Hard disk "Power On Count", how many is too many?

[atxcyclist]

I have a drive I pulled out of a freebie machine someone gave me, and the 750gb hard drive has a fairly small amount (5.7k) of Power On Hours, but it has logged a nearly 11.5k Power On Count, which my guess is actually spin-ups? Is that horrendously excessive to trust this drive for data storage? It's a 2011 Hitachi HDS721075CLA332 Deskstar which...might be a somewhat questionable drive anyway, but I don't know which ones were good and which ones were not.

[mariushm]

Should be fine ... that's 240 days of 24/7 usage or maybe 3 years of using a few hours a day. It's not impossible to have the PC started and shut down a couple or more times in a day.

As you say it's from 2011 ... it's even less daily usage than that. That drive was used for 5700 hours in 11 years ..

 

Use it for storing games and movies and crap you can always source again without or with minor difficulty...  important stuff, keep copies on multiple drives.

 

[BetteBalterZen]

The old Hitachi HDD's were just build differently. They are so hard to kill. I'm sure yours are just fine. I also have a Hitachi from 2009. Got over 40.000 hours of power on time and has been through multiple builds and now sits in my NAS. It just won't die and still got the same good speeds as always. Can't remember power on count though but I bet it is many!

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, atxcyclist said:

I have a drive I pulled out of a freebie machine someone gave me, and the 750gb hard drive has a fairly small amount (5.7k) of Power On Hours, but it has logged a nearly 11.5k Power On Count, which my guess is actually spin-ups? Is that horrendously excessive to trust this drive for data storage? It's a 2011 Hitachi HDS721075CLA332 Deskstar which...might be a somewhat questionable drive anyway, but I don't know which ones were good and which ones were not.

The Power-On Count is an irrelevant metric for SSD's, it only matters for HDD's, and usually a high Power-on Count means that whatever it was in had aggressive power management settings. It should be fine.

 

for reference:

vs

Both of these drives are in external drive chassis, which is why they're "hot", Note how the seagate has had one error in it's entire lifetime of 4.2 years of power-on time. Where as the older WD has a high power-on count, which, again, means it was aggressively trying to save power at some point.

 

What I'm trying to say is that the power on counter isn't something to really care about. For mechanical drives, even the power on hours isn't really relevant unless you're looking to avoid Helium drives that might be losing their seal.

 

You should only look at the "uncorrectable error" count, if that number is any value other than "0" (look at the raw value) then that drive should not be used. Other error numbers need some interpretation, because those values can be flipped simply by having the drive ejected/unmounted. Uncorrectable errors tend to mean physical damage, like the drive being dropped.

 

[Mark Kaine]

On 12/6/2022 at 7:10 AM, BetteBalterZen said:

I also have a Hitachi from 2009.

2009? pah! mine's from 2007 (ripped out of my dead ps3 - rip) and still works! (its only 60gb though lol)

 

but really, i have several hitachis... they all still good! 

[mariushm]

 

91700+ hours and 445 power cycles. I tend to run my computer 24/7

The WD20 (2 TB) has 62K and the HGST NAS 4 TB has 58K ... the WD40 (Red Plus 4TB) is younger at 1600-ish hours

 

 

[Beerzerker]

There is no number that amounts to "Too many" power on events, if the drive works then it's fine and will be so until it does fail like anything else.

The actual amount of hours on the drive (Useage) is by far the more important value to worry about in the case of an HDD.

 

On 12/6/2022 at 1:34 AM, Kisai said:

The Power-On Count is an irrelevant metric for SSD's, it only matters for HDD's, and usually a high Power-on Count means that whatever it was in had aggressive power management settings. It should be fine.

 

for reference:

vs

 

 

From what's quoted here from a post above, it's "Power On Count" isn't bad, it's the "Power On Hours" you'll need to have concern about and yours isn't too bad overall.
I have HDD's with more than that on them and they still work fine to this day.

[BetteBalterZen]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

2009? pah! mine's from 2007 (ripped out of my dead ps3 - rip) and still works! (its only 60gb though lol)

 

but really, i have several hitachis... they all still good! 

2007? That's cool haha, but only 60GB? Mine from 2009 has 1TB. But maybe the drives back then increased drasticly in capacity, idk hehe. 

But yeah, the old Hitachis are the kings of HDD's!

[Mark Kaine]

3 minutes ago, BetteBalterZen said:

but only 60GB

haha, yeah that was max capacity for ps3... you could upgrade the hard drive,  but it was rough lol... got a 500gb samsung evo later, that was pretty awesome (game installs went lightning fast!)

 

and yeah, at that point game sizes and storage capacity got bigger and bigger fast...

[BetteBalterZen]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

 that was max capacity for ps3... . got a 500gb samsung evo later, that was pretty awesome (game installs went lightning fast!)

Ah I see, and that's a huge upgrade hehe