20 year old hdd OOF

[just that pc guy]

so a couple of days ago i yelled for help because both my laptop and desktop hard drive failed.. thats fixed now but i have a windows xp machine thats almost 20 years old and, wtf its hard drive works fine while my somewhat newer ones are forgetting how to boot windows. dont get my wrong when the xp hard drive runs it makes a mega loud bddddbdddddd!!! with the needle moving but it works fine... WHY??!! thats all im wondering is why is a 17 year old hard drive working better than a 7 year old one

[Syntaxvgm]

Quote

why is a 17 year old hard drive working better than a 7 year old one

Luck. 

[just that pc guy]

Just now, Syntaxvgm said:

Luck. 

to be honest i think it is, i checked the disk in cmd like a week ago and nothing is wrong with it.

[Radium_Angel]

8 minutes ago, just that pc guy said:

to be honest i think it is, i checked the disk in cmd like a week ago and nothing is wrong with it.

Build quality.

I have a 27 year old hard drive still in production (god help me, I can't replace it) that had a 10 year warranty.

 

[.Apex.]

13 minutes ago, just that pc guy said:

so a couple of days ago i yelled for help because both my laptop and desktop hard drive failed.. thats fixed now but i have a windows xp machine thats almost 20 years old and, wtf its hard drive works fine while my somewhat newer ones are forgetting how to boot windows. dont get my wrong when the xp hard drive runs it makes a mega loud bddddbdddddd!!! with the needle moving but it works fine... WHY??!! thats all im wondering is why is a 17 year old hard drive working better than a 7 year old one

Because everything back in the day was overbuilt, my family also owns a 20+ year old home stereo amplifier that still works perfectly.

[SenKa]

3 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Build quality.

I have a 27 year old hard drive still in production (god help me, I can't replace it) that had a 10 year warranty.

 

What drive, if I may? I need something with that level of reliability!

[SenKa]

Just now, syn2112 said:

Because everything back in the day was overbuilt, my family also owns a 20+ year old home stereo amplifier that still works perfectly.

Same. I had a 30 year old amp from my grandfather that only died recently due to my own stupidity (never plugged it into a surge protector, power ripple killed it during a storm.)

[.Apex.]

Just now, SenpaiKaplan said:

Same. I had a 30 year old amp from my grandfather that only died recently due to my own stupidity (never plugged it into a surge protector, power ripple killed it during a storm.)

Oh damn that's sad to hear those things sound amazing, much better than today's amplifiers, I believe it's a Yamaha

[Spotty]

Any drive can fail unexpectedly at any time, regardless of how old it is. That's why it's important to back up any data you aren't prepared to lose.

[flibberdipper]

The phrase "they just don't make 'em like they used to" really comes in to play with most older hardware. I have quite a bit of shit that's 20 years old and works just as well if not better than newer parts.

[Bananasplit_00]

same reason everything but the motherboards(cap plauge) from LGA775 is almost indestructible, its simpler and at times more well built. 775 machines just refuse to die.

 

15 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Build quality.

I have a 27 year old hard drive still in production (god help me, I can't replace it) that had a 10 year warranty.

 

Holy crap, what drive?

[Eastman51]

I have a Compaq Presario from circa 1995 that works like its new. Probably needs a paste replacement, and definitely needs to be dusted, but still works great. Plays Battleship beautifully. 

I think it has a 5.25" HDD, and I know its only got 16GB of storage; very slow.

[mariushm]

It's not really a "they just don't make them like they used to"

 

It's several factors.

Everything is higher precision these days to squeeze more data into the discs, the platters have more tracks, the platters are closer together, the read/write heads are closer to the platters so there's higher risk of heads hitting platters when some mechanical shocks occur. There's more processing power involved, more error correction when reading and writing data, trying to read bits from drive surfaces etc..

You're also using a lot more data these days ... when you turn on a pc today, you're reading and writing way more data compared to when you were booting WIndows XP, programs read and write more data  etc

As for laptop drives, these are subjected to more heat and vibration and mechanical shocks (even placing your hands on the laptop case and heavy typing can be seen as tiny mechanical shocks going into the hard drive) so in general the risk of failures for laptop hard drive is higher. They do make the firmware on those more careful (parking heads more often or moving the heads outside the platter area as soon as possible so if shock occurs the heads don't vibrate and hit the actual platters) and they're more careful about heat but that's about it.

Also, it's a price issue, race to the cheapest ... you were not buying 50$ 1-2 TB drives back then. All components were more expensive. Computers were more expensive (compared to the buying power, salaries etc)

These days, as customers want cheap cheap, they're forced to make cheaper less reliable brands (WD Green series for example, though not saying WD Green is not reliable, I like them) and not just make highest quality drives like WD Black and enterprise drives. Nothing stops you today from paying tens of dollars more over regular price for a higher end model, with higher reliability ratings and performance and longer warranties.

Now mechanical hard drives also have competition from SSDs so I suspect the quality will decrease even more for the cheapest series out there, or manufacturers will start to sell only higher capacity (for example 2+ TB) drives and just a few cheap small size ones as replacement parts or for people who want backwards compatibility, extending life of old computers etc.

[Spotty]

25 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

The phrase "they just don't make 'em like they used to" really comes in to play with most older hardware. I have quite a bit of shit that's 20 years old and works just as well if not better than newer parts.

That's probably because you threw out anything that broke 20 years ago and only hung on to the stuff that worked.

It's not like you're going to keep a bunch of 40GB HDDs that have been broken for the last 20 years just so you can compare failure rates to modern 3TB drives.

[flibberdipper]

10 minutes ago, Spotty said:

That's probably because you threw out anything that broke 20 years ago and only hung on to the stuff that worked.

It's not like you're going to keep a bunch of 40GB HDDs that have been broken for the last 20 years just so you can compare failure rates to modern 3TB drives.

Yep, I totally threw out stuff that broke when I was born. Big brain gang up in here.

[BuckGup]

I use a Samsung stereo system that's from the 70s and it works great 

[WereCatf]

53 minutes ago, syn2112 said:

Because everything back in the day was overbuilt, my family also owns a 20+ year old home stereo amplifier that still works perfectly.

I don't believe this claim. I see no significant dip in reliability with modern stuff compared to old stuff. I've had a shitton of stuff break almost immediately out-of-the-box back in the day, just as I've had a shitton of stuff continue to work reliably for years, non-stop.

[.Apex.]

48 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

I don't believe this claim. I see no significant dip in reliability with modern stuff compared to old stuff. I've had a shitton of stuff break almost immediately out-of-the-box back in the day, just as I've had a shitton of stuff continue to work reliably for years, non-stop.

Well something breaking out of the box is not about reliability, it's just plain faulty, but what i meant is everything these days is designed to work at "spec", most of the stuff break because they decided to cheap out on some component that they thought "should do fine according to spec" and they take into account life expectancy because why would they spend more if most people are gonna replace the device in X amount of years, and you see this kind of mindset everywhere.

Profits is probably not the only reason, they also have electronic waste and efficiency in mind etc, that's cool and all but we'll never go back to the days where something was so overbuilt because "why not", not necessarily everything as I said, but it was a lot more common.

[.Apex.]

at the end of the day you get what you pay for though (kinda)

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

What drive, if I may? I need something with that level of reliability!

 

2 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

same reason everything but the motherboards(cap plauge) from LGA775 is almost indestructible, its simpler and at times more well built. 775 machines just refuse to die.

 

Holy crap, what drive?

Quantum...good luck finding one anymore. Quantum, IIRC, got bought out by Seagate

[X_X]

On 3/16/2019 at 12:19 AM, Radium_Angel said:

Build quality.

I have a 27 year old hard drive still in production (god help me, I can't replace it) that had a 10 year warranty.

 

I had a Conner drive from back then that lasted only 15 years. Perhaps because it's usefulness ended long before then being 120MB capacity and only was run now and then later on to see if it was still going.

[Doobeedoo]

I also have an old PC still with like same old HDD still working while my modern one died after few years of use. Luck indeed. 

[just that pc guy]

On 3/15/2019 at 1:23 PM, SenpaiKaplan said:

Same. I had a 30 year old amp from my grandfather that only died recently due to my own stupidity (never plugged it into a surge protector, power ripple killed it during a storm.)

if the data was reliable enough then you could look online, my guess is the hard drive board that got fried, they got replacement parts all over the internet surprisingly.