How to know if a HDD is really new

[zpoison]

 

How to know if a HDD is really new?

For example, the HDDs are cheaper on ebay, but how to really know if a disk is really new when you buy it?

Crystaldiskinfo will not detect when the HDD has been formatted?  It will read it as a new one, right?

[Firewrath9]

uh, if you didn't buy straight from manufacturer, then its prob either used or refurb.

[Optane^]

Download crystal disk info, it will tell you how many how hours it's got.

[-rascal-]

What @Optane^ said...and you the HDD label/sticker should also have the manufacture date.

 

Example, 27-March-2010

[zpoison]

@-rascal-, how many months should be reasonable to buy it, 6 months?

[mariushm]

SMART information from the HDD will tell you how many continuous hours the hard drive operated.  For example if the drive reports 1000 hours, then you know the drive is AT LEAST 1000/24 = ~ 40 days if it ran 24/7 , plus whatever time it sat in the stores.

 

SMART data can be faked though

 

Date may be on the label. If not you can search for the series ex WD1002FAEX and datasheet may tell you when this series was launched... if the datasheet was published in 2000, then you'll know the drive was probably made after 2000.

 

Another way to tell is to simply inspect the chips on the circuit board. A lot of manufacturers like to put the year and week of the manufacturing date on the chips.. Here's for example this board below:

You can see the smooth chip on left says 643 which could mean year 2006, week 43 .. the big controller chip says 639 so 2006, week 39, the tiny eeprom chip (down and left of big chip) i think has a 5something, so probably year 2005 towards the end of it (these small chips are ordered in big volumes so it's natural they'd have a bigger stock of them)

The brown plastic has 0528 so 2005 week 28 ...  and so on..

 

 

[mariushm]

14 minutes ago, zpoison said:

@-rascal-, how many months should be reasonable to buy it, 6 months?

Depends on how many hours has that drive actually run and if the drive was running in a computer with good cooling (hard drives are sensitive to high temperatures)

I would rather buy a hdd that ran 24/7 .. and I'd avoid a drive that was used as external drive and moved around and subjected to mechanical shocks

 

If the drive has over 10-20k hours of operation, I'd avoid it. I actually have hard drives in my PC that have over 40k of hours of use (have one with 70k) but I keep my pc running 24/7 and treat my pc well.

[-rascal-]

2 hours ago, zpoison said:

@-rascal-, how many months should be reasonable to buy it, 6 months?

 

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

Depends on how many hours has that drive actually run and if the drive was running in a computer with good cooling (hard drives are sensitive to high temperatures)

I would rather buy a hdd that ran 24/7 .. and I'd avoid a drive that was used as external drive and moved around and subjected to mechanical shocks

 

If the drive has over 10-20k hours of operation, I'd avoid it. I actually have hard drives in my PC that have over 40k of hours of use (have one with 70k) but I keep my pc running 24/7 and treat my pc well.

 

What @mariushm said, basically.

Depends on how much actual usage the drive has on it, really.

Personally, I would not buy a used HDD that is more than 5 years old.

 

My HDDs from 2008 ~ 2010 are are still working without issue.

Heck, I still have functioning IDE drives from 2002 ~ 2004.

[zpoison]

I bought many used HDDs 6TB (wd blue) in a lot and 3 or maybe 4 of them have already stopped working
Now I'm looking to buy something that will last, but it seems no retailer sells any Western digital HDDs with the retail boxes, I never saw a retail box from WD for their hdds. I'm tired of them failing.

 

WD60EZRZ, that's what I have

they were not old, the date was recent, all of them

- One has stopped powering after a abrupt shut down (unplugged abruptly)

- One has start doing a 'tic' when closing

- One has started to scratch, and loose grip

- two of them are doing this actually

 

All this after , let's say from 3 months to one year of use, my PC stays open, HDDs power setup are on 'never sleep' my PC never sleep