How old are your drives?

[KingfisherUK]

I recently ordered some new hardware from a supplier I've used for many years and when looking back through my order history, I noticed that I had purchased four 2TB Samsung HD204UI drives from them 10 years ago - three of these drives are still going strong in my file server! I've had numerous drives fail on me over the years, yet these ones just keep going!

This got me thinking - how old is the oldest drive you have in your PC/server? Whilst I now know these HD204UI's are 10 years old, Stablebit Scanner reports them as around 7 years 300 days old, so I assume that's been their "power on" time.

(Before anyone asks, yes I do have some redundancy in my system and have spare drives on standby just in case!)

[user345678]

Normally I change my storage drives (normal harddrive) after 5 years.

[Spider99]

Unless i get performance issue need more speeeeed -  i dont replace mine till they die

or i run out of space and need bigger ones

have a lot of old smallish drives hanging around gathering dust

[KingfisherUK]

Well, I finally bit the bullet and replaced/upgraded all my drives - I now have only 3 drives more than 141 days old and the oldest of those is just over 3 years old so should keep me going for a while!

[Rob Manderson]

1 hour ago, KingfisherUK said:

Well, I finally bit the bullet and replaced/upgraded all my drives - I now have only 3 drives more than 141 days old and the oldest of those is just over 3 years old so should keep me going for a while!

You're a brave person! :-)

[gtaus]

I am in the process of replacing my oldest drives, which were about 6 years old. I recently had 3 HDDs fail, but they were actually newer ~3 year old drives, so go figure. Unfortunately, my HDDs do not seem to age well, and they go from no SMART warnings to completely dead within a day or so. I have tried many different brands of HDDs and they all seem to fail about the same.

Amazon.com has had a special going on with renewed 4TB HDDs for $60.00 which have 5 year warranties. I bought a few of those because they were NAS drives and the 5 year warranty is better than the 2 year warranty I was getting on my new drives. So far, the drives have all checked out fine. They also report 0 hours on the renewed drives and no SMART warnings. Don't know if buying renewed drives will prove to be a good investment, but I am not getting 5 years out of my newest bunch of drives with only 2 year warranties. So, at least I am getting 5 years covered with the renewed drives.

[Umfriend]

My storage needs don't really grow so I am just sticking with what I have, anything between 1.7 and 5.5 yo (6 drives). I bought them spread out over time. Mostly Toshiba and HGST as I had a few issues with Seagate and WD years ago. Only 2 HDDs of same type and purchase date so those are in seperate Pools.

As long as they don;t fail, I'll run them until they do.

[Saphir]

My oldest internal drive I use frequently is from 2010 (WD black) and  a few from 2011 (WD green, Barracuda green, Samsung). In the beginning of my Server I used "normal" HDDs because I had a some and they were cheaper. Since 2013 I buy WD red but only if I need them really. The old drive can run till they die. Only one Samsung/Seagate HDD has a few bad errors but is still working (I replaced it this days). Two Seagates have proplems with the LCC which is going very fast up. The WD black LCC goes a bit faster up to. Overall I'm very lucky with my HDDs.

I have externel dirves too and they are older but working even if the LCC on some of them is very high.

[Rob Manderson]

On 1/21/2021 at 2:15 AM, gtaus said:

Amazon.com has had a special going on with renewed 4TB HDDs for $60.00 which have 5 year warranties. I bought a few of those because they were NAS drives and the 5 year warranty is better than the 2 year warranty I was getting on my new drives. So far, the drives have all checked out fine. They also report 0 hours on the renewed drives and no SMART warnings. Don't know if buying renewed drives will prove to be a good investment, but I am not getting 5 years out of my newest bunch of drives with only 2 year warranties. So, at least I am getting 5 years covered with the renewed drives.

I tried those too.  The first 3 were Hitachi 7,200 RPM drives.  Been in the server for about 7 months and so far so good. Zeroed out smart data (not sure if that's a good idea or not) but so far they've passed 7 complete scans with no errors.  I replace a drive if it gets even 1 reallocated sector.  Can't complain about the price though they do run a little warmer than I'd like (all of 34 C). 

I've also bought 4 HGST 5,700 RPM drives though I've only had 'em a week.  They run about 5 C cooler (as you'd expect with the reduction in speed).  All 4 passed their first scanner pass and, significantly, they stayed at 28 C throughout the entire scan.  Most drives warm up somewhat during a complete scan but not these.  I'm quite happy with the HGST renewed/5 year warranty though time will tell if the warranty is honoured.  I have no reason to believe it won't be if one fails within the next 5 years.

I'm not overly fussed with the speeds.  I can still saturate a 1GB/s connection and the server does media, not database.

[gtaus]

20 hours ago, Rob Manderson said:

I'm quite happy with the HGST renewed/5 year warranty though time will tell if the warranty is honoured.  I have no reason to believe it won't be if one fails within the next 5 years.

I tried to buy my Amazon renewed drives from the seller GoHardDrive. I have purchased drives from GoHardDrive for years and their customer support has always been first rate. I feel confident they would back their warranty.

[gtaus]

FYI, I just ordered another renewed 4TB HDD with 5 year warranty from Amazon for the sale price of $59.99. I was able to select GoHardDrive as the seller. Interestingly, GoHardDrive lists that same drive on their website as not in stock, so maybe they have some contract with Amazon at the moment. They sell a different renewed HDD on their website, but it comes with a 3 year warranty, not the 5 year warranty as if bought through Amazon.

Just curious on how other people make their purchasing decisions on HDDs. I used to just buy the least expensive drive in terms of $/TBs. For example, a 3TB drive for $45.00 would be $15/TB. My renewed 4Tb at $60 would also be $60/4TB or $15/TB.

However, if you factor in the warranty periods, then you have a better look at lifetime value. For example, the $45.00/3TB HDD/3 year warranty comes out to be $5/TB/year for warrantied storage. The renewed 4TB HDD is $60.00/4TB HDD/5 year warranty which comes out to be $3/TB/year, which in my book is a better value.

Over the years, I have lost so many HDDs that I only count them as viable drives for their warranty period. Most drives last that long, but I have had several HDDs die before the warranty period expired. So now I only consider their warranty period in my purchasing decisions. If the drive lasts longer, I am happy. If the drive only lasts as long as the warranty period, I figure I got my money's worth out of the drive.

[chiamarc]

I still use a 12yo (this week) external 320GiB hard drive that I stole from an old Dell laptop and placed in an external USB3 housing! Technically, it's only been part of my pool for about 4 years. I don't know why I keep it around...nostalgia.

[sjlplat]

On 3/17/2021 at 6:09 PM, gtaus said:

I tried to buy my Amazon renewed drives from the seller GoHardDrive. I have purchased drives from GoHardDrive for years and their customer support has always been first rate. I feel confident they would back their warranty.

GoHardDrive support is top-notch.  I have used their warranty policy, and they stand behind it 100%.  As long as you have the serial number, they will replace a failed/failing drive.

[gtaus]

On 11/4/2022 at 8:12 AM, sjlplat said:

GoHardDrive support is top-notch.  I have used their warranty policy, and they stand behind it 100%.  As long as you have the serial number, they will replace a failed/failing drive.

Yes, it's best to write down your S/N of the HDD on each and every order invoice. Having said that, GoHardDrive also records your drive's S/N and if you forgot to write it down on that invoice, GoHardDrive will let you know if it's a HDD that you bought from them. I think GoHardDrive is the leader in support and never hesitate to order from them.

[lvau]

3x WD Green drives (1, 1.5 and 2TB) from 2009 still spinning fine here without any issues and over 12 years power on time by now. Second old couple are 2x WD Green 4TB recertified drives from 2017 with over 5 years power on time. All of them get a short smart test each day and a extended smart test all 3 weeks. Not a single issue with any of them yet. Will keep then until they die and of course got everything backed up, so no need to swap anything before they die and also eager to see how much longer they will last.

[Andy T]

My oldest remaining drive is a 1tb Western Digital WD10EADS Caviar Green, it's been powered on for 5069 days 21 hours or 19 years! It's lived through being in a RAID5 array, Windows Home Server Pool, Drive Bender and now DrivePool!

I did have some 1tb IBM drives too only 1 out of 4 of those failed, the other three I simply removed to make space for newer/bigger disks. ROCK SOLID!

I don't have may 4tb drives - I did, but they failed very quickly! Some got swapped under warranty, then failed again. I seem to remember a bit of a scandal, not the performance SMR one... but a design flaw or something.

Have you looked at the data BackBlaze publish? https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

[Blackjack]

All Seagate HDDs. 4 Special NAS drives and 2x Exos