So if you had an enterprise hard drive, in my case a Hitachi Ultrastar 2tb drive, with over 5 and a half years of power on time but 0 reallocated sectors, how would you feel about it? On one hand, it's 7 months past the end of when the manufacturer planned to warranty it to, but on the other it's kinda been torture tested and proven working.
Would you return it and roll the dice on better/worse one, or would you keep it and trust it? It will be used in a redundant pool of course, but I still don't want failing drives. Opinions?
From what I understand, enterprise drives are rated to last about 5 years, and much further past that they can start doing some really weird stuff. I would certainly not use it for much more than a scratch disk for stuff I didn't care about.
I'd say the same. Anything past 5 years is borrowed time. Not to say you couldn't get a few more years out of it, but you're essentially rolling the dice.
I have to test hard drives on a daily basis to see if they are healthy enough to be put into a refurbished systems and its obviously the biggest point of concern when buying a used system. As of now I rarely use hard drives if they are not from 2010 or later. That being said its the usage that I look at most... ie power on hours (like you had pointed out). With that amount of PoH's it would be tossed immediately (but its a business so there are stricter requirements from my end). Personally I've used those Hitatchi's in cheaper builds and they end up working fine however they are rather noisy (hell I still have several cabinet drawers full of them). Few years ago I'd have no problem using them, now its sparingly.
You are rolling the dice with that drive. If you can find one with lower PoH then I'd say go for it if you have redundancy.
Thanks for the comments everyone. I bought these drives "refurbished" (server pull) off of ebay, and I'm still within the return period so it'll go back along with the ones with reallocated sectors. I already planned on sending it back, but I wanted some backup on my opinion before sending it in. Thanks all!
Not sure why that statement is coming up all the time, he said that once, maybe twice in the videos.
Sure warranty is 5 years and they may or may not be "designed" for 5 years in mind (because that's the average use time after which they are usually swapped for bigger drives anyway), but they can very well fail well before that, but at the same time they could very well last double that time...
It's basically Schröderinger's Hard Drive... the only thing you have going for you on the first 5 years is the warranty, and that only covers the hardware, not the data, so unless you have backup you're screwed either way.
On a side note, just this winter my first ever hard drive failed. Old 320GB Samsung desktop drive running for 10 years nearly 24/7, and it's not technically even dead, the read speed is just abominable and I can hardly even write on it anymore... And also it disconnects every few minutes.... Ah well, maybe it's really dead.
5 Years power on is impressive and I would say you got your moneys worth out of the drive and a planned replacement is in order. Who to say how long it would go before death is an unknown.
I run a windows on an old ssd I dont mind if it dies. 80G intel
