Should i be worried about my mass storage hard drive situation

[Souranil21 chakraborty]

So i am using this wd 500gb hard disk for over 8 years now. I recently noticed that the gnome disk utility is showing that the disk has som bad sectors but the disk is okay. So i was thinking should i now upgrade the storage? .?I have some backups of my most sensitive datas but my most movies animes some steam games and also many source codes of my learning projects are in this drive.so i was thinking should i consider upgrading the drive now or maybe i can use it for sometime long. I am considering a 2tb 7200rpm seagate barracuda drive(around 60$ in india).  

Edited March 1, 2022 by Souranil21 chakraborty

[191x7]

It's old. If it's having bad sectors or blocks, replace it.

[manikyath]

after 8 years bad sectors are just a thing that happen, but on the flip side after 8 years failures are a thing that just happen too.

 

i'd put it like this: as long as the drive isnt raidly declining, there's probably not much to worry about.

but if you care about your data being safe, is there an argument to be made about buying a new disk, and using the old one for backups?

[mariushm]

I would say yes, absolutely get a new hard drive... the drive is old, and has started to get bad sectors, and it's likely that "weak" area where the bad sectors are will continue to expand over time and you'll start to have more and more problems and may even get files that are hard to read or that are read with corrupted sectors (so you'd watch an anime/movie and the video will be blocky or you'll just a few seconds in the movie because the video file was read incorrectly from the drive)

 

Copy the stuff on the new drive, but keep the old drive at least for 2-3 months... because the chances of a hard drive failing or breaking are the highest in the first few months.

 

I would say check the prices ... if a 1 TB drive is 60$ and a 2 TB drive is 70$ ... get the 2 TB drive. 

You don't need 7200 rpm ... if you get a cheaper WD Blue that runs at 5400 rpm or 5900 rpm for example, that's still good. 

[wseaton]

Big rule with conventional hard drives. The newer they are the more reliable they are. Backblaze stats prove this.

 

Ditch the 500GB spinner because it will only get worse. Any newer drive will be more reliable.

[Souranil21 chakraborty]

On 3/1/2022 at 1:29 PM, manikyath said:

after 8 years bad sectors are just a thing that happen, but on the flip side after 8 years failures are a thing that just happen too.

 

i'd put it like this: as long as the drive isnt raidly declining, there's probably not much to worry about.

but if you care about your data being safe, is there an argument to be made about buying a new disk, and using the old one for backups?

no i will not use the old one for backup i back up most of my sensitive data in the google drive

[Vishera]

Hard drives can last really long or they can last not that long,

The Seagate ST96812AS 60GB i have since 2006 is fine and i am still using it:

[Blue4130]

7 hours ago, Vishera said:

Hard drives can last really long or they can last not that long,

The Seagate ST96812AS 60GB i have since 2006 is fine and i am still using it:

That is some really low hour count. Powered on hours matter much more than mfg date. 

[mariushm]

6 hours ago, Blue4130 said:

That is some really low hour count. Powered on hours matter much more than mfg date. 

Indeed. you say you bought it in 2006, and we're in early 2022 ... so that's around 21 years or 7600 days, which would translate to you using the drive for less than 1h each day. 

It was also started only 1642 times so that would translate to an average of 5400 hours / 1642 = 3.3 hours of use each time computer was started.

 

 

In comparison, my WD Black 1 TB I was talking about in a previous post probably has over 70k hours of operation by now, running 24/7.