Hello everyone. I finally decided to swap my exterbal backup drive for a new one (old one had 7+ years). I got a 1TB WB Red drive (my thought process was Red drive, reliable for storage) and put it in an external USB 3.0 enclosure. I'm still keeping all the data also in the old drive because I'm waiting to see if this drive fails. How much you think I should wait before formatting the old drive? To "test" it I'm trying to run it as much as I can and so far is going well. Just one thing: I can hear it slightly buzzing when it's spinning but no vibration whatsoever. Is it normal? Thanks for all the answers.
you'll hear the noice it makes a lot more not being inside a PC case, depending on the design of the enclosure sometimes it can vibrate a bit which isn't good, but sound like what you're describing is the sound of normal operation.
have you checked the SMART data of your new and old hard drive, that often gives you fair warning if the drive is starting to get sick or is very sick already.
http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php
under the smart tab choose your hard drive from the drop down box, no all external enclosures support viewing of SMART data but most aftermarket ones do.
Thanks for the answer. The enclosure I'm using is this Enermax in the USB 3.0 version. This is with the new HHD. The old one was all made by Pacardbell and I highly doubt that I could get S.M.A.R.T. info about it since it's really old. I'm not feeling any vibration coming out of the new drive, maybe I just hear the motor. Anyway it's really really quiet for being in a metal enclosure. It never got alarmingly hot while I was copying 450GB of data alla at once and never did any weird noise writing small files consecutively. I decided to dismiss the old drive because when I pick it up turned off and I gently turn it around I can hear something moving inside, not rattling but something that's in some kind of rails but still moving back and forth. Also the drive is noisy, really noisy.
yeah if it's an old enclosure that came with the drive you might need to take the drive out of that old enclosure to view the SMART maybe not. It will either show up in the drop down box in speedfan or not.
I've got a few older seagates and other brands that still report healthy, but the crazy noise they make starting up and running, I don't trust them. I use them for experimenting in a test linux server with RAID arrays where when a drive fails it just give me an excuse to have experience recovering from that. etc.
That old enclosure looks like way too small to have a SATA to USB adapter inside. My idea is that the USB board is soldered to the drive. For now I'm keeping everything on the old drive, waiting to see if the new drive fails on me soon. How much you think I should wait before removing the files off of the old drive?
the rule is never have one copy, as long as there is a duplicate copy of your important stuff other than the old drive then go ahead and format if need be, early life failures tend to happen in the first few days or weeks, if it's fine after a month or two it's probably going to be fine until it starts to get to old age or until some hard physical shock happens while its running.
Don't throw it out, unless you drill through it with a power drill or open it up or do a secure wipe (format it like 5 times with random data patterns) some programs specifically do that. There is a chance someone can find it at the dump and recover data from it, keep it as a paperweight or do something to make it unreadable and deposit for recycling somewhere.
I'm going to keep my old drive, I won't throw it out the window. Thanks for the suggestion to destroy it anyway, I would've done it (I used to break CDs and DVDs when I decided to throw them so I did know the procedure). I'm gonna keep the old drive but use it for less important things and experimenting, like you are doing with your old drives.
yeah I learned that the tip workers where i live go through everything electronic and check out hard drives and stuff so I've paranoid about reminding everyone not to just throw things like that away.
Did you try loading up parted magic and doing an extended self-test? Best of luck.