I am not too worried about it.

I've had good luck on NOS drives, both IDE and SCSI. Haven't had one die yet. One Quantum 2GB IDE drive I received had the motor stuck on the first power up - I took it back out of the PC and gave it a few quick flicks of my wrist while holding it in the X Y axis and was able to break it free without opening it. Works fine now.

Thanks for everyone's replies. Good info. I'll be picking up a few as I come across good deals.

I'm aware that Seatools can reduce the space visible to the host on larger hard drives (i.e. reduce a 160 GB hard drive down to 30 GB), does it also work for other manufacture drives? Or perhaps WD tools can reduce WD drives? Do brands like Maxtor, Hitachi and Samsung have tools which can do the same?

Brawndo wrote on 2021-07-20, 02:44:

Thanks for everyone's replies. Good info. I'll be picking up a few as I come across good deals.

I'm aware that Seatools can reduce the space visible to the host on larger hard drives (i.e. reduce a 160 GB hard drive down to 30 GB), does it also work for other manufacture drives? Or perhaps WD tools can reduce WD drives? Do brands like Maxtor, Hitachi and Samsung have tools which can do the same?

Seems it's part of the ATA standard. On Linux hdparm -N p66059280 can do it for the 33.8 GB limit. Not sure if there is a vendor neutral tool to do it from DOS or windows.

Will also chime in that I have had good luck with NOS older ide drives, as long as they were a brand that didn’t develop issues from storage alone (cough Quantum)

I recently picked up 2 sealed Maxtor 1gb drives and both worked great.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2021-07-19, 09:59:

Do you have a link to these NOS IDE drives. Personally, I like to use hard drives over CF cards. I just like the sound and capac […]
Show full quote

Do you have a link to these NOS IDE drives.
Personally, I like to use hard drives over CF cards. I just like the sound and capacity of hard drives.
It just does not feel like a real retro computer using a CF card.

Also the performance of a Hard drive is okay if you use it with a computer and CPU the operating system is designed for.
Some CPUs and hard drives are designed for DOS and Win3x computers
Some CPUs and hard drives are designed for Win95 computers
Some CPUs and hard drives are designed for Win98 computers
Etc…

You just can’t mix any IDE drives with a certain CPU and motherboard and expect it to perform well.
These are NOT legos.

Certain hard drives are engineered to perform best with certain CPU’s and Motherboards.

For DOS and Win3x a 5400 rpm drive is okay.
But not for a Win98 computer.
It Might be okay for Win95 computer.

For Win 95 or 98 computer I would look for a 7200 rpm drive.

IIn my personnal experiance totally disagree on your "not being LEGO comment. I've mixed and match components well up to 20 years apart from when they were manufactured and all worked seamlessly.