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How's your old spinner holding up?

xBruce88x

xBruce88x

Joined
Oct 29, 2009
Messages
2,683 (0.47/day)
System Specs
System Name Old Gateway
Processor i5 4440 3.1ghz
Motherboard Gateway
Cooling Eh it doesn't thermal throttle
Memory 2x 8GB JEDEC 1600mhz DDR3
Video Card(s) RX 560D 4GB
Storage 240gb 2.5 SSD 3TB 7.2k Seagate
Display(s) Dell @ 1280*1024 75hz
Case Gateway
Audio Device(s) Gateway Diamond Audio EMC2.0-USB 5375U ($15 a long ass time ago)
Power Supply 380w oem
Mouse Purple Walmart special, 1600dpi. Black desk mat
Keyboard SteelSeries Apex 100
VR HMD Lmao
Software Windows 10
Benchmark Scores It can run Crysis (Original), Doom 2016, and Halo MCC
Just wanted to shout out my old 3TB Seagate drive. Its been a little tank of a unit and still going strong after all these years. Got it used for $1.08 after tax at a Goodwill in Colorado back in like 2018 or so. Best buck and change I've spent! Handles games from my steam library well enough too!
3tb-seagate.png
 
All my HDDs are unfortunately super dead.
 
The oldest HDD I have is from the 90's. 1.2GB WD Caviar IDE drive. Still works as well, though it's slow as molasses in January compared to the next oldest drive from 2005, a 60GB IDE 2.5' laptop drive.

Macro Device said:
All my HDDs are unfortunately super dead.
Click to expand...
Not here. HDDs still far outnumber SSDs in my home and office. The reason is simple, raw storage space. SSDs can't touch HDDs in cost per TB ratio. It still going to be a loooong time until SSDs overtake HDDs in that area.
 
Hah yea I still have an older 486 laptop that's still functional. No clue about the drive health but it seems responsive enough for windows 3.11
 
In my desktop I have two 1TB WD10ezex from around 2013 and they're still going strong after 25k hours and 6k spinups. There's a bunch of drives older than that not in actual use but fully functional, even the Quantum Fireball.
 
Oh that kind of spinner, such a loaded question
 
i have a 12TB Ironwolf with ~60.000 Hours of Runtime and it's flawless.
my brother has my very old Toshiba HDD from maybe 2008-2010? and it's 24/7 running in his PC and still works just fine.
 
inquisitor1 said:
are there important things on it? do you mirror whats on it on another drive?
Click to expand...
Just games. Original plan was to record gameplay sessions, but don't have time for it lol
 
Most of my HDDs are still working. My oldest is my 1TB Velociraptor that I picked up like 10 years ago. Still going strong. Was my main drive until SSDs became more affordable.
 
Most recent Toshiba from like 2021, so far not too bad.
1739163730993.png


The Whitelabel I picked up ~2018? Struggling to find a purpose for it and runs a little warm but I guess this is fine too.
1739164061697.png


Also they're both capped on sata2 lines. 20TB in cute little eMachines box goes BRRRRR. You know you love it. :pimp:
 
DaemonForce said:
Most recent Toshiba from like 2021, so far not too bad.
View attachment 384152

The Whitelabel I picked up ~2018? Struggling to find a purpose for it and runs a little warm but I guess this is fine too.
View attachment 384153

Also they're both capped on sata2 lines. 20TB in cute little eMachines box goes BRRRRR. You know you love it. :pimp:
Click to expand...
The higher end Toshiba drives can be used as boot drives.
 
I retired fully working HDD's at almost 10 years old last year.
One of the 4TB WD Red in my main system, which I will be removing soon, that has a couple of dodgy sectors, the drive firmware wont reallocate them but NTFS has marked them to stop being reused and stuck at pending sectors in SMART.
 
My desktop drivers appear to be super durable (touch wood). My external drives on the other hand... Only one of them still works out of the 3-4 that I bought in the last 8 or so years.
 
A couple of my 4TB on my system spec still works well. There is one spare 1TB HDD that stores my old stuff still works. But there is one other 2TB Samsung that is dead for reason unknown to me. My first SATA drive which is 160GB Seagate 7200.9 still works too.
 
i havent checked but i stopped buying them since 2016 when my external seagate 1tb died.... clicking noise... 1 year old
my 6 weeks holiday pictures and video to malaysia and japan all down the drain.... i will never touch seagate again
WD(7200) Toshiba(4800) still going :) they are over 10 years old...
 
Hyderz said:
i will never touch seagate again
Click to expand...
Could it have been physical trauma?

I also got the impression, including based on the Backblaze statistics, that Seagate has more dodgy models than other manufacturers.
But it's not a scientific study. Some Seagate models may be/are good, and other manufacturers also have less reliable models on occasion.

DaemonForce said:
Most recent Toshiba from like 2021, so far not too bad.
The Whitelabel I picked up ~2018? Struggling to find a purpose for it and runs a little warm but I guess this is fine too.
Click to expand...
What's with the WL 4TB drive being "4900 GB"?!

And home come the Toshiba 16TB is capped at 200MB/s?
It's far less than SATA 3Gbps.
 
Hyderz said:
i havent checked but i stopped buying them since 2016 when my external seagate 1tb died.... clicking noise... 1 year old
my 6 weeks holiday pictures and video to malaysia and japan all down the drain.... i will never touch seagate again
WD(7200) Toshiba(4800) still going :) they are over 10 years old...
Click to expand...
Did you ever send it to DriveSavers? You still could...
 
lexluthermiester said:
The higher end Toshiba drives can be used as boot drives.
Click to expand...
Indeed. Quite a valuable thing to some but not me. Strictly data only policy on HDDs these days.
nageme said:
What's with the WL 4TB drive being "4900 GB"?!

And home come the Toshiba 16TB is capped at 200MB/s?
It's far less than SATA 3Gbps.
Click to expand...
Yeah so this disk doesn't exist.
1739191581504.png


It shows up in device view as WL4000GSA6454, which lines up closer to unlisted 4TB mediamax units but this one is a 4.9TB unit and yes I have filled it enough to confirm it's well over the 4TB mark.
All the others like it will show up as ~4471.2GB usable and this is 4564GB usable. Soooooo yeah. Luckily that's just how I roll. About to test ReFS behavior on it today.

1739192912741.png


The other thing is that all of this data is managed on the world's most miserable Lima chip called the Athlon 2650e.
It likes to idle 800MHz and boost to 1600Mhz. I have it pinned at max speed to minimize performance issues.
Is it going to give me the full speed of the drives? No.
Does it give me the best possible iSCSI performance? No.
Does it run much better when overclocked to 2GHz? Yes.
Do I really need the extra resolution for handling storage? No.
Does all of this run okay on 2GB ram? I haven't seen any problems.
Unless I'm hosting a UT99 game and doing HTTP/FTP or multitasking through it, runs great.
In the event of a PSU failure or quick change, can I slump the drives into another PC and continue using the data? YES.

So that's kind of how I operate. It also does a great job filtering network traffic through a 2x10GbE SFP+ card. It keeps things warm.
 
As far as I know, they all work fine. I really only use two of them daily, and a third one a little less regularly for backups. The rest are never used anymore as I outgrew them but they all worked fine up until the point I stopped using them. I've never had a natural hard drive failure... yet. I'm waiting for that day. I have had one rendered inoperable by my own mistake though.

The oldest ones I still have is from the late 2000s, which I was about to say isn't that old, but that's almost 20 years ago now so I guess it is. I don't have anything that predates SATA anymore though, which is sort of the cutoff I have in my mind for "old hard drives". The oldest one I still use regularly is from 2017 so the ones I deal with are not quite that old. The others are all from this decade.
 
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