What is a fair hard drives lifespan

Soadyheid · 03-30-2015, 06:58 PM

@ballsystemlord

Quote:

The disks that I mentioned lasting 8 years are ones that ran windowz and, as a rule of thumb, you start them up and shut them down, preferably daily.

As I mentioned, the disks are best left spinning, they then conform to Newton's first law of motion...

Quote:

The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.

If it's spinning, it likes to keep spinning. Plus disks take more current to start spinning than to maintain spinning, so you stress the disk and it's electronics everytime you stop and start it.

I'm used to working with disks in Data Centres but even the humble desktop PCs I've come across were left powered up, just the monitors switched off.

Play Bonny!

metaschima · 03-30-2015, 08:14 PM

It depends mostly on usage. If you are not using the computer at night, then shut it down. However, shutting the disk down every few minutes to save power will wear down the drive.

If it is a server, then just leave it on.

onebuck · 04-01-2015, 09:32 AM

Hi,

I have seen drives left on for 24/7/365 and no failures within computer labs that monitors were the only cycled off option. Things do depend on environment and power stability. If you have clean source of power then less likely to have surges. If the temperature swings are large then you are sure to experience issues with the electronics and mechanical equipment.

On my newer systems I have installed SSD and use of HDD only for intermittent uses like long term storage/backup. Once you install a properly configured SSD then you will never go back to mechanical drives for primary storage. Not just boot times but system operations as a whole are very improved over a mechanical drive. Costs for SSD are going down while reliabilities are going up, especially when one knows how to configure the system for usage.

If you maintain a good environment then I would expect the HDD to at least meet the manufactures specifications for a life.
Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

ballsystemlord · 05-20-2015, 10:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jefro

Low level puts new track info on it. dd just writes over the existing set.

Go to Hitachi web site for diag suite. I think ultimate boot cd has it too.

The UBCD may very well have it but their version does not support SATA drives.
I've since tried overwiting it with dd and the unrecoverable sector count jumped and several thousand clusters were reallocated.
Long story short, The drive is dead.

flshope · 05-20-2015, 02:43 PM

Perhaps slightly off topic, but a PC Mag-related web site posted this: "Who makes the most reliable hard drives?"

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1...le-hard-drives

jefro · 05-20-2015, 05:51 PM

" Question: How can I access my SATA HDD from the UBCD?

[Source] You may need to configure your BIOS so that the SATA HDD is detected on either the primary or secondary IDE channel. This can be done by switching the SATA drive from "enhanced mode" to "compatibility mode" in BIOS (compatibility mode is sometimes called "native mode" or "IDE mode"). Unfortunately, not all BIOSes support this feature.
"

https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/faq.html