Time to replace some of my old harddrives/SSD?

[Tomgang]

Some of my harddrives are 7 1/2 year old now and with one of my old WD raptor drives showing sings of failure after 7 1/2 years of use i am thinking its maybe be a good time to replace all the oldest drive i have before they also fail. I have 4 Western digital HDD (WD is the only HDD produkcent i have fait in still) and 2 SSD´s one from crucial and one from Samsung.

Just to point it out, only one of my raptor drives are failing the rest works great so far but they are also old.

Here are S.M.A.R.T data screen of my drives id that can help. All data looks good but as told one of the raptors are failing even when S.M.A.R.T data say its alright and that is why i dont trust S.M.A.R.T 100 %.

CRUCIAL M4 64 GB SSD is about 5 year old.

Samsung EVO 250 GB. This drive is about 2-3 year old so dont think this need replacement yet.

WD velociraptor 150 GB this drive is 7 1/2 year old.

Second WD velociraptor 150 GB this is the drive that gives me trouble. This drive 7 1/2 year old.

WD Caviar black 1 TB. This drive is 7 1/2 year old.

WD AV-GP 2 TB. This drive is about 3 year old.

 

[Silas Woodruff]

If I'm ready this right and you have two 150GB HDD's and the 1TB 7 year old are the only ones I would replace with a higher capacity drives even if they are still good.
I'd recommend a 500 or 1TB HDD to replace those two or one 2TB drive to replace all three 7 year old drives.

 

[Tomgang]

If I'm ready this right and you have two 150GB HDD's and the 1TB 7 year old are the only ones I would replace with a higher capacity drives even if they are still good.
I'd recommend a 500 or 1TB HDD to replace those two or one 2TB drive to replace all three 7 year old drives.

Yearh its the 7 year old drives i am most conserned about. But i where more thinking to get another SSD to replace my old raptors and maybe even one more of the samsung i al ready have and put them in raid 0 for gaming and a new 2 TB WD AV-GP or red drive for store. Maybe also replace my crucial drive to get a bigger OS drive aswell. 64 GB for OS are not much today.

What do others think. Would it be a good idea to replace atleast the 3 oldest drives?

 

[slozomby]

well replacing the 150gb drives with a single ssd would increase the speed of those drives considerably. and if they are starting to fail its a good time to do so. heck just replacing those drives with a single large spinning disk is probably faster due to greatly increased sector density.

storage drives I don't replace until they are starting to fail or you need more space, assuming you have good backups. if you don't have good backups, then maybe get an external drive for that purpose.

I don't recommend raiding ssds. theres really not a lot of benefit for gaming. you can combine the space with a with a volume set ( not a raid) in windows if you want a single space. or just spread the games out between them.

os drive is a little small for my tastes. but I run the os and apps on a single drive. without seeing total writes to the disk its hard to say if replacing it for preemptive failure is worthwhile.

another option is to move what is on your 850 and both raptors to a single ssd and then make the current 850 your os drive.

personally I like the WD reds if you're going to replace the storage drives.

 

[Jetster]

The language is throwing me off. How many hours on the drive is the concern. I replace mine about 30,000 hours Really most top brands are fine where do you live?

 

[Tomgang]

well replacing the 150gb drives with a single ssd would increase the speed of those drives considerably. and if they are starting to fail its a good time to do so. heck just replacing those drives with a single large spinning disk is probably faster due to greatly increased sector density.

storage drives I don't replace until they are starting to fail or you need more space, assuming you have good backups. if you don't have good backups, then maybe get an external drive for that purpose.

I don't recommend raiding ssds. theres really not a lot of benefit for gaming. you can combine the space with a with a volume set ( not a raid) in windows if you want a single space. or just spread the games out between them.

os drive is a little small for my tastes. but I run the os and apps on a single drive. without seeing total writes to the disk its hard to say if replacing it for preemptive failure is worthwhile.

another option is to move what is on your 850 and both raptors to a single ssd and then make the current 850 your os drive.

personally I like the WD reds if you're going to replace the storage drives.

One of the raptors are failing. But i think i will gain some speed by raid two SSD´s. Remember i only have sata 2 ports on my motherboard. I know the image say sata/600 with is sata 3 but thats is a PCI controller that dosent have raid support and dosent give true sata 3 speed because it max out at read/write 375/200 MB/s. while true sata 3 maxes out at about 600 MB/s in read and write. So raid 0 with sata 2 will give me sata 3 speed (sata 2 one port maxes at about 285 MB/s).

But if i ran raid 0 on two sata 3 ports i properly would not gain much more speed.

I will only replace the 1 TB drive that is over 7 years old. But yeah i also have got an good eye for WD red drives. So i properly gonna replace it with a 2 TB red.

About SSD it is not a bad idea to throw my OS on samsung drive cause that is only a game drive any way right now and getting one big drive or two smaller drives for raid 0 for games.

The language is throwing me off. How many hours on the drive is the concern. I replace mine about 30,000 hours Really most top brands are fine where do you live?

Oh sorry i shut properly have change the language to English before making screenshots. Im from Denmark since you ask and language in the first screenshots is Danish. the Oldes drive all have over 12000 hours of power on and well over 3000 star ups.

New screen in English with the failing raptor drive.

 

[slozomby]

raiding ssd's for games doesn't do much of anything. there have been plenty of testing to prove that.

another option you might look at if you have free pcie slots.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167359

 

[Tomgang]

raiding ssd's for games doesn't do much of anything. there have been plenty of testing to prove that.

another option you might look at if you have free pcie slots.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167359

Good idea, but i dont have more free pci slot. Two GTX 970 and at pci sata controller takes them all or are covering them.

 

[hat]

So you have a 2TB drive, a 1TB drive, 2 150GB raptors and 2 SSDs? I take it the Raptors are starting to fail (at least one of them). Depending on how full your drives are, you could just move the data to another drive...

I think you have too many drives. What are you doing with two 150gb velociraptors? The performance is easily matched or outclassed by newer drives. You could get a single 4TB Black and replace all your spinners with one. If the price of a 4TB drive is too steep, you can get two 2TB drives for half that. Or just buy one 2TB drive and keep your existing one, and still have more capacity than you do now, with two less physical drives in your computer.

 

[Tomgang]

So you have a 2TB drive, a 1TB drive, 2 150GB raptors and 2 SSDs? I take it the Raptors are starting to fail (at least one of them). Depending on how full your drives are, you could just move the data to another drive...

I think you have too many drives. What are you doing with two 150gb velociraptors? The performance is easily matched or outclassed by newer drives. You could get a single 4TB Black and replace all your spinners with one. If the price of a 4TB drive is too steep, you can get two 2TB drives for half that. Or just buy one 2TB drive and keep your existing one, and still have more capacity than you do now, with two less physical drives in your computer.

there are reasons why I have multiple drives. At time i multitask and doing more than one thing at the time. And at times one drive cut not keep up and there a total bottleneck. So i got more drives to spread load over. Meaning drives dedicated for deferent task and remember this is before i got SSD and they where even at a price mortals cut pay. So i had a dedicated drive for OS another for games and a third for when i listen to musik or watch a movie while i converted a movie or musik clip on other drives. more hardrives made it possible to do more than one thing at the time without getting lag cause og a harddrive that cut not keep up and trust me when time is money that is hell of annoying.

About the raptors. Yes one of them are showing failure and got two back when to have one for OS and one for games after i got my first SSD the raptors where put in raid 0 for a dedicated game drive and later got the second SSD cause games just got bigger and bigger + took longer and longer time to load. So up til now the raptor store older games and the samsung ssd took care of newer and longer loading games until one of the raptors gave me trouble this week.

Drive bigger than 2 TB is not an option cause my old mother board does not support drives bigger than 2 TB. Remenber my motherboard is aswell well over 7 years old and the drives where not that big back when.

I think the final will be replace the oldest drives with and SSD and one more 2 TB drive. that shut do it.

 

[hat]

I don't see how you can load drives up that much. One drive for OS and another drive for other stuff sure, perfectly reasonable... but any kind of conversion/transcoding isn't gonna be that intensive on a disc... nor would be watching a movie. I could see 3 drives being perfectly reasonable, one for OS, one for games, and one for storing movies and shit. The big movie storage drive could handle conversion at the same time no problem.