It seems like hard drives are designed to last for a long time. My oldest Toshiba laptop's hard drive is the original 4.1 GB from 1998. Still works fine today with no bad sectors at all even after 21 years.
I just got rid of an old Dell desktop that was running Windows XP. The processor was failing. But it had the original 250GB HDD in it and was still going strong. It was too old for Windows 10 because there was no drivers for the hardware.
Best HDD i've ever owned Hitatch 250GB! PRetty fast and i have like, 7 of them, 5 used, and none of them have any signs of failure, despite being over a decade old!
my Hitachi 1tb hdd is from 2009 and has 51000 Hours of workingtime and its still in my main pc edit: i make regular backups of all my drives (old/new/hdd/sdd)
Seagate are garbage. They are worthless new. Better using WDC RED or Black drives. HGST drives are also pretty good quality. I can't speak for Toshiba, I only owned one which my dog broke by knocking it off the table when plugged into the USB dock. That is one thing that mechanical drives have a difficult time with, is exposure to G-Forces. For this reason, if you have a laptop, you are better off with a higher RPM hard drive or a SSD drive.
Jason Tam I mine crypto currencies with hdds and everyone mining with hard drives call Seagates “Shitgates” because they fail way more often then Wd drives
Please make a video on how you get rid of your broken or useless components. I really would like to give more awareness on getting rid of stuff without making the environment a trash-bin..
Well here's a few suggestions, put it on eBay for next to nothing let it be someone else's problem, send it off to a recycling center some of them will even pay you or offer to give them away on some electronic engineering forum, I'm sure some guy on there could find a use for the parts or depending on what it is, use it to repair another component.
Drop them off at big chain electronics retail stores like Bestbuy. They charge recycling fee for any new item purchased from the store. They collect old electronics too.
@@Blox117 yeah, all these phenolic compounds in the PCBs were totaly formed by natural processes and "won't" cause all sorts of shit if it gets in the water supply
I rarely go with used hard disks because I don't trust them as much as new, although on the rare occasion I do, I will: > Ensure the warranty seals are in good shape > the top cover is not dented or misshapen in any way > Check the logic board on the back to ensure it's not damaged or missing screws and with regards to the disk's health... > listen to the disk. If there is any grinding noises or the bearings in the spindle make a lot of noise, don't bother with the disk. That spindle can and very easily sieze if the bearings are worn. even if the disk has low power on hours and the surface scan passes. > I will check the drive's SMART data and verify that the following is at minimum above threshold: - Ultra DMA CRC error rate - High fly writes (especially on 2.5" disks) - Pending Sector count - Uncorrectable sector count - Power on hours count - power on count / stop-start count - spin-up time I will also perform a read/write benchmark to make sure the disk is still reading and writing data to itself at full speed. Disks tend to degrade over time but this will worsen if the disk has bad sectors. If you're unsure of the health of a disk that you're looking to buy... ask to see the disk and run a SMART analysis and surface scan on it.
Rule 1 avoid Seagate hard drives (see Louis Rossman vid if you have any doubts about this). Rule 2 avoid drives made in 2nd half of 2011 from Thailand due to the floods, there's lots of failures.
My experience with used HDDs: They're fun. Just assume they're gonna break anytime so only put worthless stuff on there. I like to use GeForce experience highlights to save every singe kill I get on my hard drive :D
Yeah these used drives can be useful to store Steam games, emulator ISOs, movies, that kind of thing. Keep writes to a minimum, mostly read from it, and things should be ok. Use "symbolic links" to point to files on other partitions. For example: keep the "core" of your game (graphics, sounds, levels, etc etc) in this partition but store your savegames and preferences (files that are written to constantly) on other partition, pointed by a symlink.
Lol you must be bad or you've got a petabyte HDD if you're screen recording after every kill, jokes aside what game do you play where you capture every kill
Quick Scan should not be used alone to show that a drive works. It can however sometimes show when a drive fails. This is how i do my (used) hard drive checks: 1. Check SMART: If any bad sectors or seek errors, drive is bad, if good, go to next step 2. (Optional) Check HD tune quick, if any red squares, drive is bad, if good, go to next step 3. Check HD tune full, if any red squares, drive is bad, if good, go to next step 4. Wipe drive if used. 5. Check SMART again for any new errors I do all of this with a copy of hirens boot CD 15.2, a free live cd/usb tool with hd tune included.
Another piece of advice concerning a dying Hard Drive is try not to change the Data on it at all until you back it up. I have 3 Hard Drives that are on their last legs that all still work because I disconnected them when I noticed the problem & backed up what I needed from them. They all still work & I still occasionally pull Data off of them but have not added to or erased any files on it. They will probly work like that for a long time, good enough for a secondary backup for whatever is on it.
Before giving up on a bad HDD take a look under their PCB because they can develop rust (usually looks like some kind of black gunk) where the PCB touches the HDD head pins and motor pins. Removing the PCB and cleaning the contacts with rust cleaner/a eraser/isopropyl alcohol can bring them back to life and put them back into service for many years. I have 2 ~8 years old 2Tb Seagates drives that the Bios was having a really hard time trying to detect them and when it did they where giving a lot of R/W errors or disconnecting. After a cleaning the PCBs they are now working like new for about a year. The only thing is that the first driver that started showing problems I didn't knew about it and I tried many softwares in hopes of fixing it. Using the driver when it was giving errors while using repair softwares left a mark on the S.M.A.R.T. If you check this HDD on the HD Tune Pro it will say that the drive Failed and must be replaced but in reality the drive is fine. One has 1263 days of power on and is the one with the S.M.A.R.T. failed. It was my main OS for many years but I have a SSD now. Even being fine i'm only using it to store games and movies because of how long it has being in duty. And the other have 114 days of power on and started showing the same problem around 12~16 months after the main but I already knew what do to so the S.M.A.R.T. is clean. Both where brought and installed in the same year (~2012) with 2~3 months of difference. The difference of time probably is due power saving that turn the disk off if its not in use.
I got a 8 TB enterprise HDD off ebay for $60. No issues with it and hardly any power-on hours...so I would say yes, they are worth it :) At least if you find a good seller anyways+being able to return is always nice if something goes bad
Another great tip for you or PC builders. Use something like Seagate Seatools. It's free and has a lot of the features of HD Tune. You can even run the built in self test on the drives from a bootable USB or inside windows. My favorite tool to asses HDD and SSD health is Hard Disk Sentinel (not free, but absolutely a great tool).
I've sold bad drives myself, without any ill intent. I did reimburse those drives, but yeah. I'm a techy person, but even techy people don't always know much about bad drives. It's very easy to buy or sell bad drives.
Good tips! Being mechanical devices wherein small misalignments can be disastrous it's definitely important to take a second good look at one. I'd like to add one thing: If you think something is wrong with only the PCB on the underside of the drive, don't bother trying to replace it. There's certain information on it regarding the physical properties of the platter in the drive. The chance that even a 100% identical model drive's PCB will work (without problems) is very slim
That would be usually the EEPROM, but knowing WD cheaped out on some drives a little bit too much, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to swap in a board, only to find out they have to transplant the MCU chip because there's no EEPROM. Maybe I'm wrong but Seagates are far more lenient in this case - not 100% sure though.
I have had great experience with used HDDs here in the UK recently. I like to buy in bulk, 10x 1Tb Seagate ST1000DM003 all from 2016 for £100 shipped in a segmented hard drive shipping box all in sealed anti static bags. Cheap and very cheerful. Before that 5x WD gold for £40
@@IosifStalinsendsyoutoGulag probably not pre built PC's from a shop, for me building PC's is a hobby so I just try to get people the best price for performance which often involves used parts. I just test everything well and give warranty, can't argue with lower price for the same performance
Something I’d found a couple of times with old motherboards and new SSDs is that the SATA cable May be the problem, specially if the cable is not brand new. The system may not see the SSD but changing the SATA cable fixes the problem. Since the first time I experience this problem I always buy new SATA cables and I also try to use the shortest cable posible. Updating the firmware on the SSD also helps. Thanks for the great content!
dealing with an old failing disk taught me a whole lot about how to use computers and how to optimize my process, cause less wear to components etc... had a "clicking" disk that made a lot of noise on Windows, on Linux the thing is silent and still running... learned how to put my temporary files inside a RAMdisk (specially browser directory), learned how to use symlinks to store files that are written to constantly in another partition but make the system still think that it resides inside the same partition, etc etc... you say 8 years there, I don't doubt that number... SSD's just can't compare, all of the sudden you lose everything (seeing people installing whole OS's inside SSDs just make my stomach turn by the way... well, the market depends on some dumb people burning money I guess...)
@@FeelingShred ok I was with you until the ssd point, that's just totally incorrect. Sure maybe mlc nand when it was first released was unreliable as fuck, but new nand is waaaaaay better than rust in terms of reliability. At my place of work we had 5-10 hard drive failures per year. With the ssds, it's closer to 1-2. As for where you install the OS, why would you care if it was destroyed? There's no critical data in the OS? As long as you aren't an idiot and repath your documents/downloads etc to a redundant system (either raid or cloud storage) it shouldn't matter if the OS drive goes kaput because you don't store user data on it. So no I completely disagree with your characterisation of ssd's here.
@@FeelingShred *knock on wood* none of the SSDs that I have ever bought over the past 10+ years has ever failed. To give you an idea of how much usage they get as a boot drive, my current boot drive which is just over a year old is sitting on 17TB of data written. The only one that I have that is a bit worrying is a Seagate 2TB SSD that is already at 90% life remaining after 5.36TB data written but it has been sitting at that value for the past 6 months or so despite being in use so it is possible that HWiNFO64 is reading the SMART values incorrectly.
@@FeelingShred Only on cheap SSD, old SLC x25-E have a life span beyond your own. I still have some that work to this day, write life barely touched in s.m.a.r.t. even though they have written fully over many times over. But yes spinning drive prices have been stagnant forever. Drives used or new, you need at least a pair regardless, so either way you trust nothing.
Pro Tip: Download Crystal Disk Info, set it to "Start with Windows" and "Show in the Tray". It will warn you as soon as something unusual happens with your drive or if its about to fail. Helped me out a few times now.
Agreed, I installed it to run all the time just a few weeks ago on my systems and notify me by email on issues. Just two weeks later, it notified me of one drive that got a bad sector...then a couple days later it got another bad sector. The early notification made it possible to swap the drive and easily transfer the data without having to pull it from backups. I do backup everything, but it's faster to just clone the data from a working drive. After the data was transferred, I stress tested that drive and a ton of new bad sectors to appeared.
Another stress test is to attempt to read the entire contents of the drive. Bad sectors do not surface until a failure happens, and a failure is unknown until that sector is used. Another trick to make your drives last longer is to mirror them, format them with ones and then zeros, and then copy data back. Thus refreshes the strength of the data and even makes the drive speedier.
More important than power on time is power cycle count. I never spin down or turn off my HDDS, if i can help it. I have many 12+ year old (spin time) drives still humming along.
Exactly, also every time the computer hibernates or is suspended, the disk has to stop/start again. These days I just leave my laptop turned on 24/7, only reboot when strictly necessary. Computers were not made to be powered off.
Important tip. If you have time to unscrew the motherboard of the hdd, 2.5/3/5 doesn't matter, IF there are pads that make contact to the hdd itself, sme may have a plug/socket system but most have pads, then check to see IF they have dulled and become almost brown, this can and does prevent the hdd from showing up in the bios, reading incorrect space etc. If so then all is NOT lost, just get a soft eraser and rub over the pads being carteful NOT to knock off any companonents as some around thyose pads can be very small. The reason? that brown tarnish can prevent proper power going into the hdd itself and read/write line etc from being read properly. This is because of signals being transfer are actually electrical. The less the conductivity, the less chance of reading or powering etc. Give them a rub and they should shine up. You can try IPA but tbh, that most likely will not work as effectively. Do the eraser and try again as you may find that this was the cause all along. I have had this issue and even provenj to a fiend on a hdd that had NOT spun for 10 years or more, after doing this in front of him, it spun up for the first time in that 10 year period. Nothing wrong with it. So, give it a go, even if your own hdds fail, try taking a look, normally a Torx screwdriver is needed but other than a philips (cross head). the pads? usually around 2 rows f about 10+ on each. Just pads nothing soldered on to them, no solder on them, just straight pads.
When I built my first gaming PC I bought a used hard drive which was a 1tb western digital blue for £25 and I have built 3 more PC's since and still using that hard drive as a secondary drive to this day so a good purchase made in my opinion.
About 90% of my drives are 2nd hand, all purchesed though cex with a warrenty, I just use them as cold storage and check the data every 6 months or so, all various sizes and makes from 500gb to 3tb. Its a cheap backup method for me.
yeah these things can be useful for storing non-critical data, like games, emulator ISOs, movies etc... just keep writes to a minimum and things should be okay... been using one like this for 3 years, there's other guy that says 8 years, I don't doubt him at all... Linux helps a lot with old drives too, less random writes on disk
@@FeelingShred You sound confused....writes dont affect durability with old fashined spinning HDs...Actually, writting is required to make sure your data stays intact overtime... For this sole reason, there are apps that their only use is actually rewriting all the sectors of a hard drive with the very same data they contain, to make sure the data is safe and magnetism strong... Leaving a hard disk in a shelf for a decade is a good way to lose some data here and there...
@@Trikipum what you're talking about is bit flips which can happen and are accelerated by heat, generally HDDs are less prone to bit flips than ssd's. However writes do effect lifespan, anytime a HDD is doing something that being idly spinning with a parked head it's doing wear on the bearing, everytime that write head moves up and down the platter it's one more chance of a head crash or something
Ahhh the classic sound of clicking. 100% agree that hdd is useless... HD Tune is a great free tool, have use it for years, and It's a great tool to pick a good 2nd hand HDD.
If you can see the manufacture date, power on hours and #of power ons (hdd), or TBW (ssd), and the drive is within normal use range, then sure no problem. Actually my whole Nas has manufacturer referb and open box drives. Haven't had a single issue. Just get DOA replacement guarantee and stay away from scetchy looking listings
I have bought refurbished HDDs that have worked great and some that have had problems. I would recommend running a full capacity test on the drive using a tool like badblocks. I have a dedicated linux install on a flash drive (not a bootable live iso, an install using the flash drive as the boot device) specifically for this purpose. If you are going to be processing a lot of drives I recommend using a tool like BHT that allows running badblocks on multiple drives simultaneously, and creating a dedicated rig for running it. As a added bonus running badblocks will overwrite the entire drive and leave it blanked as all zeros when complete, so you reduce the concern of sensitive data being recoverable from the drive. It is not as good as running dban, but is an improvement over nothing while you are inspecting the drive.
The Skyhawk is still under warranty. If you aren't able to get it repaired in oz(you should be able to however), bring it to Taiwan where we can repair it and make another video.
I got several Seagate drives sent in for repair, and replacements failed and were sent in for replacement, where those replacements also failed... So on so forth.. Seven times across 11 drives before I gave up and threw them all in the garbage in favor of buying WDC. In ten times that time, I only had two WDC drives fail, and only one on warranty. It says a lot about their quality. The cost of shipping the drives to Seagate, added up, and losing my data numerous times nearly ended up with me smashing all my computers with a sledge hammer. So frustrating losing irreplaceable family photos, videos and countless hours of work on the computer. I always recommend using RAID with crappy drives like Seagate.
they make great candidates for software raid. I use storage spaces and its been super robust for me and has survived a few drive failures now. Speeds are slow, but for a lot of things that doesn't matter so much. If you use ReFS it will periodically check your files for bitrot too and fix any that it finds along they way. And bitrot can be a problem. Especially when moving around terabytes of data.
I noticed that on some drives,when using hdtune quick scan option,it won't find bad sectors on the drive,but using the normal slower error scan will find bad sectors.
One thing I've found to be helpful with used drives is to squint really hard at the picture to find a manufacturing date. Worked out great for my mint 256GB NVMe drive that was only 5 month old.
I just use white label drives. Instead of paying for a used drive and not know what you are getting, white labels are brand new drives by major manufacturers without a manufacturer warranty. Used drives usually are out if warranty anyway, might as well spend money on the new drive and sellers will usually give you a 1 year warranty
Thank you, finally i found someone who actually showed what a bad drive sounds like, i was worried that my hard drive years ago and it never made a sound like that
I got my 1tb drive for 18 bucks shipped and it has been great. A little loud but one-day when I can build my own pc (when prices calm down) I will go ssd for my boot drive to quiet things down. I only have the 18 dollars and traded 5 year old tv into my pc. Plays fallout 4, mafia 3, and much more. Love it.
Buying used hard drives is great option! I set up mine in ZFS pool with 2 or 3 drive fault tolerancy. After few months of 24/7 running only one broke, which I replaced with no data loss
I was once out for a walk and found a PC in a thornbush, It was rusty and had been rained on for quite a while. The drive I pulled out of it was a Hitachi DeskStar 160GB, the PCB was rusted and the solder connections around all the SMDs were corroded. But it still worked, and probably still does work, three years later as it sits in my hard drive drawer.
Sometimes the bearings start to go and whacking it can get them going. Less so with modern HDDs where the thing will just jam up and your screwed. I once had some WD Raptors in raid 0 back in the day and every time i started the PC i had to " encourage " the platters to spin up with the rubber end of a screwdriver , once they warmed up they where fine. In fact , pro tip, if you want to replace the drive in your PC or server just as its about to go out of warranty. Step one, go get your rubber mallet ( you do have a rubber mallet right ?) Fire up some massive disk to disk copy on your drive to get it spinning nice and fast. Take rubber mallet and go to hell on the side of the drive ! after about 10 or so good hits you should hopefully get a head crash. Return the drive for replacement, the rubber mallet wont leave any marks!
On the side can be helpful if the heads are stuck, but 'flat' and you damage heads or platers. A method I had to try on an OLD drive (Quantum Fireball) was stick it in the freezer for a day. Gave me ~15mins to back up files, 2nd time it died for good.
@@andljoy Or, don't be a swindling a$$hole. Every time someone pull these kinds of stunts, it raises the scrutiny and suspicion level for everyone else with a honest claim. At warranty intake, all they do is check drives. You don't think they can tell the difference between impact damage and wear/fabrication failure? If a drive has failed, is grinding, clicking or completely dead and it's in for warranty replacement claim, they pop it open. Because people do this sh1t and it's definitely not covered by warranty.
One thing about old or used HD is if they was within the 5 years from date of manufacturer its usually covered by the warranty. I had a lot of drive in the past that they replaced the drive without receipt that WD, seagate, ibm etc. all they ask was the date it was made. That covers retail or oem HD in most cases.
Bad sectors can be just crc errors due to power losses. First you need to confirm the sector is actually bad by zeroing out the drive (full format) and seeing if the bad sector remains after. If its gone its just gone, it was a half written sector which had a bad crc and wasnt actually damaged
I'm 9 minutes in and didn't see the below mentioned... Sometimes the drives stay in reset mode as long as they get power on the 3.3v pins in the sata connector. It's a relatively new SATA stand-by/staggered turn on feature. Covering the 3.3v contacts with some tape or a sheet of paper will get the drive started (or use a molex->sata adapter cable for testing). If there's no vibrations (motor not working), it could be just a fuse tripped by the power connector, or a safety diode that's not conducting. A multimeter can check those (use continuity on fuses, diode on diodes). Sometimes, the power input jack contacts have solder cracks so the drive doesn't get 5v or 12v at all and resoldering the power connector gets them working.
I have 2 old 2TB barracuda drives that have almost 70k hours on them, they are used on a media server and still have no errors. I run error tests on them every month. My longest running SSD is a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB with 45k hours and 73 TBW to date, still runs like new.
We test all the hard drives we re-sell. We commonly use "Disk Health" in Parted Magic, or CrystalDisk Info. HD Tune is good, but CrystalDisk Info can get SMART info over a USB-to-SATA/IDE adapter where HD Tune can't. If we are suspicious of a drive that checks out in SMART we'll run it through a scan in HDD Regen, takes a while but it worth the peace of mind.
Don’t normally post, but you can easily get 2tb hdd new for around $60-70 in us. Usually seagate barracudas 7200rpm on Newegg or microcenter. So I think 1tb drive don’t really make sense new as you mentioned, vs a 500gb SSD for about $60. Also crystal disk info will do a similar job, to the program you mentioned, but also work on SSD and it’s free as well.
I have all types of drives in my current rig. An Intel Optane 905P 480GB U.2-NVMe SSD, two WD Blue 3D Nand SATA SSDs of 2TB and 4TB, and a WD VelociRaptor 10000 rpm HDD of 1TB.
I got rid of all of my HDDs except one as a backup drive. SSD only system. Less noise, more reliable. I had a bunch of HDDs fail on me and only one SSD.
I've got a couple 1TB hard drives manufactured circa 2010ish from Goodwill and a thrift store in a redundant Windows Storage Spaces array for the past few years, and haven't had any problems yet. One of them even came with a few hundred bad blocks- and nothing more has failed yet. Really, that's something you might want to look into- Windows storage Spaces. It can do all sorts of software RAID, and more. However it might involve a crash course in Powershell to do some of the more advanced stuff (IE: SSD+HDD tiering)
I bought a 500 gig hard drive on newegg that was supposed to be new but was obviously used as hell. Love how the seller took a blue Sharpe in a failed attempt to hide the wear on the label. The metal cover had so many deep nicks and scratches I'm surprised it actually worked but the s.m.a.r.t data showed it had 24 hours or so of runtime on it. Then down the line I bought a 3TB drive from Microcenter that was refurbished because it was about the same as a new 1TB drive from the same line. Good working drive but it's got 2 separate partitions on it that I can't get to merge to get it to use all 3TB on one partition. I'm wondering if maybe the drive was formatted with dual operating systems on it and the refurb screwed it up or something. Also years ago I had a hard drive go belly up the moment it started that clicking noise in a laptop
Speedfan (which is free) has a truly excellent HD analysis feature, that reports all the smartdrive parameters and health and can also do an even more in-depth analysis. I really recommend it for assessing whether a drive is worth using or not.
I have a portable HDD from college (Graduated in 2012) that I used to throw in my back pack and not think twice. That case is scratched to hell but the thing is still kicking (though I have noticed some slowing in recent times).
I had a drive like that once, it was an enterprise drive, I loved that sound it made when it spun up but I could've done without the extra idle noise, so I'll be sticking to consumer drives from now on.
I bought a New seagate drive similar to your model, but with 8TB capacity. It too won't even run when plugged in my pc. But gyess what: i applied a piece of tape on a 3.3V pin on the sata power connector, and once plugged again, it now works miraculously ! So be careful especially if you have an older power supply, this issue can happen to you.
My total of faulty drives have been 1 x Corsair SSD & 1 x WD HDD (both bought new) over the last 30-odd years. I also have a NAS using 4 x Ironwolf Pro's drives running 24/7 for over 2 years now without any issues. My philosophy is you get drives suitable for the job and as they last a long time, never (within reason) compromise on the price. In all honesty, I understand that people may be constrained by budget but in the great scheme of things, TCO is extremely low for storage. I wouldn't bother with the used market when it comes to storage for the aforementioned reasons. In reality, I have only retired drives (barring the 2 failures I mentioned above) due to their size more-so than how they are performing.
My PC are still running with one 500GB hard drive in addition to the main 120GB windows partition. It is old enough that it still run on SATA II standard. Just make sure you get a warrant, and then try to fill it all out as soon as you install it. If it crashed, return it.
I lost 2TB of data thanks to 2 1TB external HDs from Walmart. My mom bought them both an I lost everything on them. Never again. Bought 1 WD from Walmart a long time ago still works. Bought 3 hard drives off of OfferUp. 1 Seagate HD and 2 WD 500gb hard drives. They still work to this day.
Thank God i dont have any problem with my hdd-s (i have a 13, an 8, a 6 and a 3 years old drives) and i dont had any problem with them. Of course i backup regularly on my newer external hdd-s.
Thank you so much for the info! Love your content so much😁👌 it's worth noting I used to buy SEAGATE it took me 4 harddrive to realize the company has bad quality control... all 4 were brand new and all of them died on me within 1 year. Since then I've only bought Western Digital and I kid you not all 10 of them are perfect functional and fine. I need big hard drives for storing my 8k TH-cam videos.
I work with surveillance systems for a living and all of them have hard drives. The Seagate 3 year failure rate is over 50% and the Western Digital 3 year failure rate is less than 5%. I will only ever buy WD until Seagate fixes their issues.
I tend to put together a few PC's once every couple of months and then I sell them off...it's just a hobby for me and it scratches that itch of wanting to build something. I've got to say I do enjoy these videos about what to be careful of when buying. To keep costs down, as a main storage drive I'll usually go on eBay and buy either a 500gb ($15) or 1tb ($30) generic, unbranded hard drive that's listed as new. I'm not sure if these drives are truly new or not, but they usually work pretty well, and the only one I got that didn't work (it would just show up in Windows as having 0.0mb available and I couldn't find a fix for it) the seller replaced pretty quickly. I'm glad to know about this health check program... I'll be using it going forward. And a selling note to the TechYesCitizens who are curious... Yes, people still buy PC's with hard drives in them. Other tech reviewers act like hard drives just shouldn't be used at all anymore, but that's not true. People don't care that it's got hard drive storage, at least when buying low end systems. Just throw a cheap SSD in there as a boot drive for better quality of life while browsing the desktop and they won't mind longer load times for their games. And some people, myself included in some cases, are only playing eSports games or maybe older games that load quickly enough even on a hard drive. Oh...or they could be someone that only plays GTA V (I've met plenty of people like this actually, including my wife). While the load times are pretty bad in that game, swapping from a hard drive to an SSD makes no difference. It's one of the only games I know of that actually changes load times based on how good your CPU is. Moral of the story is know your customer and what hardware they actually need.
500gb to 1 tb is what you find inside sky HD & sky Q boxes, its also an ideal way of getting a HD without paying thru the nose for one, you only need to format them
I don't immediately ditch a drive with a couple of bad sectors: if there's like 5 or fewer bad sectors, I perform ATA Secure Erase on the drive, which makes the drive format itself and forces the drive to reallocate any bad sectors it finds while doing that. In my experience, those couple of bad sectors typically appear in a rather short amount of time when the drive is still new, but then there don't appear any more of them after that, so, once the drive has rellocated those from the spare-area, it's all good and fine again. I've got several ~10 year-old drives like that that I'm still using. It's only if there appear more bad sectors later on that I ditch the drive.
I had a 2.5" external that was clicking recently and holy crap did it actually last for some time after that and I was even able to copy off all the data from it. I actually used it for a few months like that before I finally retired it and it was still operating last I had it plugged in. It just slowly kept adding bad sectors but there must have been enough spares because it never came across any that it couldn't recover. The drive was totally full too. Usually by the time they start clicking they are completely toast. Used drives can be a good bargain if they aren't brand new and known to be working. Most drive failures happen either really early in their lifespan or pretty much at the end. The mean time between failures for most physical drives is in the order of years these days. I have quite a few that are over 10 years old and are still totally fine despite being used on a daily basis. Interestingly, I have a bunch of external lacies and they all started failing right around the same time.
I'm interested too. I know they are mostly sold to the local Chinese market and they contain SK hynix memory chips which are a very good brand. But as for the quality of the board and controller that X-Star makes, who knows. I know it's only a small company with a small factory.
I prioritise buying new for my media storage drives, used if it's in "like new" condition 6 months top. Stretch to 1 year old if the price is right. Game storage drives, or for flipping a PC then I can consider older drives. Seagate has a bad rep for failure rate from what I can see, and with personal experience, twice. If you use HDTune to routinely check HDD health, turn off quick scan. I'd be saving cash by the first bad sector and most of the time that small error gets missed on quick scan.
scratched up labels and covers are not the only indicator and/or means noting as some drive bays have very close tolerances in the space and the metal edges can scrape over the label or top cover and scratch it up. hard drives can be very sensitive to even where if the top cover or or certain screws are removed especially the ones under the warranty void stickers will hold the head stack and because of how precise hard drives are if the screw is removed it will cause the head stack to shift and cause it to never work again. that is why recovery houses has a special head stack alignment software tool that they can re align the head stack when doing data recovery. from other videos i have seen it is mostly the western digital drives that are sensitive to shifting head stacks. next hard drives are very sensitive to dust and can only be serviced safely in a clean room so that is why recovery houses are very clean
HDD drives will still worth it to store loads of data. But another thing that you didn't mentioned is that these type of drives, specially the most old ones, they will suffer a data loss over a very long period of time by demagnetizing the information of the plates. So until the SSDs will catch up in price to HDDs, these type of drives will keep being produced.
I have 70% satisfied experiences with used hard drive so far. I have bought a lot of used hard drives, only 2-3 drives are failed. But for some people I know, he bought some used hard drives too but almost all the hard drives he got are failed in just a month after he bought.
Never had a problem with 3.5 drives. I had a 2.5 fail under warranty in a toshiba laptop once. Really not supprised. Was replaced with a Hitachi which is workimg 10 years later so thumbs up to Hitachi at this point
Yes in US you can get a 83$ SSD, the inland professionals come from MicroCenter, and come with 2 year warranties ontop of that at no extra cost.... Not to say they are top of the line but still good deal
It's like a gamble... Sometime you got really good used hdd, sometime got really bad used hdd. I always use HDSentinel Pro cz the UI is really good for beginner
That's a lot of used hardware, I'm afraid. Just be familiar with return policies. I use what mostly, so unless the thing I bought is like $15 I'll go ahead and exchange it or refund it.
I’m starting to move towards putting just SSDs in most builds. If it’s over 600€, then I try and go with a 500GB or 1TB SSD. They are relatively cheap, if you do not get the best ones. 1TB SSD for 90€ new is a good deal IMHO
I purchase my used hard drives from a local computer store. He installs SSD’s, wipes the old hard drives, and puts them up for sale at 10 bucks per drive. Minimum 250 gb up to 1 Tb. All 10 bucks.
I think a compromise is to use RAID1 (mirror mode) and you'll enjoy the cheaper price whilst also having some sort of redundancy if one of the hard drives starts erroring our or dying on you. I personally use FreeNAS and ZFS setup to allow two hard drives to fail in a eight hard drive setup for safety (before I need to start worrying). The average computer user does not need such redundancy and they can enjoy RAID1 and get best of both worlds.
I've not bought tons of used drives so take it with a grain of salt but here's my take on it, the most important thing to look for is: A) Good drive models, even "good" brands have their failures so it's important to look for specific models that a lot of people are happy with or find data on failure rates such as the backblaze reports. B) Look for the date or date of manufacture (DOM), as long as it's been packaged well and it's at most 2 years old then it probably has a lot of life left in it and it should be obvious but if it's 5 years or older, it should be considered at the end of its life and not to be trusted.
Many businesses and smart people TAKE A HAMMER to their drives when they liquidate their older PCs. So if you see dents(even small dents) it's likely purposeful data security to destroy the drive. I see it almost every time I goto my local recycling center. (Weekly)
i'm just lucky that these days i just go online and buy used drives for cheap and get them delivered for next to nothing. i don't even have to leave the house and i'm usually guaranteed to get drives that are 100% health and 100% performance.
Little tip, from what I heard of at least. Turn on time is not a big deal to me, rather than number of spin on cycles. When drive starts it's getting to most wear and tear on its platter bearing. This is why it's bad idea to have hard drives turn off when not used (an option in Linux) adding more stress than necessary and instead of 1000 power cycles you see 3000 or more.
I like buying used HDD mostly 1 Tb ones. I'm using in my ITX rig at the moment 3 used HDD : 2x 2.5" HDD and one 3.5" HDD (from 2012 lol). 3.5" WD HDD : WD10EALX 2.5" Seagate HDD : ST1000LM024 2.5" WD HDD : WD10JPVX The 3.5" HDD started to get unstable sectors (13 at the moment) but few months ago it was showing as good status in CrystalDisk. Now it's showing as caution status but it's still working fine. I'm using my ITX rig to play games and watch youtube videos mostly so it's not that important if a drive fail suddently. I also scored 2 more 3.5" WD used drives, a WD black and blue (wd10ezex or wd10ezrz can't remember the model) both 1 Tb. If you buy used drive just follow the advice told in the video and you should be fine (not buy very old drive like sub 2011/2010, and always ask for SMART info about the HDD you want to buy). For non critical data storage used HDD are perfectly fine like games for example or to use in a recording server/HTPC 👍
I use a program called SpeedFan. It shows all the temperatures and there's a S.M.A.R.T. tab that shows all the status values of your hard drives. If a used hard drive looks healthy, and sounds healthy, and shows no errors, then I'd have no worries about storing important data on it. In fact, I would put more trust in a used hard drive that is "TRIED AND TRUE" than new hard drive that has yet to prove itself.
Better yet, get a bunch of hard drives, stick them in a NAS with RAID10/RAIDz2, create a pool for files and another for block storage, add an iSCSI drive and Windows will think it’s local and you can have a pool of fast storage and run an NVMe locally.
Another thing worth considering is that 2.5" laptop hard drives work perfectly fine in a desktop, and are much more resistant to shocks from being shaken, dropped, etc.
You'd think. I have a friend who is easy on his laptop, but lost 2 different models of wd blue. Moved him over to a used ssd so hopefully I won't have do any more data recovery.
@@zoomzabba452 Bad luck :( They have the same chance of failure over time as a 3.5". It's only shock that they're more resistant to. Even then, it's not like it's ever safe to drop it.
Laptop HDDs are completely useless. They are INCREDIBLY slow. To the point where they're too slow to run Windows 10 at a usable speed. (a desktop HDD from the same era runs fine for example) They only last like 1-2 years in my experience. Had about 4 fail on me for various reasons, one of them lasted a grand total of 15 days power on time... I decided to just completely ditch them, use an SSD, and the laptop is incredibly snappy and response, whereas before it would take like 15 seconds just to open the start menu and 5 minutes to boot windows. Never again. My gaming laptop also has a HDD (not as a boot drive) it can't handle steam downloads as steam extracts as its downloading, and it causes stuttering in certain games, while on my desktop the game loads twice as fast and no stuttering, despite having weaker specifications in some areas. I would never touch a 2.5inch hdd ever again, absolutely useless
Some of the things I have learned about HDD over the past 20+ years. - Keep the temps under 40C. The new fangled boxes with little to no air movement are death to spinners. - Try to minimize spin up and down as this adds to both wear and tear and heat build up. I have seen reports of 10+ years of constant use. - Good power supply. Clean and abundant pereferred. - Good cables. No corrosion and properly constructed, like there are no bad cables, right? - If possible a real UPS with power regulation, this will help your whole build. - Long term storage should be accessed as little as possible, rewriting a movie file is unnecessary. Large archives and back ups should be over written as little as possible. Multiple copies in multiple locations on different drives. - Good quality drives will last longer but will cost more. Enterprise class used drives may well have in excess of 20,000 hours on them but due to the likelihood of few spin ups have much life left in them and are generally made with higher quality components. FWIW I keep all my drives under constant fan cooling and currently have 2 Toshiba DT01ACA200 1TB drive with at least 31,000 hours each running just fine at 33C and a WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 3TB with over 35,000 hours running at 30C. I also have a Seagate ST2000DM001-ER164 2TB running over 20,000 hours at 36C which strikes me as a bit warm. I guess time to adjust the fan.
You are clueless.. I have a maxtor cheap ass HDD that is 76.000 hours+. Long term storage should be accessed as little as posible and never rewritten?.. that is a good tip to actually lose your data... you need to refresh your data in your hard drives, and the only way to do that is actually rewritting the data.. is in such a way that there are even programs that are just for this, to read a hard disk and rewrite every sector with its data, to make sure magnetism is strong...seems like you didnt learn that much in the past 20 years after all...
@@Trikipum I think my comment stands for itself, unlike your clueless and ignorant assertion plus your demonstartation of howlittle you actually know about how the encoding process actually works in older HDD. BTW If you don't supply evidence of your 76000 hours it is not credible.
I work in IT at my college so I'm constantly surrounded by used hard drives. From my experience, they usually work just fine, especially if they're coming out of office pc's that never even came close to filling them halfway. Funny enough I've only come across 3 dead drive (other then the one's I broke myself) and all three of them came from iMac's...so take that however you like.
What's your experience with Used HDDs? Let us know below!
I took this bogan guy from Queensland to a Taiwanese scrapyard where we picked up a bunch of cheap driveys from a guy who gave us a hard time.
I had a used Seagate as backup. RIP.
I take old hdds from old computers i don't always buy hard drives
Old hdds is also good Temporary Boot drive till you get ssd
Tens of used HDDs and have never had a problem, use them in my own system. I have had a few SSDs die on me however.
For me its a 50/50 kinda at the point to not buy stuff from people here in south africa most are just looking to take chances at best
It seems like hard drives are designed to last for a long time. My oldest Toshiba laptop's hard drive is the original 4.1 GB from 1998. Still works fine today with no bad sectors at all even after 21 years.
I just got rid of an old Dell desktop that was running Windows XP. The processor was failing. But it had the original 250GB HDD in it and was still going strong. It was too old for Windows 10 because there was no drivers for the hardware.
Toshiba
Best HDD i've ever owned Hitatch 250GB! PRetty fast and i have like, 7 of them, 5 used, and none of them have any signs of failure, despite being over a decade old!
They obviously shoud last a long time , data is important but they might fail
@@namesurname4666 same hard drive even still works today in that laptop, now going on 23 years old that Toshiba laptop
The only time you want to hear those HDD noises is on Floopytron's songs.
Floppotron*
New SSD, used HDD
Games aren't sensitive data
Savegames are though, so be sure to keep 'em on the SSD people
@@pixel_vengeur391 true
I've lost countless hours of Skyrim saves when my hdd failed (OS and games where there)
@@Davix-tt9sh cloud saving is a thing
@@illusionlb There are cases where even cloud saves got corrupted
@@illusionlb not on cracked games (No, i'm not gonna buy skyrim again, Todd Howard)
my Hitachi 1tb hdd is from 2009 and has 51000 Hours of workingtime
and its still in my main pc
edit: i make regular backups of all my drives (old/new/hdd/sdd)
Hitachi hard drives are strongest hard drives
Mixa Tutorials hitachi wands too (Lenny face)
Older drives where built to last!
Hitachi last longer for me too, deskstar series are superb for home use.
Ultrastar is the best running raid 0 (I have 4 2TB drives on raid 0)
inb4 "i lost all my data"
I love how the hdds you show that don't work are seagates. I just found a hdd making that clicking noise. of course it was a seagate. lol.
Yep. 3 of my failed drives were Seagates drives. My other one was an old Toshiba drive from 2009.
Seagate are garbage. They are worthless new. Better using WDC RED or Black drives. HGST drives are also pretty good quality. I can't speak for Toshiba, I only owned one which my dog broke by knocking it off the table when plugged into the USB dock. That is one thing that mechanical drives have a difficult time with, is exposure to G-Forces. For this reason, if you have a laptop, you are better off with a higher RPM hard drive or a SSD drive.
Jason Tam I mine crypto currencies with hdds and everyone mining with hard drives call Seagates “Shitgates” because they fail way more often then Wd drives
@@ejweir4675 how much bandwidth do you need for 10tb of blank storage?
I'm in the PC business since 1999. Already then, Seagate was very unreliable. Having said that, I have seen both SG and WD drives failed.
Please make a video on how you get rid of your broken or useless components. I really would like to give more awareness on getting rid of stuff without making the environment a trash-bin..
I second this!
Well here's a few suggestions, put it on eBay for next to nothing let it be someone else's problem, send it off to a recycling center some of them will even pay you or offer to give them away on some electronic engineering forum, I'm sure some guy on there could find a use for the parts or depending on what it is, use it to repair another component.
Drop them off at big chain electronics retail stores like Bestbuy. They charge recycling fee for any new item purchased from the store. They collect old electronics too.
it came from the environment, putting it back is not "trash". that is just propaganda from the tree fking environmentalists
@@Blox117 yeah, all these phenolic compounds in the PCBs were totaly formed by natural processes and "won't" cause all sorts of shit if it gets in the water supply
I rarely go with used hard disks because I don't trust them as much as new, although on the rare occasion I do, I will:
> Ensure the warranty seals are in good shape
> the top cover is not dented or misshapen in any way
> Check the logic board on the back to ensure it's not damaged or missing screws
and with regards to the disk's health...
> listen to the disk. If there is any grinding noises or the bearings in the spindle make a lot of noise, don't bother with the disk. That spindle can and very easily sieze if the bearings are worn. even if the disk has low power on hours and the surface scan passes.
> I will check the drive's SMART data and verify that the following is at minimum above threshold:
- Ultra DMA CRC error rate
- High fly writes (especially on 2.5" disks)
- Pending Sector count
- Uncorrectable sector count
- Power on hours count
- power on count / stop-start count
- spin-up time
I will also perform a read/write benchmark to make sure the disk is still reading and writing data to itself at full speed. Disks tend to degrade over time but this will worsen if the disk has bad sectors. If you're unsure of the health of a disk that you're looking to buy... ask to see the disk and run a SMART analysis and surface scan on it.
Rule 1 avoid Seagate hard drives (see Louis Rossman vid if you have any doubts about this).
Rule 2 avoid drives made in 2nd half of 2011 from Thailand due to the floods, there's lots of failures.
My experience with used HDDs: They're fun. Just assume they're gonna break anytime so only put worthless stuff on there. I like to use GeForce experience highlights to save every singe kill I get on my hard drive :D
Yeah these used drives can be useful to store Steam games, emulator ISOs, movies, that kind of thing. Keep writes to a minimum, mostly read from it, and things should be ok. Use "symbolic links" to point to files on other partitions. For example: keep the "core" of your game (graphics, sounds, levels, etc etc) in this partition but store your savegames and preferences (files that are written to constantly) on other partition, pointed by a symlink.
Lol you must be bad or you've got a petabyte HDD if you're screen recording after every kill, jokes aside what game do you play where you capture every kill
Pro tip: make sure to turn off the quick scan option in HD tune cuz the results from the quick scan is not accurate.
Quick Scan should not be used alone to show that a drive works. It can however sometimes show when a drive fails.
This is how i do my (used) hard drive checks:
1. Check SMART: If any bad sectors or seek errors, drive is bad, if good, go to next step
2. (Optional) Check HD tune quick, if any red squares, drive is bad, if good, go to next step
3. Check HD tune full, if any red squares, drive is bad, if good, go to next step
4. Wipe drive if used.
5. Check SMART again for any new errors
I do all of this with a copy of hirens boot CD 15.2, a free live cd/usb tool with hd tune included.
Another piece of advice concerning a dying Hard Drive is try not to change the Data on it at all until you back it up. I have 3 Hard Drives that are on their last legs that all still work because I disconnected them when I noticed the problem & backed up what I needed from them. They all still work & I still occasionally pull Data off of them but have not added to or erased any files on it. They will probly work like that for a long time, good enough for a secondary backup for whatever is on it.
Sometimes when HHD doesn't work I dismount the PCB and clean all the contacts and put it back again and it works. Sometimes, not always.
Before giving up on a bad HDD take a look under their PCB because they can develop rust (usually looks like some kind of black gunk) where the PCB touches the HDD head pins and motor pins.
Removing the PCB and cleaning the contacts with rust cleaner/a eraser/isopropyl alcohol can bring them back to life and put them back into service for many years.
I have 2 ~8 years old 2Tb Seagates drives that the Bios was having a really hard time trying to detect them and when it did they where giving a lot of R/W errors or disconnecting. After a cleaning the PCBs they are now working like new for about a year.
The only thing is that the first driver that started showing problems I didn't knew about it and I tried many softwares in hopes of fixing it. Using the driver when it was giving errors while using repair softwares left a mark on the S.M.A.R.T. If you check this HDD on the HD Tune Pro it will say that the drive Failed and must be replaced but in reality the drive is fine.
One has 1263 days of power on and is the one with the S.M.A.R.T. failed. It was my main OS for many years but I have a SSD now. Even being fine i'm only using it to store games and movies because of how long it has being in duty.
And the other have 114 days of power on and started showing the same problem around 12~16 months after the main but I already knew what do to so the S.M.A.R.T. is clean.
Both where brought and installed in the same year (~2012) with 2~3 months of difference. The difference of time probably is due power saving that turn the disk off if its not in use.
I got a 8 TB enterprise HDD off ebay for $60. No issues with it and hardly any power-on hours...so I would say yes, they are worth it :)
At least if you find a good seller anyways+being able to return is always nice if something goes bad
What seller sold you that hard drive?
Another great tip for you or PC builders. Use something like Seagate Seatools. It's free and has a lot of the features of HD Tune. You can even run the built in self test on the drives from a bootable USB or inside windows. My favorite tool to asses HDD and SSD health is Hard Disk Sentinel (not free, but absolutely a great tool).
I've sold bad drives myself, without any ill intent. I did reimburse those drives, but yeah. I'm a techy person, but even techy people don't always know much about bad drives. It's very easy to buy or sell bad drives.
Good tips! Being mechanical devices wherein small misalignments can be disastrous it's definitely important to take a second good look at one. I'd like to add one thing: If you think something is wrong with only the PCB on the underside of the drive, don't bother trying to replace it. There's certain information on it regarding the physical properties of the platter in the drive. The chance that even a 100% identical model drive's PCB will work (without problems) is very slim
That would be usually the EEPROM, but knowing WD cheaped out on some drives a little bit too much, I wouldn't be surprised if someone tried to swap in a board, only to find out they have to transplant the MCU chip because there's no EEPROM.
Maybe I'm wrong but Seagates are far more lenient in this case - not 100% sure though.
I have had great experience with used HDDs here in the UK recently. I like to buy in bulk, 10x 1Tb Seagate ST1000DM003 all from 2016 for £100 shipped in a segmented hard drive shipping box all in sealed anti static bags. Cheap and very cheerful. Before that 5x WD gold for £40
What do you need 10 hard drives for?
@@IosifStalinsendsyoutoGulag I also build and sell PC's
@@bencarter96 Oh...so pre-built PCs often have used parts?
@@IosifStalinsendsyoutoGulag probably not pre built PC's from a shop, for me building PC's is a hobby so I just try to get people the best price for performance which often involves used parts. I just test everything well and give warranty, can't argue with lower price for the same performance
Something I’d found a couple of times with old motherboards and new SSDs is that the SATA cable May be the problem, specially if the cable is not brand new. The system may not see the SSD but changing the SATA cable fixes the problem. Since the first time I experience this problem I always buy new SATA cables and I also try to use the shortest cable posible. Updating the firmware on the SSD also helps. Thanks for the great content!
8 years ago I got 3 2TB drives at 50 aud each. They're all still spinning to this day
dealing with an old failing disk taught me a whole lot about how to use computers and how to optimize my process, cause less wear to components etc... had a "clicking" disk that made a lot of noise on Windows, on Linux the thing is silent and still running... learned how to put my temporary files inside a RAMdisk (specially browser directory), learned how to use symlinks to store files that are written to constantly in another partition but make the system still think that it resides inside the same partition, etc etc... you say 8 years there, I don't doubt that number... SSD's just can't compare, all of the sudden you lose everything (seeing people installing whole OS's inside SSDs just make my stomach turn by the way... well, the market depends on some dumb people burning money I guess...)
@@FeelingShred ok I was with you until the ssd point, that's just totally incorrect. Sure maybe mlc nand when it was first released was unreliable as fuck, but new nand is waaaaaay better than rust in terms of reliability. At my place of work we had 5-10 hard drive failures per year. With the ssds, it's closer to 1-2.
As for where you install the OS, why would you care if it was destroyed? There's no critical data in the OS? As long as you aren't an idiot and repath your documents/downloads etc to a redundant system (either raid or cloud storage) it shouldn't matter if the OS drive goes kaput because you don't store user data on it.
So no I completely disagree with your characterisation of ssd's here.
@@FeelingShred *knock on wood* none of the SSDs that I have ever bought over the past 10+ years has ever failed. To give you an idea of how much usage they get as a boot drive, my current boot drive which is just over a year old is sitting on 17TB of data written. The only one that I have that is a bit worrying is a Seagate 2TB SSD that is already at 90% life remaining after 5.36TB data written but it has been sitting at that value for the past 6 months or so despite being in use so it is possible that HWiNFO64 is reading the SMART values incorrectly.
@@FeelingShred Only on cheap SSD, old SLC x25-E have a life span beyond your own. I still have some that work to this day, write life barely touched in s.m.a.r.t. even though they have written fully over many times over.
But yes spinning drive prices have been stagnant forever. Drives used or new, you need at least a pair regardless, so either way you trust nothing.
Pro Tip: Download Crystal Disk Info, set it to "Start with Windows" and "Show in the Tray". It will warn you as soon as something unusual happens with your drive or if its about to fail. Helped me out a few times now.
HDD Sentinel is another such product which also supports dedicated hard drive RAID controllers. Not sure if crystal mark does that or not.
@@pixels303at-odysee9 idk either, but great tip too
Agreed, I installed it to run all the time just a few weeks ago on my systems and notify me by email on issues. Just two weeks later, it notified me of one drive that got a bad sector...then a couple days later it got another bad sector. The early notification made it possible to swap the drive and easily transfer the data without having to pull it from backups. I do backup everything, but it's faster to just clone the data from a working drive. After the data was transferred, I stress tested that drive and a ton of new bad sectors to appeared.
@@Zeric1 Glad it Helped you :)
Another stress test is to attempt to read the entire contents of the drive. Bad sectors do not surface until a failure happens, and a failure is unknown until that sector is used. Another trick to make your drives last longer is to mirror them, format them with ones and then zeros, and then copy data back. Thus refreshes the strength of the data and even makes the drive speedier.
More important than power on time is power cycle count. I never spin down or turn off my HDDS, if i can help it. I have many 12+ year old (spin time) drives still humming along.
Exactly, also every time the computer hibernates or is suspended, the disk has to stop/start again. These days I just leave my laptop turned on 24/7, only reboot when strictly necessary. Computers were not made to be powered off.
well, i guess thats one win for SSD
Important tip. If you have time to unscrew the motherboard of the hdd, 2.5/3/5 doesn't matter, IF there are pads that make contact to the hdd itself, sme may have a plug/socket system but most have pads, then check to see IF they have dulled and become almost brown, this can and does prevent the hdd from showing up in the bios, reading incorrect space etc. If so then all is NOT lost, just get a soft eraser and rub over the pads being carteful NOT to knock off any companonents as some around thyose pads can be very small. The reason? that brown tarnish can prevent proper power going into the hdd itself and read/write line etc from being read properly. This is because of signals being transfer are actually electrical. The less the conductivity, the less chance of reading or powering etc. Give them a rub and they should shine up. You can try IPA but tbh, that most likely will not work as effectively. Do the eraser and try again as you may find that this was the cause all along.
I have had this issue and even provenj to a fiend on a hdd that had NOT spun for 10 years or more, after doing this in front of him, it spun up for the first time in that 10 year period. Nothing wrong with it. So, give it a go, even if your own hdds fail, try taking a look, normally a Torx screwdriver is needed but other than a philips (cross head). the pads? usually around 2 rows f about 10+ on each. Just pads nothing soldered on to them, no solder on them, just straight pads.
When I built my first gaming PC I bought a used hard drive which was a 1tb western digital blue for £25 and I have built 3 more PC's since and still using that hard drive as a secondary drive to this day so a good purchase made in my opinion.
still rocking a 2.5" WD Blue here too...
About 90% of my drives are 2nd hand, all purchesed though cex with a warrenty, I just use them as cold storage and check the data every 6 months or so, all various sizes and makes from 500gb to 3tb. Its a cheap backup method for me.
yeah these things can be useful for storing non-critical data, like games, emulator ISOs, movies etc... just keep writes to a minimum and things should be okay... been using one like this for 3 years, there's other guy that says 8 years, I don't doubt him at all... Linux helps a lot with old drives too, less random writes on disk
@@FeelingShred You sound confused....writes dont affect durability with old fashined spinning HDs...Actually, writting is required to make sure your data stays intact overtime... For this sole reason, there are apps that their only use is actually rewriting all the sectors of a hard drive with the very same data they contain, to make sure the data is safe and magnetism strong... Leaving a hard disk in a shelf for a decade is a good way to lose some data here and there...
@@Trikipum what you're talking about is bit flips which can happen and are accelerated by heat, generally HDDs are less prone to bit flips than ssd's.
However writes do effect lifespan, anytime a HDD is doing something that being idly spinning with a parked head it's doing wear on the bearing, everytime that write head moves up and down the platter it's one more chance of a head crash or something
I once got a cheapo used drive off eBay. It was shockingly high hours, but it ran just fine with no issues. Still have it in my secondary computer.
Ahhh the classic sound of clicking. 100% agree that hdd is useless...
HD Tune is a great free tool, have use it for years, and It's a great tool to pick a good 2nd hand HDD.
If you can see the manufacture date, power on hours and #of power ons (hdd), or TBW (ssd), and the drive is within normal use range, then sure no problem. Actually my whole Nas has manufacturer referb and open box drives. Haven't had a single issue. Just get DOA replacement guarantee and stay away from scetchy looking listings
I have bought refurbished HDDs that have worked great and some that have had problems. I would recommend running a full capacity test on the drive using a tool like badblocks. I have a dedicated linux install on a flash drive (not a bootable live iso, an install using the flash drive as the boot device) specifically for this purpose. If you are going to be processing a lot of drives I recommend using a tool like BHT that allows running badblocks on multiple drives simultaneously, and creating a dedicated rig for running it. As a added bonus running badblocks will overwrite the entire drive and leave it blanked as all zeros when complete, so you reduce the concern of sensitive data being recoverable from the drive. It is not as good as running dban, but is an improvement over nothing while you are inspecting the drive.
The Skyhawk is still under warranty. If you aren't able to get it repaired in oz(you should be able to however), bring it to Taiwan where we can repair it and make another video.
Who is "we"
I got several Seagate drives sent in for repair, and replacements failed and were sent in for replacement, where those replacements also failed... So on so forth.. Seven times across 11 drives before I gave up and threw them all in the garbage in favor of buying WDC. In ten times that time, I only had two WDC drives fail, and only one on warranty. It says a lot about their quality. The cost of shipping the drives to Seagate, added up, and losing my data numerous times nearly ended up with me smashing all my computers with a sledge hammer. So frustrating losing irreplaceable family photos, videos and countless hours of work on the computer. I always recommend using RAID with crappy drives like Seagate.
@@HoloScope I took Bryan to do tech repairs in May when he was in Taiwan. I was in the video.
@@pixels303at-odysee9 That sounds awful! I would certainly be unhappy with that too if that happened.
if i have two hdd that dont look perfekt, i just put them into RAID 1
would be a waste otherwise (in my opinion)
they make great candidates for software raid. I use storage spaces and its been super robust for me and has survived a few drive failures now. Speeds are slow, but for a lot of things that doesn't matter so much. If you use ReFS it will periodically check your files for bitrot too and fix any that it finds along they way. And bitrot can be a problem. Especially when moving around terabytes of data.
or a DIY nas - rock64 openmediavault with ZFS or Btrfs
Wtf is perfekt....lol
I noticed that on some drives,when using hdtune quick scan option,it won't find bad sectors on the drive,but using the normal slower error scan will find bad sectors.
One thing I've found to be helpful with used drives is to squint really hard at the picture to find a manufacturing date. Worked out great for my mint 256GB NVMe drive that was only 5 month old.
I just use white label drives. Instead of paying for a used drive and not know what you are getting, white labels are brand new drives by major manufacturers without a manufacturer warranty. Used drives usually are out if warranty anyway, might as well spend money on the new drive and sellers will usually give you a 1 year warranty
Thank you, finally i found someone who actually showed what a bad drive sounds like, i was worried that my hard drive years ago and it never made a sound like that
I got my 1tb drive for 18 bucks shipped and it has been great. A little loud but one-day when I can build my own pc (when prices calm down) I will go ssd for my boot drive to quiet things down. I only have the 18 dollars and traded 5 year old tv into my pc. Plays fallout 4, mafia 3, and much more. Love it.
Buying used hard drives is great option! I set up mine in ZFS pool with 2 or 3 drive fault tolerancy. After few months of 24/7 running only one broke, which I replaced with no data loss
I was once out for a walk and found a PC in a thornbush, It was rusty and had been rained on for quite a while.
The drive I pulled out of it was a Hitachi DeskStar 160GB, the PCB was rusted and the solder connections around all the SMDs were corroded.
But it still worked, and probably still does work, three years later as it sits in my hard drive drawer.
I had a friend who swore he could fix his old ipods with the hdd's when they made that clicking sound, by violently slamming it on the floor.
Well i guess they didn't make a click sound after that anymore.
Lmao
Sometimes the bearings start to go and whacking it can get them going. Less so with modern HDDs where the thing will just jam up and your screwed.
I once had some WD Raptors in raid 0 back in the day and every time i started the PC i had to " encourage " the platters to spin up with the rubber end of a screwdriver , once they warmed up they where fine.
In fact , pro tip, if you want to replace the drive in your PC or server just as its about to go out of warranty.
Step one, go get your rubber mallet ( you do have a rubber mallet right ?)
Fire up some massive disk to disk copy on your drive to get it spinning nice and fast.
Take rubber mallet and go to hell on the side of the drive !
after about 10 or so good hits you should hopefully get a head crash.
Return the drive for replacement, the rubber mallet wont leave any marks!
On the side can be helpful if the heads are stuck, but 'flat' and you damage heads or platers. A method I had to try on an OLD drive (Quantum Fireball) was stick it in the freezer for a day. Gave me ~15mins to back up files, 2nd time it died for good.
@@andljoy Or, don't be a swindling a$$hole. Every time someone pull these kinds of stunts, it raises the scrutiny and suspicion level for everyone else with a honest claim. At warranty intake, all they do is check drives. You don't think they can tell the difference between impact damage and wear/fabrication failure? If a drive has failed, is grinding, clicking or completely dead and it's in for warranty replacement claim, they pop it open. Because people do this sh1t and it's definitely not covered by warranty.
One thing about old or used HD is if they was within the 5 years from date of manufacturer its usually covered by the warranty. I had a lot of drive in the past that they replaced the drive without receipt that WD, seagate, ibm etc. all they ask was the date it was made. That covers retail or oem HD in most cases.
Bad sectors can be just crc errors due to power losses. First you need to confirm the sector is actually bad by zeroing out the drive (full format) and seeing if the bad sector remains after. If its gone its just gone, it was a half written sector which had a bad crc and wasnt actually damaged
I'm 9 minutes in and didn't see the below mentioned... Sometimes the drives stay in reset mode as long as they get power on the 3.3v pins in the sata connector. It's a relatively new SATA stand-by/staggered turn on feature. Covering the 3.3v contacts with some tape or a sheet of paper will get the drive started (or use a molex->sata adapter cable for testing).
If there's no vibrations (motor not working), it could be just a fuse tripped by the power connector, or a safety diode that's not conducting. A multimeter can check those (use continuity on fuses, diode on diodes). Sometimes, the power input jack contacts have solder cracks so the drive doesn't get 5v or 12v at all and resoldering the power connector gets them working.
I have 2 old 2TB barracuda drives that have almost 70k hours on them, they are used on a media server and still have no errors. I run error tests on them every month. My longest running SSD is a Samsung 850 Evo 500GB with 45k hours and 73 TBW to date, still runs like new.
Have 6x2TB Hitachi HDDS. Bought them refurbished 8 years ago. They're still going strong.
I have abused some drives in the past and they didn't show any bad sectors but did fail down the line.
We test all the hard drives we re-sell. We commonly use "Disk Health" in Parted Magic, or CrystalDisk Info. HD Tune is good, but CrystalDisk Info can get SMART info over a USB-to-SATA/IDE adapter where HD Tune can't. If we are suspicious of a drive that checks out in SMART we'll run it through a scan in HDD Regen, takes a while but it worth the peace of mind.
Don’t normally post, but you can easily get 2tb hdd new for around $60-70 in us. Usually seagate barracudas 7200rpm on Newegg or microcenter. So I think 1tb drive don’t really make sense new as you mentioned, vs a 500gb SSD for about $60.
Also crystal disk info will do a similar job, to the program you mentioned, but also work on SSD and it’s free as well.
I have all types of drives in my current rig. An Intel Optane 905P 480GB U.2-NVMe SSD, two WD Blue 3D Nand SATA SSDs of 2TB and 4TB, and a WD VelociRaptor 10000 rpm HDD of 1TB.
You are definitely my favorite tech TH-camr .....feels like all the others just try and show off there expensive PC's that they get for free lol
I got rid of all of my HDDs except one as a backup drive. SSD only system. Less noise, more reliable. I had a bunch of HDDs fail on me and only one SSD.
I've got a couple 1TB hard drives manufactured circa 2010ish from Goodwill and a thrift store in a redundant Windows Storage Spaces array for the past few years, and haven't had any problems yet. One of them even came with a few hundred bad blocks- and nothing more has failed yet.
Really, that's something you might want to look into- Windows storage Spaces. It can do all sorts of software RAID, and more. However it might involve a crash course in Powershell to do some of the more advanced stuff (IE: SSD+HDD tiering)
my local thrift store wants 20$ for an 80gb drive... that's IDE and untested.....
I bought a 500 gig hard drive on newegg that was supposed to be new but was obviously used as hell. Love how the seller took a blue Sharpe in a failed attempt to hide the wear on the label. The metal cover had so many deep nicks and scratches I'm surprised it actually worked but the s.m.a.r.t data showed it had 24 hours or so of runtime on it. Then down the line I bought a 3TB drive from Microcenter that was refurbished because it was about the same as a new 1TB drive from the same line. Good working drive but it's got 2 separate partitions on it that I can't get to merge to get it to use all 3TB on one partition. I'm wondering if maybe the drive was formatted with dual operating systems on it and the refurb screwed it up or something. Also years ago I had a hard drive go belly up the moment it started that clicking noise in a laptop
I am a HUGE fan of that rope lamp. It is truly rugged!
Speedfan (which is free) has a truly excellent HD analysis feature, that reports all the smartdrive parameters and health and can also do an even more in-depth analysis. I really recommend it for assessing whether a drive is worth using or not.
I have a portable HDD from college (Graduated in 2012) that I used to throw in my back pack and not think twice. That case is scratched to hell but the thing is still kicking (though I have noticed some slowing in recent times).
I got this 2tb refurb. Sounds like a jet engine spinning up, and shakes the case during any kind of activity. But it works great.
I had a drive like that once, it was an enterprise drive, I loved that sound it made when it spun up but I could've done without the extra idle noise, so I'll be sticking to consumer drives from now on.
my dads PC has a 6TB toshiba HDD, it is VERY loud, loudest HDD i've ever heard, but it does work fine
I bought a New seagate drive similar to your model, but with 8TB capacity. It too won't even run when plugged in my pc. But gyess what: i applied a piece of tape on a 3.3V pin on the sata power connector, and once plugged again, it now works miraculously !
So be careful especially if you have an older power supply, this issue can happen to you.
My total of faulty drives have been 1 x Corsair SSD & 1 x WD HDD (both bought new) over the last 30-odd years. I also have a NAS using 4 x Ironwolf Pro's drives running 24/7 for over 2 years now without any issues. My philosophy is you get drives suitable for the job and as they last a long time, never (within reason) compromise on the price. In all honesty, I understand that people may be constrained by budget but in the great scheme of things, TCO is extremely low for storage. I wouldn't bother with the used market when it comes to storage for the aforementioned reasons. In reality, I have only retired drives (barring the 2 failures I mentioned above) due to their size more-so than how they are performing.
My PC are still running with one 500GB hard drive in addition to the main 120GB windows partition. It is old enough that it still run on SATA II standard. Just make sure you get a warrant, and then try to fill it all out as soon as you install it. If it crashed, return it.
I lost 2TB of data thanks to 2 1TB external HDs from Walmart.
My mom bought them both an I lost everything on them. Never again.
Bought 1 WD from Walmart a long time ago still works. Bought 3 hard drives off of OfferUp. 1 Seagate HD and 2 WD 500gb hard drives. They still work to this day.
Oh man, I almost forgot about the "Deathstar" and the click of death. Before IBM sold it to Hitachi, it was infamous for reliability issues.
Thank God i dont have any problem with my hdd-s (i have a 13, an 8, a 6 and a 3 years old drives) and i dont had any problem with them. Of course i backup regularly on my newer external hdd-s.
Thank you so much for the info! Love your content so much😁👌 it's worth noting I used to buy SEAGATE it took me 4 harddrive to realize the company has bad quality control... all 4 were brand new and all of them died on me within 1 year. Since then I've only bought Western Digital and I kid you not all 10 of them are perfect functional and fine. I need big hard drives for storing my 8k TH-cam videos.
I work with surveillance systems for a living and all of them have hard drives. The Seagate 3 year failure rate is over 50% and the Western Digital 3 year failure rate is less than 5%. I will only ever buy WD until Seagate fixes their issues.
@@iamsoldats wow I didn't know this before wasting money lol
I tend to put together a few PC's once every couple of months and then I sell them off...it's just a hobby for me and it scratches that itch of wanting to build something. I've got to say I do enjoy these videos about what to be careful of when buying.
To keep costs down, as a main storage drive I'll usually go on eBay and buy either a 500gb ($15) or 1tb ($30) generic, unbranded hard drive that's listed as new. I'm not sure if these drives are truly new or not, but they usually work pretty well, and the only one I got that didn't work (it would just show up in Windows as having 0.0mb available and I couldn't find a fix for it) the seller replaced pretty quickly. I'm glad to know about this health check program... I'll be using it going forward.
And a selling note to the TechYesCitizens who are curious... Yes, people still buy PC's with hard drives in them. Other tech reviewers act like hard drives just shouldn't be used at all anymore, but that's not true. People don't care that it's got hard drive storage, at least when buying low end systems. Just throw a cheap SSD in there as a boot drive for better quality of life while browsing the desktop and they won't mind longer load times for their games. And some people, myself included in some cases, are only playing eSports games or maybe older games that load quickly enough even on a hard drive.
Oh...or they could be someone that only plays GTA V (I've met plenty of people like this actually, including my wife). While the load times are pretty bad in that game, swapping from a hard drive to an SSD makes no difference. It's one of the only games I know of that actually changes load times based on how good your CPU is. Moral of the story is know your customer and what hardware they actually need.
500gb to 1 tb is what you find inside sky HD & sky Q boxes, its also an ideal way of getting a HD without paying thru the nose for one, you only need to format them
I don't immediately ditch a drive with a couple of bad sectors: if there's like 5 or fewer bad sectors, I perform ATA Secure Erase on the drive, which makes the drive format itself and forces the drive to reallocate any bad sectors it finds while doing that. In my experience, those couple of bad sectors typically appear in a rather short amount of time when the drive is still new, but then there don't appear any more of them after that, so, once the drive has rellocated those from the spare-area, it's all good and fine again. I've got several ~10 year-old drives like that that I'm still using.
It's only if there appear more bad sectors later on that I ditch the drive.
My brother got his 2TB WD red in a good condition for 20 Euros which should be around 22 USD
The Tech Yes City Rebrand is 🔥
I always check the smart status using hddscan but I will definitely try your method.
I had a 2.5" external that was clicking recently and holy crap did it actually last for some time after that and I was even able to copy off all the data from it. I actually used it for a few months like that before I finally retired it and it was still operating last I had it plugged in. It just slowly kept adding bad sectors but there must have been enough spares because it never came across any that it couldn't recover. The drive was totally full too. Usually by the time they start clicking they are completely toast. Used drives can be a good bargain if they aren't brand new and known to be working. Most drive failures happen either really early in their lifespan or pretty much at the end. The mean time between failures for most physical drives is in the order of years these days. I have quite a few that are over 10 years old and are still totally fine despite being used on a daily basis. Interestingly, I have a bunch of external lacies and they all started failing right around the same time.
I had a 30gb hard disk that was clicking for over 3 years before it died...
can u do a review of that china ssd "X-Star" that you show in this video? is that any good?
I'm interested too. I know they are mostly sold to the local Chinese market and they contain SK hynix memory chips which are a very good brand. But as for the quality of the board and controller that X-Star makes, who knows. I know it's only a small company with a small factory.
@@brendanfarthing they are dram less ssd. with some times bad controller
I prioritise buying new for my media storage drives, used if it's in "like new" condition 6 months top. Stretch to 1 year old if the price is right.
Game storage drives, or for flipping a PC then I can consider older drives.
Seagate has a bad rep for failure rate from what I can see, and with personal experience, twice.
If you use HDTune to routinely check HDD health, turn off quick scan. I'd be saving cash by the first bad sector and most of the time that small error gets missed on quick scan.
scratched up labels and covers are not the only indicator and/or means noting as some drive bays have very close tolerances in the space and the metal edges can scrape over the label or top cover and scratch it up.
hard drives can be very sensitive to even where if the top cover or or certain screws are removed especially the ones under the warranty void stickers will hold the head stack and because of how precise hard drives are if the screw is removed it will cause the head stack to shift and cause it to never work again.
that is why recovery houses has a special head stack alignment software tool that they can re align the head stack when doing data recovery.
from other videos i have seen it is mostly the western digital drives that are sensitive to shifting head stacks.
next hard drives are very sensitive to dust and can only be serviced safely in a clean room so that is why recovery houses are very clean
My 500gb hdd from 2010 still working today no clicks or whining noise. I just use it to store my old music and installers
i got a few old ones i just use them as backup drives.. just dump all my stuff on them then unplug it and put in the draw until i need it
HDD drives will still worth it to store loads of data. But another thing that you didn't mentioned is that these type of drives, specially the most old ones, they will suffer a data loss over a very long period of time by demagnetizing the information of the plates.
So until the SSDs will catch up in price to HDDs, these type of drives will keep being produced.
I have 70% satisfied experiences with used hard drive so far. I have bought a lot of used hard drives, only 2-3 drives are failed. But for some people I know, he bought some used hard drives too but almost all the hard drives he got are failed in just a month after he bought.
for me it's worth it bought 2 of them with warranty and proof it worked they packaged like new for like 50% off retail or something
I've had good luck with used drives, especially from a recycling center.
Never had a problem with 3.5 drives. I had a 2.5 fail under warranty in a toshiba laptop once. Really not supprised. Was replaced with a Hitachi which is workimg 10 years later so thumbs up to Hitachi at this point
Yes in US you can get a 83$ SSD, the inland professionals come from MicroCenter, and come with 2 year warranties ontop of that at no extra cost.... Not to say they are top of the line but still good deal
It's like a gamble... Sometime you got really good used hdd, sometime got really bad used hdd. I always use HDSentinel Pro cz the UI is really good for beginner
That's a lot of used hardware, I'm afraid. Just be familiar with return policies. I use what mostly, so unless the thing I bought is like $15 I'll go ahead and exchange it or refund it.
my pc is 100% used, with 3/7ths of the parts being over a decade old, and one is two decades old!
I’m starting to move towards putting just SSDs in most builds. If it’s over 600€, then I try and go with a 500GB or 1TB SSD. They are relatively cheap, if you do not get the best ones. 1TB SSD for 90€ new is a good deal IMHO
@Dalle Smalhals Ahahaha that makes sense, but you can get 2TB SSDs for just 150$, if you are alright with cheap ones. I doubt you,d need much more
@Dalle Smalhals Ahahaahh okay ;)
I purchase my used hard drives from a local computer store. He installs SSD’s, wipes the old hard drives, and puts them up for sale at 10 bucks per drive. Minimum 250 gb up to 1 Tb. All 10 bucks.
I think a compromise is to use RAID1 (mirror mode) and you'll enjoy the cheaper price whilst also having some sort of redundancy if one of the hard drives starts erroring our or dying on you. I personally use FreeNAS and ZFS setup to allow two hard drives to fail in a eight hard drive setup for safety (before I need to start worrying). The average computer user does not need such redundancy and they can enjoy RAID1 and get best of both worlds.
I've not bought tons of used drives so take it with a grain of salt but here's my take on it, the most important thing to look for is:
A) Good drive models, even "good" brands have their failures so it's important to look for specific models that a lot of people are happy with or find data on failure rates such as the backblaze reports.
B) Look for the date or date of manufacture (DOM), as long as it's been packaged well and it's at most 2 years old then it probably has a lot of life left in it and it should be obvious but if it's 5 years or older, it should be considered at the end of its life and not to be trusted.
Many businesses and smart people TAKE A HAMMER to their drives when they liquidate their older PCs. So if you see dents(even small dents) it's likely purposeful data security to destroy the drive. I see it almost every time I goto my local recycling center. (Weekly)
i'm just lucky that these days i just go online and buy used drives for cheap and get them delivered for next to nothing. i don't even have to leave the house and i'm usually guaranteed to get drives that are 100% health and 100% performance.
1:54 YES extracting that Price for Performance :)
Little tip, from what I heard of at least.
Turn on time is not a big deal to me, rather than number of spin on cycles.
When drive starts it's getting to most wear and tear on its platter bearing. This is why it's bad idea to have hard drives turn off when not used (an option in Linux) adding more stress than necessary and instead of 1000 power cycles you see 3000 or more.
I always scan for bad sectors, regardless of used or new.
I bought used PCs but usually the drives are fine.
I like buying used HDD mostly 1 Tb ones.
I'm using in my ITX rig at the moment 3 used HDD : 2x 2.5" HDD and one 3.5" HDD (from 2012 lol).
3.5" WD HDD : WD10EALX
2.5" Seagate HDD : ST1000LM024
2.5" WD HDD : WD10JPVX
The 3.5" HDD started to get unstable sectors (13 at the moment) but few months ago it was showing as good status in CrystalDisk.
Now it's showing as caution status but it's still working fine. I'm using my ITX rig to play games and watch youtube videos mostly so it's not that important if a drive fail suddently.
I also scored 2 more 3.5" WD used drives, a WD black and blue (wd10ezex or wd10ezrz can't remember the model) both 1 Tb.
If you buy used drive just follow the advice told in the video and you should be fine (not buy very old drive like sub 2011/2010, and always ask for SMART info about the HDD you want to buy).
For non critical data storage used HDD are perfectly fine like games for example or to use in a recording server/HTPC 👍
I use a program called SpeedFan. It shows all the temperatures and there's a S.M.A.R.T. tab that shows all the status values of your hard drives. If a used hard drive looks healthy, and sounds healthy, and shows no errors, then I'd have no worries about storing important data on it. In fact, I would put more trust in a used hard drive that is "TRIED AND TRUE" than new hard drive that has yet to prove itself.
Better yet, get a bunch of hard drives, stick them in a NAS with RAID10/RAIDz2, create a pool for files and another for block storage, add an iSCSI drive and Windows will think it’s local and you can have a pool of fast storage and run an NVMe locally.
Another thing worth considering is that 2.5" laptop hard drives work perfectly fine in a desktop, and are much more resistant to shocks from being shaken, dropped, etc.
You'd think. I have a friend who is easy on his laptop, but lost 2 different models of wd blue. Moved him over to a used ssd so hopefully I won't have do any more data recovery.
and also much slower. to the point where you may as well use a pentium 4 and not notice a difference.
@@zoomzabba452 Bad luck :( They have the same chance of failure over time as a 3.5". It's only shock that they're more resistant to. Even then, it's not like it's ever safe to drop it.
@@repeatrepeatrepeat Not if you get a 7200rpm. Admittedly there are far fewer of those used.
Laptop HDDs are completely useless.
They are INCREDIBLY slow. To the point where they're too slow to run Windows 10 at a usable speed. (a desktop HDD from the same era runs fine for example)
They only last like 1-2 years in my experience. Had about 4 fail on me for various reasons, one of them lasted a grand total of 15 days power on time...
I decided to just completely ditch them, use an SSD, and the laptop is incredibly snappy and response, whereas before it would take like 15 seconds just to open the start menu and 5 minutes to boot windows.
Never again.
My gaming laptop also has a HDD (not as a boot drive) it can't handle steam downloads as steam extracts as its downloading, and it causes stuttering in certain games, while on my desktop the game loads twice as fast and no stuttering, despite having weaker specifications in some areas.
I would never touch a 2.5inch hdd ever again, absolutely useless
Some of the things I have learned about HDD over the past 20+ years.
- Keep the temps under 40C. The new fangled boxes with little to no air movement are death to spinners.
- Try to minimize spin up and down as this adds to both wear and tear and heat build up. I have seen reports of 10+ years of constant use.
- Good power supply. Clean and abundant pereferred.
- Good cables. No corrosion and properly constructed, like there are no bad cables, right?
- If possible a real UPS with power regulation, this will help your whole build.
- Long term storage should be accessed as little as possible, rewriting a movie file is unnecessary. Large archives and back ups should be over written as little as possible. Multiple copies in multiple locations on different drives.
- Good quality drives will last longer but will cost more. Enterprise class used drives may well have in excess of 20,000 hours on them but due to the likelihood of few spin ups have much life left in them and are generally made with higher quality components.
FWIW I keep all my drives under constant fan cooling and currently have 2 Toshiba DT01ACA200 1TB drive with at least 31,000 hours each running just fine at 33C and a WDC WD30EFRX-68EUZN0 3TB with over 35,000 hours running at 30C. I also have a Seagate ST2000DM001-ER164 2TB running over 20,000 hours at 36C which strikes me as a bit warm. I guess time to adjust the fan.
I have quite a few desktop drives with over 20,000 hours on them, I also have an enterprise grade debate from 2009 that still works fine.
You are clueless.. I have a maxtor cheap ass HDD that is 76.000 hours+. Long term storage should be accessed as little as posible and never rewritten?.. that is a good tip to actually lose your data... you need to refresh your data in your hard drives, and the only way to do that is actually rewritting the data.. is in such a way that there are even programs that are just for this, to read a hard disk and rewrite every sector with its data, to make sure magnetism is strong...seems like you didnt learn that much in the past 20 years after all...
@@Trikipum I think my comment stands for itself, unlike your clueless and ignorant assertion plus your demonstartation of howlittle you actually know about how the encoding process actually works in older HDD. BTW If you don't supply evidence of your 76000 hours it is not credible.
I work in IT at my college so I'm constantly surrounded by used hard drives. From my experience, they usually work just fine, especially if they're coming out of office pc's that never even came close to filling them halfway.
Funny enough I've only come across 3 dead drive (other then the one's I broke myself) and all three of them came from iMac's...so take that however you like.
Im using one right now - best decision ever 😁
A couple of my hard drives are more than ten years old and came secondhand. I use them for backup of files.