Stored hard drive failure?

Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC chad at shire.net
Wed Oct 5 07:45:27 PDT 2005


On Oct 5, 2005, at 1:44 AM, K Anderson wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC" <chad at shire.net>
> To: "K Anderson" <freebsduser at comcast.net>
> Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 12:20 AM
> Subject: Re: Stored hard drive failure?
>
>
>
>>
>> On Oct 5, 2005, at 1:13 AM, K Anderson wrote:
>>
>>
>>>
>>> How long can the hard drive sit on the shelf before some sort of   
>>> natural
>>> cause that prevents it from spinning up properly?
>>>
>>
>> How long are you storing them for?  I would think that the data  
>> on  the
>> disk would quickly become out of date and stale before any  physical
>> issues would arise.
>>
> Thanks for your response,
>
> Not sure how long I'm storing them (See above question where I  
> asked -- How
> long can the HD sit on the shelf... and  the other questions seemed  
> to be
> editted out). But you're right the info could become out-of-date  
> unless when
> I did patch management then I would pull the stored HD off the  
> shelf and
> hope that it didn't fail because of non-use and re-mirror the main  
> drive
> then stored the secondary back on the shelf. But then that really  
> doens't
> hit the other two questions that were editted out.
>
> Perhaps if somebody had experience with doing the very scenario I  
> thought
> of. I know HDs can be touchy but how touchy can they get if they  
> are just
> sitting on the shelf waiting for resuse and me going, darn that HD  
> is bad
> now that it sat on the shelf for X number of [days|weeks|months| 
> years].

I somewhat regularly retrieve used HDs off the shelf for use in some  
test or project or another and never have had a problem with a  
relatively modern HD (like built in the last 5 years) not working,  
even after sitting on a shelf for 1-2 years.

Is your data going to be good after 1-2 years?

If you are talking weeks or months sitting there that should not be  
an issue with modern HD mechanisms

Chad


---
Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC
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chad at shire.net




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