HDD age concerns

News & General Discussion
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Not sure if this is allowed here, or should go into hardware forums.

I accidentally found out that two of my HDDs 6 and 7 years old. Both are WD Blue 1TB, one has 2180 power on days and the other is 2627 days according to SMART. That’s 5.7 and 7 years repspectively.

Is it the time to replace?

I think I can replace them both with a 4TB HDD or replace just one of them with a single SSD drive. As prices for 2 TB SSD drives are in uncomfortable range for me (meaning I can buy, but won’t be happy).

Neither of those two are a system drive. The system has been sitting on a SSD for a while.

Thoughts?

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That’s old but that’s not really the problem, an HDD can fail while still in its first year of service anyway.
Take a look at that study, it’s very interesting:

If you just want to store data you can lose without any problem, you should just buy an HDD, 2Tb or 4Tb depending on how much room you’ll need in the next 5-10 years.

If it’s to store work-related data, the relevant questions are:

  • will you lose lot of time if an HDD fail?
  • will you lose important data if an HDD fail?

Usually you lose a lot of time when the system drive fail.
You can prevent that by either using mirroring either having recent images of your system disk.
I think an SSD can fail, I never had the problem but I can see no reason for it not to be able to fail.

About protecting the data, you need to have a backup in another physical place (might be a cloud or a portable HDD you update frequently and store in a family/friend house).
Having another backup locally is helpful because it’s faster to restore than a distant backup, this is usually done by using mirroring.

About mirroring, I had a problem with my previous computer because I was using the on-board RAID with black WD disks.
The problem is that sometimes (about once or twice a month) the RAID had a “problem” because of one HDD (both had “problems”).
But these “problems” weren’t really problems, it was coming from the fact that an HDD can take some time to startup, and the on-board RAID wasn’t waiting long enough before thinking that the HDD had failed.
In that case you have to lose 6-8 hours rebuilding the RAID, which slows down the computer to a crawl (nearly impossible to use Unity).
The fix is to use SSDs or NAS-specific HDDs (Red for Western Digital). I had no problems in the last 9 months with both configurations.

About large HDDs: the bigger they are, the more sectors they have, so the more chances they have to have a bad one.

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I’d look at current pending sectors, and the various error rate stats reported. The raw value for current pending sectors I think is the most important from my experience.

But my personal opinion is SSD’s have squeezed the margins on HDD’s so low today, that HDD’s are now being made too cheaply. I’m concerned that their quality may be dropping. I’d probably trust an old but good drive over a new HDD.

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Well, I was eyeing WD Blue 4 Tb, then I saw bunch of reports “it started rattling and failed within few months” and “buy those made before 25th of july this year”, etc.

Regarding error rates… which ones should I look at? Because if I check the system with, say, speccy, it is all green on both of them. 0 for pending sectors, uncorrectable sectors, seek error rate, reallocated sectors, etc.

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Unfortunately each manufacturer provides a bit different data for many fields, and I’ve been out of IT and HDD testing for nearly a decade, so I can’t answer off the top of my head. I know current pending sectors has to do with damaged sectors awaiting remap, and when I was doing this it was the most reliable indicator that I better hurry up and replace this drive across all brands.

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Both drives are western digital. I’ve checked online sources, and looks like there aren’t any warning signs in SMART, aside from the power on time being measured in years.

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I have a Western Digital HDD from the rig before my current rig, which is I believe around 10 or more years old now. yet its showing as 100% healthy from various tests I’ve done. Of course, it could die at any moment. You never know with these things!

On the other hand the drive I was using for my backups failed in 2.5 years, and funnily enough the warranty was only for two years. But through the power of being really nice I got myself a replacement.

Naturally having a good backup plan means you shouldn’t have to worry about the age of your drives all that much. You know the drill: the three stage plan. One local working copy, one local backup, and one off-side back (either an external drive or an online backup).

So long as you’re regularly making backups your drives can fail to their hearts content and you shouldn’t be losing all that much when it happens.

At present all my drives that I do ‘work’ on are SSD’s, or an M2 drive for my OS + games (in two separate partitions). HDD’s are for backups.

If you’re looking for a new drive to do work on, I’d vote going for an SSD. They last longer and longer these days, alongside getting cheaper and cheaper.

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Absolutely yes!

Drives will happily kick the bucket with Unity’s taste for billions of little files. Unity chews through my drives. My SSDs have outlasted traditional drives every time (still haven’t had a dead SSD yet but in the last decade a couple of regular drives died). I suppose it’s because of the lack of mechanical parts etc and the fact they can safely over provision.

SMART didn’t do jack nor was there any warning about my regular drives dying.

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Huh.

Now I guess the questions is whether I should buy “lifetime” cloud storage, OR look into replacing one of the drives with a 1TB SSD, or replace them both with 4TB drive, despite people saying that the new ones are much more likely to fail.

For the record, both drives are nearly archival. Meaning there’s pile of stuff there, but it is not very important, and not frequently accessed.

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I wouldn’t say upgrade just because it’s old. If you have backups, there’s nothing to lose if it dies. Now, there are other valid reasons to upgrade (like SSDs being faster or you needing more storage).

I am still rocking the original hard drive that I got in my PC when I was hired at Unity in 2013. And I use it every day for repro projects I download when fixing bugs. It’s also a 1 TB WD Blue :).

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I would not make this dependent on the age alone. Watch the smart values and if they are fine … dont worry
For me HDD’s never failed from one day to another, there where always early signs ( smart, bad sectors etc… )
Just recently a WD 2TB HDD ( about 7 yrs old) started to show bad ( unrecoverable sectors ), i suspect bad eSATA cabling i used during its lifetime to be the reason ( cable often dropped the drive+ its power support )
As replacement i bought the 4TB WD blue you mentioned :slight_smile:

Additionally, in most of the failure cases on HDDs, there is always the chance for recovering most of your data , as the drive usually is still accessable. Thats of course not true when the drive goes completely dead.
SSD’s on the other hand are far worse on that: they either die without being accessible any more or - in the case of user error ( eg. formatting/destroying partition by accident ) - recovering is almost always a lost case. Mostly because destruction of MFT etc… happens so quick :slight_smile:

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One of my project archive disks is over a decade old, no problems. However, it is cloned a couple of times year so there are two copies.

Based on a discussion with a friend of mine (who is both a sr dba, and a data horder), I have switched up most of all my storage to NAS drives with raid. In theory if any of my drives fail, I should have no data loss. (of course if the whole thing burns up… well.). Counting the NAS boxes I have at least 2 copies of everything, and 3/4 of some. Pre-pandemic, I would visit my sister a couple of time a year in the next state north, and I would clone my key stuff on to a WD drive and store it her place. (offsite is optima).

But one one the crappy things I am now discovering, after being careful to keep everything, is that while the data is intact, the data is becoming unusable. I am not going to try opening a 10 year unity project. My freehand projects and useless, flas don’t work properly, and precious, precious Fireworks PNGs are just flat. sigh…

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Hahah! My ancient work is indeed mostly going to take emulation-level hacks to get working again!

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My oldest drives (2TB consumer drives, comparable to WD Blue) are close to 70.000 online hours now and still work fine. Of course they will fail some day, but until then I don’t see any reason to replace them.

If you need more reliable storage space at low cost consider getting old enterprise HDDs on ebay. Some specific models are extremely reliable and only cost around 30$ for 2TB here.

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I will say SMART failed me twice. I really, really don’t recommend people rely on this, and should change their drives up every 5 years with 10 being the absolute max. Consider this: you have a mechanical drive that is working harder every single year as tech advances, and you don’t think there is danger in that?

There is, and both of the drives that failed me were the backup drives. The more use your drives have (which logically will increase over time), the more chances of failure, especially if you work daily with them. SSDS have proven to be much more reliable than mechanical for me.

These days I back up to external drives, and have online backups. It doesn’t have to be extreme but with drives being so cheap, and time being worth money, it makes sense to from time to time “freeze” a drive, that is, replace it and consider it a snapshot of all your work up until then, in addition to a regular backup of your important work.

Anyone saying “do less” really hadn’t been hurt by this.

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@zombiegorilla already mentioned external storage, which is probably what I’d look at for archival stuff that’s not very important and not frequently accessed. But given that description, assuming they’re backed up is it worth any worry or effort at all?

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They’re not backed up, it is basically a pile of mostly unused/forgotten data overdue for spring cleaning.

NAS is an interesting idea, but that’s not a planned purchase, so I’d rather spend money on something else.

Overall, judging by the resposnes so far, it looks like the best idea would be to check both drives for critical data and move it - if it exists - to a newer volume and let it be. Then MAYBE replace the oldest drive with 1 TB SSD. Because I have plenty of storage, but I’m always running out of SSD space.

A slightly cheaper option would be to look into M-DISC Blueray burner, but then again, optical disc technology might be on its way out as well.

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You shouldn’t trust a single place of storage for your critical data, no matter how new or reliable it is.
Even clouds will lose the stored data now and then (the recent fire in the OVH data center proved that).

If you want a cheap way to ensure your data are safe, I think you should keep the HDDs you have, and buy a small portable HDD.
You backup regularly your critical data on the portable HDD.
You check it for bad sectors about twice a year (it is important to check it because that HDD will not be used very often so it may fail without you noticing for a long time).
And you don’t store it at the same location than your computer.

It’s better to do the backups frequently, but it’s not easy as you’ll have to get back the portable HDD, copy the data, and put back the portable HDD in its distant location.
So you’ll have to find a frequency that’s not too annoying, knowing that the lower the frequency, the more data you may lose…

There’s a way to half-solve the frequency problem.
It is to have 2 portable HDDs, one at your home, and a distant one.
You backup your critical data daily on the local portable HDD, and when you can you backup on the distant one.
That way your data are safe against a HDD loss, with at most one day of work lost.
But if it’s a fire or a theft, then you’ll have to get back to the distant HDD so you’ll lose more data. But these events occur less often than a failed HDD.

All these ways of protecting the data aren’t working that well, because they imply manual interventions, and we all know that after some time we lose the good habits and the daily backups become yearly backups…
That’s where a NAS is quite nice. You work on a network drive, which is in fact your NAS, so all your data are automatically safe against a HDD failure.
And if you have a second NAS, at a distant place, you can automate a daily backup.
But it costs a lot, which is why the portable HDD solution is a good one.

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I like switching the most critical drive every ~3 years, and make the old drive the new backup drive. But I don’t trust fresh drives either, so a new drive will need to prove itself as a backup drive for ~3 months before it may become the new critical data drive. I’m basing this on statistics mentioned in an old google study (probably the one that was linked already) and personal experience of drives always failing either soon after purchase or after years of use. And I only buy WD Red NAS drives (now they’re called something different iirc, Red Pro maybe?).

One of my SSDs (not even an old one, less than 2 years - 1.6 tb lifetime writes, 164 days power on time) is starting to get bad sectors. 35 so far, but it increases from time to time. I’m unsure how to proceed because I lack experience and knowledge about handling SSDs. Do I park the data elsewhere and try to “kill” the drive with nonstop write cycles to get a warranty replacement? Or ist this just normal with SSD? Or do I need to write it off and get a new one?

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The WD red drives aren’t more reliable than other drives.
In fact, they are WD green drives, with a bit of software to guarantee they will start spinning in a given time (without that, the NAS would wrongly believe the HDD is faulty when it takes too long to start, with 2 WD black in mirroring it happened to me about once every 3 weeks, with one startup per day, forcing me to rebuild the RAID each time).

The WD red plus are just WD red with a tiny difference about how they manage their cache.
It means that they are a bit faster when copying large quantity of data.

The WD red pro drives are a bit better, they are designed to handle more temperature and more vibration.
And they are also faster (7200 RPM instead of 5400 RPM).

If you really want more reliable HDDs, you have to look toward enterprise HDDs, but those usually cost about twice the price, which makes them about the same as WD black.
The enterprise HDDs are the WD gold and WD UltraStar (they are the same, with different names because of a branding conflict when they bought HGST).
And they have a drawback compared to red or red plus HDDs, they are really noisy…
In the past WD had enterprise HDDs which were designed to be silent, but they have stopped producing them.

The WD green are slow, they stop spinning when not used (so they can freeze the explorer for a few seconds, which is quite annoying…).
The WD blue are faster than the green ones, and they won’t stop spinning if not used.
The WD purple are surveillance drives, optimized for writing in sequence, so their performance for small files is not good.
The WD black are really fast and well built. They are designed for heavy and fast workload. They aren’t as reliable as WD gold but they are more reliable than the other WD disks.

If you want reliability for a lower price, go for the WD red plus (WD red pro for a bit more speed).
If you can afford it and if you’re ready for the noise, go for the WD gold.
If you have enough money or if speed is more important than reliability, then go for the WD black.
Note that if you want speed and reliability and if you have enough money, an SSD is a much better choice than a HDD.

I only talk about Western Digital because I’ve had only WD HDDs for the last 20 years, probably 25.
I had too many problems with other brands in the past (most of which are extinct now…).
So I have exactly 0 knowledge about the other brands, in fact I don’t even know which other brands exist on the market today…

If I were you I wouldn’t do that, well, except for the storing the data elsewhere part of course.
The SDDs record the write cycles, so the manufacturer will know you have exceeded the maximum write cycles and I’m pretty sure that will void the warranty (something like “non-standard use” or any other thing written in very tiny letters in the middle of a lot of lawyer-specific text).

Also, I’m pretty sure it’s not normal to have bad sectors on a young SSD.
I have half a dozen SSDs older than yours, and used every day, and I had exactly 0 problems with them.
You should try to contact the manufacturer, they should tell you what are your options.

With HDDs, bad sectors could extend because the head may hit the plates just after them, so I usually create partitions around the bad sectors zone, leaving a sizeable margin.
It usually work well, I had a HDD with bad sectors growing rapidly, and that stopped as soon as I changed the partitions.
But anyway at the first bad sector I backup the data and store only data I can safely lose on that HDD.

I have no experience with faulty SSDs, but as far as I know there’s no real reason for the bad sectors to grow.
That said, I have found some information which may be useful to you:
https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq-ssd/my-ssd-has-bad-sectors
It seems that bad sectors can grow on a SSD, I’m curious about the reason they do…

Anyway, the most important thing with bad sectors on HDDs or SSDs is to check if the bad sectors grow or stay the same.
If they grow you must absolutely not trust that disk, and either return it to the manufacturer or just dump it.
If they don’t, you can continue to use it, it’s a bit of a gamble but no more than using a healthy HDD which can fail without any warning anyway.

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