HGST hard drives

**Jun aka Pekto** · October 30th, 2014 10:39 AM

I'm not sure what people do with their hard drives.

I have a couple of 4gb Seagates from the late 90's that still work.

I also have a 40gb Maxtor from 2000, a 100gb Hitachi Deskstar from 2001, three WD 160gb, 200gb, and 250gb from 2002-2005, 2 Seagate 500gb and 2 WD 500gb hard drives from the late 2000's (all are at least 4 years old). All still work.

Since I started assembling PCs back in 1992, I've had exactly one hard drive that failed within four years: a WD 1.6gb I bought in 1996 which died in 2000.

**badkuk** · October 30th, 2014 11:40 AM

Originally Posted by Jun aka Pekto

I'm not sure what people do with their hard drives.

**** :D

Seriously though, barring factory defects, i think environment(heat, power quality) can be a factor. Sad to admit our server room is less than ideal.

**Jun aka Pekto** · October 30th, 2014 01:28 PM

Originally Posted by badkuk

**** :D

Seriously though, barring factory defects, i think environment(heat, power quality) can be a factor. Sad to admit our server room is less than ideal.

One thing I always did with my PCs is equip them with ample RAM so there's less grinding due to the page file/virtual memory. I also made sure the page file was permanent in Windows PCs. I did it especially during the period from Win 3.0 to Win XP.

**oj88** · October 30th, 2014 02:16 PM

Originally Posted by Jun aka Pekto

I'm not sure what people do with their hard drives.

I have a couple of 4gb Seagates from the late 90's that still work.

I also have a 40gb Maxtor from 2000, a 100gb Hitachi Deskstar from 2001, three WD 160gb, 200gb, and 250gb from 2002-2005, 2 Seagate 500gb and 2 WD 500gb hard drives from the late 2000's (all are at least 4 years old). All still work.

Since I started assembling PCs back in 1992, I've had exactly one hard drive that failed within four years: a WD 1.6gb I bought in 1996 which died in 2000.

Not really surprising. I too, have had to dump many of my old IDE and SCSI drives ranging from 40MB to 40GB. Most are still working but has fallen into being impractical to operate (space occupied+power consumption vs capacity). They still work because they were pulled out well before the end of their lifespan.

I still kept a few though. For example, I use an 80GB IDE drive on my pfSense firewall (using a SATA-IDE bridge), a 160GB IDE on a test PC, and several 120-500GB IDE and SATA 2.5" drives I have in USB enclosures... all still working. I also have a 60GB Maxtor that whines like crazy.... no bad sectors though.

Anyway, BTT. I'd iterate to definitely stay away from Green drives (Seagate or WD). As mentioned before, I've had them (5x WD Green and 1x Seagate Barracuda Green).

- Of the 5 WD Greens, all but 2 remains that are clear of bad sectors. Aside from that, the three 'failed' drives are still accessible, albeit, unreliable to be of further use
- The Barracuda Green was once replaced under warranty and the replacement drive has also bitten the dust just a few months after the warranty ran out. The failure mode of both drives were practically identical; the drives just one day started to exhibit the "click of death" and is no longer accessible/detectable

I run these drives 24x7, which clearly the Greens weren't rated for. Since I've started phasing out the Greens, I replaced them with WD Reds (4x 3TB and 1x 4TB). These are rated for 24x7 with an MTBF of 1M hours. So far, the oldest WD Red of the lot is well over 680 days old, with no sign of impending failure.

To illustrate, the first report is from the oldest 3TB WD Red (WD30EFRX)... still in perfect health:

This is from one of the three 'failed' 2TB WD Green drive (WD20EARS). It's about the same age as the WD Red above but has just started to exhibit problems in the last several weeks: