I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
I still have a working HDD from the first PC I ever built back in the mid 90’s.
I have a 250GB external Seagate that is nearing 20 years old. Even made it through a house fire. Still works just fine.
I have a 200MB Seagate coming from the 90s that still works fine and it was untouched from 2001 to 2019. Yes, I had to buy MANY, MANY, MANY drives in the meantime, even if that drive didn’t die.
When I started my first serious networking job, there was a syslog server in our datacentre that had been running nonstop for almost a decade. It was an ancient radiator-white supemicro 3u server with 6 SCSI disks. I decommissioned that server 7 years later. Those SCSI disks had been running nonstop for 16+ years without a single problem. The inside of the server was covered in black plastic dust from the slowly disintegrating case fans. Other than half the case fans not working, there was nothing wrong with that server.
I’ve more than once seen a scenario of a 386 or 486 box somewhere in the corner of a server closet that has been running untouched and uninterrupted since the mid-90s, performing some absolutely critical process, with no one in the company knowing exactly what it is. Everyone who could’ve possibly had a clue has retired decades ago.
The only consensus is to never touch it.
This is more common than many people imagine. And it’s a ticking timebomb.
However, it also speaks volumes of the sheer quality of old-school hardware (and software). Most modern stuff has to be replaced (/rewritten) every few years. But there is more COBOL code running untouched from 3 human generations ago that our entire societies depend on than most people would be comfortable with.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after
This machine kept working but was missing for 4 years. They traced the network cable and found it got buried behind a wall but it was still working.
It depends on the POH (power-on hours) more than the actual age
I have a 50MB HDD in my first computer, a 286 Digital VaxMate that still works, from 1989 maybe?
I have four 2TB drives in a software RAID0 in my gaming rig. They were manufactured in 2011.
We had an old Hitachi 9200 disk array stay up for about 12 years with maybe 1-2 disk replacements. Those were very well built systems and at the time, Hitachi companies manufactured everything in them from the drives to the paint to the screws.
My 1GB (=Pentium 100 era), 20GB, 200GB IDE disks still worked when I connected them. Some have been unpowered for decades and saved in my shed. (-5 to 35°C and 60-85% humidity) I could open every single file on them that I tested.
I have had many individual drives last decades at work and at home the problem is that the odds for failure are the same for each individual drive but if you have more drives the odds that YOU will see a failure increase.
It is like saying what are the odds or rolling a 1 on a 6 sided die
1 16.67% 4 38.58%
So think of it like having a PC with one drive, vs having a NAS which typically has 4 drives. The more drives you have the more likely it is that you will see at least one failure during the life of the drive.
Yeah every couple years I buy new hard drives.
I have about a dozen that are about 10-20 years old. It’s getting hard to find a use for them, but so far I just use them as a 5th level backup, write once. I also destroyed a bunch that were too small.
Yes. And I’ve had various drives die without warning, including SSDs, flash media, spinning rust. You never know when a power spike (or corruption, or bad luck, or a spilled drink or…) is going to come along and smoke your storage.
I’m in the same boat as others that have commented – I’ve got some old IDE drives sitting on my shelf, and every time I’ve ever pulled them down to see what was/is on them, they always fire right up.
I’ve never had any in continuous use for decades, though…
I also have an old IDE drive about 25 years old that’s still working. My PC is about 20 years old and the mobo has 1 ide slot so I leave it plugged in for the hell of it. My PC doesn’t run continuously but it has a lot of damn hours on it.
I’ve seen one with near continuous uptime from the 90s. It finally failed to detect, but some canned air cleaning did the trick.
I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long…
Define long. Manufacturer R&D has shown that they can provide up to a 5 year warranty on some drives without the likelihood of excess RMA claims. During that period and beyond, for drives in consumer use, even for enterprise rated drives, there’s too many variables of use.
…and to always have backups.
Mantra: Any storage device/media can fail at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently?
Yes. Without proper backups (i.e. at least two, ideally with one set offsite physical or cloud), you’re at N-1=0
Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
Unless you’re never planning to add to your collection, you’ll always come to a point where you need more storage space. I have some 40-200GB IDE drives that are over a decade old and would likely pass SMART, but the question is what would I use them for? Even the files I consider important are over 300GB and easily fit on single drives, so why bother splitting them up to multiple drives, increasing the likelihood of failure of one or more?
I keep hearing people say that cars won’t last long and to always have money for taxi. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying cars consistently? Has anyone ever had a car work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?
I have buckets of tape drives that still work from the 90s, and my dad has some ST-225 drives in his old work pc that have been on 24/7 for ~30 years.
If I go and poke around some old servers at my work, I could easily find some 20 year old drives in production.
Are you selling any of those tape drives?
