Stored hard drive failure?

[K Anderson]

----- 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:
>
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> I thought a saw a thread on something like this but I can't seem to  find 
>> it
>> so I figure I might as well ask and see what turns up.
>>
>> The scenario:
>> I use a hard drive to mirror my main hard drive. I then pull the 
>> alternate
>> hard drive off the system and store it for later use should the  primary
>> drive fail, or the system as a whole fails.
>>
>> 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 disk would quickly become out of date and stale before any  physical 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 But you're right the info could become out-of-date unless when 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].

~Mr. Anderson