the3dfxdude wrote on 2022-11-28, 17:37:

There are certainly around 10 drives in the machines sitting next to me all in functional states that old here. More are in storage. Reliability is just gonna be hard to know from any manufacturer at this point. This is why I suggested it's best to keep any potential cost down to a minimum and just try. I think pretty much all of these I got for free over many years. Actually I got a box with some that old in the last year, also for free. Some still worked, and some didn't. But ones that do work, they really do keep ticking along, I even have some in long time active duty.

That's pretty much what I do. Most of my drives I got for free from discarded machines, and pretty much all that were working when I first got them are still chugging along nicely (some of them in regular use, the others I check periodically). And I don't have to worry if it dies as it just gets replaced by a similar one.

Buying used drives online for more than a few bucks is a great risk, IMHO not worth it at all, not only you don't know the previous history of the drive and how much abuse it went through during its life, it'll also be thrown around and kicked like a football by the shipping company (not even considering poor packaging). So it's no surprise that many people experience failures under those conditions.

On the subject of individual experience with drive reliability, I think that normalized distributions tends to skew individual experiences with different brands or drive ages.

For any set of individual drives some people will have zero failures while others may have a lot. That's just normal distribution at work.

Any drive can potentially fail. For older drives I just assume that they will fail at some point and don't use them for anything important.

If I am using them for something I care about, I make sure to back up my data.

My bigfoot 3.8GB drive purchased new at Bestbuy (retail box) died in a few years after use. Many other drives I purchased new worked for a decade 24/7 and still worked when I put them on the shelf.

As far as old drives go, what we have left today are the ones that were built the best since the sub-par ones died a long time ago in use. I have stacks of pre 500MB drives on a basement shelf for uses on builds that were tested for bad blocks and passed (even laptop ones). The worst drives I have seen were old Apple SCSI drives that just seem to have been baked to death in compacts.

I don't think anybody is going to cry if a 120MB drive in a 286 bites the dust in use these days, and I do like the noise of a spinning HD.