Few years ago I replaced four or five external hard drives here with SSDs. These have sat around but now I've stirred my stumps to erase them prior to disposal. They'll get random data written everywhere and then zeroes. They are
7200rpm, various sizes of 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB.Question is, is there any value left in them? With SSDs of similar size going for £100 or less, is it worth the faff of trying to sell them?
I might be interested in the drives, can you share the makes and models on here?
(I am building a NAS based on OMV and need to fill the NAS box up with up to 16 drives)
Also if you could indicate their ages, and whether there are any bad sectors or reallocated sectors.
As a guide, I recentl;y bought some 4TB drives for my CCTV DVR and they were £45 each INCLUDING P&P on Ebay so if we were minded to do a deal, I'd be looking at 1TB drives at £11.25 each, 2TB drives at £22.50 and
3TB drives at £33.75 each.HTH,
Stephen.
These seem actually to be Toshiba drives. They're in OWC cases to match the Mac Mini in size. All have external power supplies. The 3TB I'm erasing at the minute is a Toshiba DT01ACA300, no reallocated sectors.
Purchases 2025-2017 time frame. I've got DriveDx so I can check them for bad/reallocated sectors once the erase process is complete.
Could be interesting. You want to email me with what part of the country you're in so I can see what to do about delivery? Then I can email you with the drive stats.
1T are worth a tenner. Why not give them to someone that could use them
I am in Northampton. Your drives sound like external drives.... Do these work via USB2 or thunderbolt?
My requirement is for internal drives so I would be taking the drive out of the external caddy and putting it inside a Full Tower PC case which has room for up to 16 hard disc drives.
Also are the internal drive interfaces SATA, SATA2 or SATA3? I can find this out given the full drive model names.
S.
Was it this "I replaced four or five external hard drives" that gave the game away?
Probably not. Old hard drives are a failure waiting to happen.
Not one of those of mine of those sizes have ever failed.
There is no way to predict what will happen to a disk.
I have one disk here, ST3500418AS Made in Thailand, that has more than 50,000 hours on it. It's in great shape.
Other disks from the same epoch, only last 6,000 hours before presenting symptoms.
Sometimes you get a good one.
With FDB motors, there's no reason they have to die. The ones with ball bearing motors, there is friction and the assurance they will gradually wear out. The FDB motor is frictionless, once up to speed. If the FDB motors have retention on both ends of the rotor (not all do), then it can last a long time. Only loss of lubricant, dooms an FDB. The motor seals are key.
The disk in question, does not spin down or park either. It is always ready to field a request. It remains flying. I have other disks, which are supposed to work that way, but the bastards put parking in the firmware. Then it's slow to answer if it has gone to sleep.
Very few drives, outright die on you now. They're more likely to be showing Reallocated Raw non-zero, and make you nervous about their future.
Try to keep the drives in the same orientation they have been used over their service life. I had one drive, in a refurb PC, which seemed to have suffered some high-fly errors. And I could no longer trust it. The drives are rated for operation in six compass point orientations, but personally, I would not take a drive that had been operating right side up (the 50,000 hour one), and flip it upside-down for fun.
As for the Helium drives, I suspect they could last a lot longer, as there is no breather hole and no exchange of atmosphere with the room air. The helium drives are only "guaranteed" to have helium in them for five years. The critical seal is via an adhesive, where the helium can only escape through the depth of the sealing surface. There is a cover for mechanical rigidity, which does not contain the helium, and the adhesive is what keeps the gas in. Two covers. Helium starts at 6TB or 8TB or so, and go up to 18TB to 20TB now. I have zero helium drives.
Room conditions determine the service life of drives. I think a dry room for the air breathing drives, is a lot better for them. While the hepafilter disc is designed to make it hard for moisture to enter, it's just a matter of time and atmospheric pressure cycles. The hepafilter disc is on the inside of the drive, on the cover, and just under the breather hole. It helps ensure the inside stays clean.
Charging a small sum for each drive, is a way of saying to the purchaser that you think there is still life in them. Use your usual test procedure for hard drives (acceptance test), before selling a drive on. I would have no qualms about selling that 50,000 hour drive onwards, because all tests pass and Reallocated is still zero. The HDTune benchmark curve doesn't have spikes in it (from Reallocations you cannot see). The 6,000 hour drive, with the non-zero Reallocated, I'd stick that in the dust bin. It still works, but if I won't use it myself (does not pass Acceptance Test), then I would not expect a buyer to put up with "trash".
One of the drives I got from the computer store recently (WD Black 1TB), was completely dead on arrival. Seemed to have a motor power issue, and would not attempt to spin. Just because a product is "new", does not mean a thing. That's the very first drive I've purchased, to have a problem like that. Naturally, it did not pass the Acceptance Test.
From a performance perspective, many of the old drives are too slow for any practical purpose, but you will discover purchasers are desperate for a "deal". I bet I could sell my Western Digital 4GB drive with the 5MB/sec transfer rate. It's still perfectly functional. Low service hours. Perfect for an antique PC for a museum project. Would be no good for booting a bloated OS.
The power-on hours, is a field in the SMART table.
Paul
Well, depends on their interfaces I'd say, though you can still buy usb to drive interfaces, normally you would need a power supply as well. If they are reliable then I guess you could use them as back ups for the back up. They are of course slow, but in the case of back ups, probably not an issue. Brian
Top-posting for Brian...
Is it still the case that spinning HDDs last longer than SSDs when there is a lot of writing taking place - eg when used for recording TV programmes, then deleting them after watching and recording something else in the same storage locations, repeat many times.
I can see that this might be a use for spinning HDDs.
I'm wondering whether to replace the spinning HDD with an SSD in my PVR - a Raspberry Pi running TVHeadend which records to a USB-connected spinning HDD. I'm wondering whether to replace the HDD with an SDD to reduce the power consumption, given that Pi and HDD are always-on.
SSD lifetimes are rated in TBW.
The number is hidden in the "View More" section at the very bottom of the manufacturer web page. For the 1TB drive here, this means the cells can be written an average of 600 times each.
Chia farming specialty drives, at a grand a piece ($$$), can have 20x higher endurance. Which would be over a million hours of recording from a single tuner. The secret to these, is stuff like Micron Enterprise Flash, where Micron claims the flash has 6x the TBW rating. And somehow the drives built using those, last 20x longer (hmmm...).
In any case, it's the TBW rating (whether honest or not) which estimates how long the device will last. You could place the NVMe in the PCWorld article, in an NVMe USB tray, to turn it into a TV recorder. But that's only if you could afford such frippery. The TV recording device, may not have enough +5V for an NVMe USB tray loading. Whereas the Samsung SATA drives I use here, seem to use around 2.5W on write. An OS with power management, may be able to force them into sleep state. The idle power is much lower. An old Kingston SSD with Sandforce controller, uses 7W peak power on write, which is too much for USB port usage on your average 2.5W USB2 recorder port.
Hard drives have endurance ratings too, but the units of measure are different. It's terabytes of writes per year, ranging from 110 TB/yr for WD Blue class, to 550 TB/yr for WD Gold class perhaps. I have no idea how we can use that number, to estimate the "bog roll rating" of a HDD for TV recording. I have a hard drive here, still in good condition after 50,000 hours of spinning and not doing anything :-) When the Gods look kindly on your hard drive, the FDB motors last a long long time. Modern FDB motors last a lot longer than the old ball bearing ones.
On a web site, hard drives last a year, before the flex cable to the head assembly fails. And that is the "beating the piss out of a drive" rating, where the TB/year are perfectly meaningless. The TB/year is a "head scraping platter" kind of rating (the bathtub curve for the drive exhibits a wearout shape). Some cheap drives, when disassembled, you can even see physical damage to the OS partition area.
If your TV recorder has already worn out a hard drive, then you already got a datapoint to work with. And screw the maths...
Broadly not any more.
The data seems to be that SSDs will outlast . HDDs in most applications.
The real uses of HDDS is in long term archival of data on drives that are switched off.
I would, yes.
Not necessarily - and don't believe every warning message you see.
I have a 1TB Seagate SATA Hybrid SSHD in my laptop. It's turned on and off every day; on time is around 15 hours a day, and it's now at least
8 years old, as it was 12 - 18 months old when I bought it. The first time I used Linux Mint's "Disks" about 3 months after I got the laptop it reported "Disk is OK; one failing attribute is failing (42°C/108°F)".It's still giving the same message...
Well that is probably about to die then. I don't think I have ever seen an HDD run reliably past 10 years of more or less continuous usage.
My server no.1 drive has logged 7 years of power on time, but its still basically error free.
I don't expect another 7 though.
USB. 2 or 3, not sure which.
Well I assumed you'd need just the drives.
I've finished erasing them all now. Here's some DriveDx log info about the 1TB I just finished:
### DRIVE 1 OF 1 ### Last Checked : 28 September 2022 22:21:37 BST Last Checked (ISO 8601 format) : 2022-09-28T22:21:37
Advanced SMART Status : OK Overall Health Rating : AVERAGE 52.8% Overall Performance Rating : AVERAGE 52.8% Issues found : 0
Serial Number : 27C10ENFS WWN Id : 5 000039 fedeabc89 Volumes : Untitled Device Path : /dev/disk4 Total Capacity : 1.0 TB (1,000,204,886,016 Bytes) Model Family : Toshiba P300 Model : TOSHIBA HDWD110 Form Factor : 3.5 inches Firmware Version : MS2OA8J0 Drive Type : HDD 7200 rpm
and:
=== PROBLEMS SUMMARY === === IMPORTANT HEALTH INDICATORS === ID NAME RAW VALUE STATUS 5 Reallocated Sector Count 0
100% OK 197 Current Pending Sector Count 0 100% OK 198 Offline Uncorrectable Sector Count 0 100% OK 199 UDMA CRC Error Count 0 100% OKSo you have 5 drives, one is a 1TB size, what are the other 4 drives capacities?
Yeah I'm only interested in the internal drives so you could reuse the external cases and put your own SSDs into?
Where are you located?
S.
oh and the drive models so I can look up if they are SATA1 or SATA2 or SATA3 interfaces.
Actually 6. I'll list their infos later today.
I had one Mini upgraded internally with a 1TB SSD which I've split into two partitions. And I have 5 or so external 1TB SSD for backup on various machines.
Near Canterbury.
They often have wear levelling applied so that one section is never repeatedly written to if other sections have had no activity.
Possibly only a problem on a PVR if the user near fills the SSD and then just has a small area to repeatedly record/play/delete. If the PVR SSD is regularly cleaned of the more historic recordings and perhaps always operated with a large percentage of the SSD free then it may be possible with 600 write cycles to record 300,000 HD programs within the life expectancy of the SSD.
75000 = 8.5 years - how much continuous TV needs to be recorded? :)HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.