If the budget is that tight, why replace perfectly working drives? Solid state storage might cost an extra 10 or 15 bucks but you get a ton of value from it in terms of speed, decibels and heat. Worth it

Zeerex wrote on 2022-10-13, 01:51:

If the budget is that tight, why replace perfectly working drives? Solid state storage might cost an extra 10 or 15 bucks but you get a ton of value from it in terms of speed, decibels and heat. Worth it

The laptops contain the original drives as far as I know. One of them is a Hitachi Windows 95 machine from the mid 90s and the other a Toshiba Tecra A3 from around 2005. I plan on backing up their drives because they are pretty old. I guess I could backup the drives and worry about replacements if they fail, but I don't mind replacing them and keeping the old ones as backups if there is a cheap option. IDE drives are going to be harder to find in the future, so if these ones are decent, they might be worth picking up.

I'm not too concerned over noise, but it might be worth putting an SSD in the Toshiba. I'm not sure about the Hitachi though. Seems overkill for an old Windows 95 machine.

I think it depends on how you collect. I have a pretty massive laptop collection and spending money for SSD to IDE adapters for all of them would have been pretty expensive and not worth the effort. Over the years I have purchased a large amount of IDE and SATA laptop HDs to install into systems that are missing a drive or just for stock because they were only a few bucks each after shipping. You also have the issue with proprietary HD enclosures and interfaces where an adapter might not even fit. Not even sure adapters work on pre LBA systems either if you collect that far back.

ive bought about 20 ide drives ... about 1/4 of them were no good..

kennyPENTIUMpowers wrote on 2022-10-13, 13:36:

ive bought about 20 ide drives ... about 1/4 of them were no good..

This happens due to your unknown several criteria. Such as quality of auction, does drive looks worn or mint look? Cost? If rather low. This what you get.

Focused on Ebay my experiences goes like this:
My success rate was around 2% defective rate for about 12 hard drives purchased from ebay within reason, lowest is around 50 cdn, high but under 200 cdn. Some were new, some were refurbished by OEM but still, for these new hard drive from one seller which no longer exists now which had exceptional reasonable price. Datacenter hard drives tend to be defective or worn.

SSD wear indicator was higher on used SSDs for used SSD from ebay as well, cost started from 50 for 100GB and up, I was focused on datacenter SSDs and occasional consumer level SSD, never generic. One was new from Samsung. Hynix, Samsung, Intel and Micron.

Cheers,

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2022-10-13, 01:43:

Here is a drive advertised as being new:

they will be new .. to you 😀 Source is recycled computers. They are mass tested and get SMART hacked (cleaned) to show 0 hours.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-13, 17:17:

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2022-10-13, 01:43:

Here is a drive advertised as being new:

they will be new .. to you 😀 Source is recycled computers. They are mass tested and get SMART hacked (cleaned) to show 0 hours.

That is definitely a possibility (even the labels might be faked to suggest consecutive serial numbers and/or similar production dates for multiple drives ), or they might be actual new old stock that came from an inventory of spares kept in stock somewhere . Years ago, I would have said that nobody would bother going to that degree of effort to falsify things for 10$ or less per unit, but almost nothing would surprise me nowadays.

I have a new old stock scsi drive that is 25 years old, sitting on the shelf, never used. Might be a good experiment to check if it works someday. In my experience for certain drive manufacturers, if the drives sit and age that way, they'll just be dead. Of course this is with spinning drives. SSDs have their own problems.

If the drive is from a known quality run, I wouldn't spend more than 20-30$ for something NOS or hardly used. Otherwise, probably only pay for shipping for any old spinning drive, if you those disks. Because really, for most systems, especially IDE, you can just buy something new that adapts to IDE quite easily. I mean, even CF or SD go for a few dollars new, and are easier to ship, and less prone to mechanical breaking. If the computer is any newer than around 25 years old, you'll probably be best to get a modest SSD for anything you really care about. Oh if you are really thinking about shipping from china old IDE drives... not sure it'd be worth that shipping cost either!

With regard for old Samsung drives... I have seen a number of failures in them. Fujitsu, probably the same as Samsung. For the seagate, I haven't seen too many used of the newer seagate drives such as that -- probably ok drives. Chances are, if you order any of those you'll be lucky enough, it will come working, but who knows how long. They seem like used drives to me.

Ebay/amazon is full of "new old stock" server drives. HGST is very popular due to longevity. All nicely packaged in fresh factory sealed antistatic bags, often with consecutive serials because they all came from same racks. 2012 drives with cleared SMART. Sometimes chinese/recycler are sloppy and only clear current SMART stats forgetting about deeper smart logs and you can see how brand new drive had a >40000 hours before whole storage rack was retired and sold to recycler. Example:

1SMART Extended Self-test Log Version: 1 (1 sectors)
2Num  Test_Description    Status                  Remaining  LifeTime(hours)  LBA_of_first_error
3# 1  Extended offline    Aborted by host               90%     11829         -
4# 2  Short offline       Completed without error       00%      5586         -
5# 3  Short offline       Completed without error       00%     41650         -
6# 4  Vendor (0xb0)       Completed without error       00%     41252         -
7# 5  Vendor (0x71)       Completed without error       00%     41251         -

One of my own Ultrastar 7K4000 bought in 2020 with ~0 Head Flying Hours and load/unload cycles 😀 you can clearly see someone ran Vendor (0x71), (0xb0) and Short offline before resetting SMART. I ran Short offline ~year into ownership and clicked another Short offline by accident just now while generating this log. All in all 53K hours and drive runs flawlessly - this is why they can get away with resetting smart and still even offering 1 year warranty. Due to https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html I wouldnt consider buying any other brand of "new old stock" scam drives.
I have multiple 7K3000/7K4000 2-4TB drives sold this way, some have empty smart, others still have old smart logs showing 30-40 power on hours before being recycled. Seems 4-5 years was industry standard for refreshing Storage solutions. At ~$30 its worth the risk.

Interesting stuff. I never knew that SMART hacking was a thing. I might be better off just going with CF or an SD card.

Whoa. I'm surprised SMART can be edited. I thought this was only done with specialized jigs.

Cheers,

All those drives you linked are probably from recycled hardware. It says they're tested and I'd trust that.
I bought some Seagate 40GB drives for a similar price locally in the UK and those are new drives as far as I can tell - IDE drives aren't particularly valuable now so some can be old stock. The upside to those too good to be true drives from china is that the ones sold locally have had to drop price to follow.

Vintage IDE have usually been fine in my experience except for the Toshiba MKxxxxGAS/GAX series - early fluid drive bearing drives where over long enough every single one develops bad bearings. The seagate and WD drives from that era are great though.

Lately I've been using mini-PCIe and a little mPCIe SSD to IDE adapter board for systems that need over 4GB of CF card storage. Works out about £10-15 per drive for 16 to 32GB of real SSD. The SD to IDE stuff is quite hit or miss for me, works well in some systems and not in others.

Afaik you need at least PC-3000 to erase SMART. Not a problem for an outfit flipping thousands of drives that would otherwise go to a landfill.

From IDE era I would avoid Fujitsu, they had quite a big oopsie. 2005 annual report listed HDD litigation-related expenses at 10,220 mil yen = ~$100mil
I worked at European Fujitsu distributor in late nineties. Absolutely the best non IBM(1) hard drives you could buy at the time. Cheap, fast, dead silent, super reliable. Then this happened:
https://www.theregister.com/2002/11/05/fujits … ts_4_9_million/
https://www.dataclinic.co.uk/fujitsu-hard-disk-recovery/

“blame was laid on the supplier of epoxy mould compound used in the manufacture of Cirrus’ Himalaya 2.0 and Numbur chips”

Every single drive sold between 1999-2001 died within 3 years (PB15/PB16). Symptoms were drive not being detected, reporting as garbage corrupted strings, not spinning up or even clicking. The irony is they are 100% perfect mechanically. Btw I read somewhere swapping pcbs without making sure they have same firmware rev on board might result in service area corruption requiring actual specialist knowledge to recover (or running premade script in PC3000).

(1) and we all know how IBM Deskstars turned out ;-( Amazing and fast drives, until the sad conclusion.

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-14, 07:38:

From IDE era I would avoid Fujitsu, they had quite a big oopsie. 2005 annual report listed HDD litigation-related expenses at 10,220 mil yen = ~$100mil

That reminds me of the old pun about Seagate HDDs (it's in German, my apologies).

Seagate, seagate nicht.

Which sounds like "sie geht, sie geht nicht" (she goes, she goes not).

It's a pun about reliability, about a Seagate HDD working/not working. 🙂

Jo22 wrote on 2022-10-14, 08:01:

Seagate, seagate nicht.
or
"Escom-mt zurück."

kennyPENTIUMpowers wrote on 2022-10-13, 13:36:

ive bought about 20 ide drives ... about 1/4 of them were no good..

does that mean broken? (or bad clusters etc)

If they are of the written spec of the drive they'd be ok

gerry wrote on 2022-10-14, 09:17:

kennyPENTIUMpowers wrote on 2022-10-13, 13:36:

ive bought about 20 ide drives ... about 1/4 of them were no good..

does that mean broken? (or bad clusters etc)

If they are of the written spec of the drive they'd be ok

broken ..
these are drives from a recycling centre... not tested, just pulled straight from machines .. i paid very little for them.. they are from 1995/6/7 all IDE and capacity 540mb to 20GB .. they just dont work at all..
its pretty much the same for motherboards .. about 25% of the ones ive bought have failed to POST and it masnt just cmos battery issue or bad ram...
i just factor in this 25% failure rate to anything i bid on that hasnt been tested

rasz_pl wrote on 2022-10-14, 07:38:

From IDE era I would avoid Fujitsu, they had quite a big oopsie. 2005 annual report listed HDD litigation-related expenses at 10,220 mil yen = ~$100mil

Why give up on great Fujitsu discs if the marriage only started with the MPG series?
Although my favorite drives are 40gb thin samsung 😀