Old Sata drive at 36,000+ hours of power on time -Time to replace?

BuRgLaR · Jan 30, 2017

I'd never noticed just how long I've had this drive and how long it's been run into the ground until the other day I noticed it starting to be rather noisy.

I looked at CrystalDiskInfo to see if there were any issues going on but I noticed something alarming I had never noticed before.

My old workhorse drive was sitting at 36,000+ of power on hours with a read/write of 34/16TB.

So I had to break out my calculator to figure out just how long that was and came to a result of 4.116 years...... Sheesh how time flies.

Now considering all of that and the fact it's getting rather noisy under heavy transfers should I consider ditching it?

wagex · Jan 30, 2017

if its saying its still good with no errors or reallocated sectors id keep running, always best practice to have backups, 3 of my 2tb drives in my server are over 41,000 no errors or anything.

EarthDog · Jan 30, 2017

Your choice. I don't see anything in that screenshot that tells me to get rid of it.

Regardless, always have a backup!!!!

Suppressor1137 · Jan 30, 2017

I have to ask. Is that the default crystal disk info screen? I've never used the program before. Caught me off guard lmao.

To answer, My WDC black 1tb has similar ratings, still working. I have its data backed up on a brand new 3tb toshiba. EVENTUALLY when 1tb SSDs are a little bit cheaper, I'll get one of those to replace that thing. Its over 7 years old now

sno.lcn · Jan 30, 2017

Like others have said, nothing in the CDI screenshot indicates any health problems. But in my experience, one an HDD starts getting loud, it may indeed be time to replace. Other than platter issue and bad sectors, hard drives have parts than can wear out, and can start making strange noises (ticking, whining, squealing, ...) before they call it quits. But I'd say keep a backup and run the thing into the ground.

Suppressor1137 said:
I have to ask. Is that the default crystal disk info screen? I've never used the program before. Caught me off guard lmao.

To answer, My WDC black 1tb has similar ratings, still working. I have its data backed up on a brand new 3tb toshiba. EVENTUALLY when 1tb SSDs are a little bit cheaper, I'll get one of those to replace that thing. Its over 7 years old now

Must be the Shizuku edition.

BuRgLaR · Jan 31, 2017

Correct

trents · Jan 31, 2017

I often see hard drives start to fail at about 35k run time hours but some will go much longer than that and some won't get that far. It's kind of a Bell curve. I have found Crystaldiskinfo to be a pretty good predictor of pending hard drive failure. It it turns up problems the drive is usually not long for the world. I would check that SMART drive data about every 6 months from here on out.

wagex · Jan 31, 2017

trents said:
I often see hard drives start to fail at about 35k run time hours but some will go much longer than that and some won't get that far. It's kind of a Bell curve. I have found Crystaldiskinfo to be a pretty good predictor of pending hard drive failure. It it turns up problems the drive is usually not long for the world. I would check that SMART drive data about every 6 months from here on out.

agreed, i check my raid array atleast once a month, but my raid controller will also notify me if anything starts to go south via text message on my phone.
hdd guardian is another tool that works great and is a little more intuitive for people who dont like to intemperate the smart data in the way most show it.
this is my newest drive in the array, but hdd guardian does a good job usually with raid controllers being able to check individual disks inside an array.

HankB · Feb 1, 2017

I have 200GB drives with about double the hours. I think drives in that age bracket were pretty solid. As they increase capacity error margins go down and longevity is likely to suffer.

The bigger issue is that they don't hold that much and aren't very fast. And the knowledge that it might go another 4 years. Or might not.

trents · Feb 1, 2017

I worked on a computer this summer with well over 90k hours on the spinner system hard drive and it was still going strong. That is the most hours I have seen on a drive.

EarthDog · Feb 2, 2017

Anecdotes....

Just keep an eye on the SMART data bud.

Mpegger · Feb 2, 2017

Ah, a fellow WD 640GB drive user. These drives are truly workhorses, as my two, which I purchased new many years ago to use in RAID0 back before SSD's were even envisioned, have 42,753, and 42,779 hours on each, and are still in use in my main system.

So your drive still has at least 11,000 hours of life left. I'll let you know when mine kick the bearing. :beer:

Mighty_Miro_WD · Feb 2, 2017

Hi @BuRgLaR!

The drive look in a perfect condition - no Reallocated, Current Pending or Uncorrectable sectors whatsoever, so IMO as long as there are no performance issues with the HDD you can keep using the unit for as much time as you want (or at least until such issues start to appear, of course). I personally have and still use one 9 years old drive, for instance, and it's working pretty good considering his admirable age!

Of course, don't forget to make regular backups of your data on another location not because of drive failure risk, but because that way you will make sure that your valuable information is safely secured elsewhere.

Hope this helps and enjoy the drive!

BuRgLaR · Feb 2, 2017

Mpegger said:
Ah, a fellow WD 640GB drive user. These drives are truly workhorses, as my two, which I purchased new many years ago to use in RAID0 back before SSD's were even envisioned, have 42,753, and 42,779 hours on each, and are still in use in my main system.

So your drive still has at least 11,000 hours of life left. I'll let you know when mine kick the bearing.

I could never figure out why they made this drive in the first place.

640GB is so totally random.

EarthDog · Feb 2, 2017

Platter size and density bud... 2 320gb platters.

Dr. McCoy · Feb 2, 2017

Mighty_Miro_WD said:
Hi @BuRgLaR!

The drive look in a perfect condition - no Reallocated, Current Pending or Uncorrectable sectors whatsoever, so IMO as long as there are no performance issues with the HDD you can keep using the unit for as much time as you want (or at least until such issues start to appear, of course). I personally have and still use one 9 years old drive, for instance, and it's working pretty good considering his admirable age!

Of course, don't forget to make regular backups of your data on another location not because of drive failure risk, but because that way you will make sure that your valuable information is safely secured elsewhere.

Hope this helps and enjoy the drive!

I'll throw in Crystalmark threw an uncorrectable sector warning with one of my drives today when I was checking things - I know the drive had an OEM recovery partiton that I had tried to knock down earlier for unifying the drive since that partition was useless to me anyway. It was only after using DBAN that I got the error to go away.
Formatting with the Fdisk util in Win setup and all didn't make it go away but DBAN did and I probrably needed to wipe it anyway so no biggie.
Some errors are just that and can be fixed.

It's all one drive now and is reported as being good.

trents · Feb 3, 2017

McCoy, are you saying you deleted the SMART information?

Mpegger · Feb 3, 2017

I don't think he means he deleted the SMART data, but "reset" it. I've done that with drives in the past as well. Basically, if you have a bad sector appear, you can run a drive test to force the controller to mark that sector as unusable and reallocate it. What happens then is that it will appear as if the drive no longer has a bad sector, as the controller will no longer show or allow access to that sector on the drive. So your SMART data would go from reporting 1 Bad Sector before the test, to reporting 0 Bad Sectors after the test/reallocation.

This is why actual RAW drive space differs from drive to drive, even among the same model/batch. The extra sectors are used as spares for reallocation.

wagex · Feb 3, 2017

i actually just popped a few drives in my server for testing purposes, two were older seagate drives, those have 53,000hours and the two wd drives have 43,000hours lol

trents · Feb 3, 2017

Mpegger said:
I don't think he means he deleted the SMART data, but "reset" it. I've done that with drives in the past as well. Basically, if you have a bad sector appear, you can run a drive test to force the controller to mark that sector as unusable and reallocate it. What happens then is that it will appear as if the drive no longer has a bad sector, as the controller will no longer show or allow access to that sector on the drive. So your SMART data would go from reporting 1 Bad Sector before the test, to reporting 0 Bad Sectors after the test/reallocation.

This is why actual RAW drive space differs from drive to drive, even among the same model/batch. The extra sectors are used as spares for reallocation.

So you are saying this increases the amount of drive space given to sector reallocation than the drive shipped with from the factory. Am I understanding you correctly.

Old Sata drive at 36,000+ hours of power on time -Time to replace?

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