I have just put some hard drives back into service, I never throw them out but when my Linux unit failed I dragged out one I had in storage for about four years.
It failed too along with about five others that were with it.
They will repair using a mint installation DVD, but I end up with filesystem faults after anything from a few hours to a few days. Is this a known problem? I thought disk drives would be like anything else really and not suddenly give trouble after being used out of the storage box.
On Windows, use HDTune free version and the Health tab, to examine the SMART table of information. This program is now 12 years old. There is this free version and there is a paid version which is constantly reissued. This free version does the all-important read benchmark, which is a good adjunct to the SMART info (it helps cover off the shortcomings of how SMART works).
formatting link
The image at the bottom of this picture, shows a Health display, with the two (bogus) yellow marks that all my drives show. The Reallocated and Current Pending on the example seem to be zero.
formatting link
Running a read benchmark using the Benchmark tab, if there are significant dips in transfer speed (10MB/sec for a 50GB swath), that's also an indicator that sectors were spared out and you may have a bad patch.
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Storing a drive in a place with widely varying temperature causes the breather hole on the drive to "breath". The hole equalizes atmospheric pressure. If the chassis of the drive is at a different pressure, air either moves in or out, as appropriate. The filter on the hole is a hepafilter, but it's still possible for humidity to work its way through.
Now, say this is a garage. Maybe the air is humid, and the temperature varies widely. Humid air enters the drive, the humid air condenses on the platter surface. The platter rusts (for lack of a better word).
OK, so I didn't take care of my drive for ten years. What should I do ?
Bring the drive in from the garage, into your heated house. As long as the humidity in the house is below 60%, when the drive breathes in and out over the next month, the net humidity level inside the drive may drop.
After a month, give the drive a try and see if it still behaves strangely.
The platters are plated and the "working bit" is the very top layer. I haven't seen a list of what the metal layers consist of, to advise what might happen to it.
The newer drives have a magnetic "keeper" layer just below the plating, and that part completes the magnetic circuit for the vertically oriented bits stored there. The flying height of the newer drives is very very low. A patent warns that the flying height might be 3nm. Whereas it uses to be 10u or 1u or so. A MFM scan shows the tracks have a height of 2nm (this could be a scanning artifact). The topography situations is about as close to a crash landing as they can arrange. The arm is very stiff, which is part of the reason the heads don't crash all that readily. However, when it comes to foreign materials sitting on the platter, the room for them to go "under" the heads, is zero. Everything is crash material, including frost.
After the disk collection has acclimatized, I'd give them a try. I would recommend storage in a box with a desiccant, but not many people have a ready supply of desiccant handy, so that would be silly.
The newer Helium drives, you don't have to worry about stuff getting in, because the breather hole is gone. The exposure with them, is that the Helium escapes. And it doesn't really matter whether they loaf in the garage or in the house, eventually the Helium has to get out of those. We just don't know at the moment, what the leakage rate is.
At least one of the Helium drives, has a sensor in the SMART table that says something about the "gas situation". But again, no tech details are available as to what kind of sensor, and whether we should trust what it indicates. So far I have zero Helium drives (I've been careful not to buy them by accident). It's not that I don't like science experiments, it's that they make so many science experiments I can't keep up. For example, there's a new drive out with two arms, that runs 500MB/sec total. But I don't really think it's fit for consumers. If I was a "collector", I'd definitely have to buy one...
Well disks are probably the worst for failing whilst a spare, but anything in the storage box can fail. Capacitors dry out, for things with moving parts the lubricants thicken and go gooey.
If several disks give the same problem, perhaps its not the disks, but what you are connecting them to. Could be bad RAM or bad IDE controller? I think I would be trying some long running memory tests...
Typically modern drives don't report bad sectors. The controller on the drive re-maps them and only reports bad when it runs out of spares. Have you checked the SMART data?
Silica gel cat litter is cheap (if you shop around) and readily available. It may be partially saturated with water when you buy it, so bake it in the oven for a few hours at about 120degC, spread out thinly over a baking tray.
Probably depends on the drive and how old it is and one of the worst places to store drives ins an unheated outbuilding or a loft, the temperature cycling seems to make them less reliable. What size drives and what vintage, Are we talking IDE here? Brian
hard drives are hermetically sealed. Temperature is more likely an issue, as platters expand, coupled with worn bearings that can make older drives unpredictable when cold, but once there is the least hint of an issue, chuck them. Life is too short.
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