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 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.