I’m not sentimental over old tech, but tapes are great for doing system backups, which is what we use them for at work. They’re not fast, but they are cheap for the density you can get. It’s like $30 for a 2.5TB/6.25TB tape.
So you probably wouldn’t care for this video either. Pity… I’m a sentiMental old fuddy-duddy, I guess.
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For my current use in my current box… and really any of them going forward not much use for a mechanical hard drive. But that’s just me, use cases arise for them and will always be there, but there will be more mechanical plants getting shut down as demand decreases.
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At least you can play Pachelbel on floppies 
I still use floppies (including the old 5 inch) but I am usually de-compiling abandoned software and transferring old programs to newer media collections.
I love saving the old games and many of the old business applications to customize for newer equipment. (many of these simply got the job done without all the bells and whistles)
I still have the old dos based point of sale program from my mothers video store and i run it through dosemu on my linux machines (fast as lightning)
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if the drives are good wipe them and ebay them! If you are not using them any time soon at least make some money back on them!
just remind the buyers they are purchasing them as-is
Also one thing you might need to consider dependant upon how stable your electrical system is in your area If you experience brownouts it could be wreaking havoc on your drives
under-powering servo motors generates excessive heat in the motor as the control circuitry tries to keep the drive spinning at rated speeds it draws a lot more current.
read write functions degrade as well.
once a head warps from heat you get the familiar death clicking sound from the drive.
I would say for mobile use such as laptops, solid state is really required. All that moving about isn’t really suited for mechanical drives anymore. It’s kind of a desktop use now a days.
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I can agree here but still will say the importance of making proper backups.
sure they can take time but how much time is lost if all your files end up dumped because you didn’t take time to back them up?
Ive had people argue that they had a large drive so they didn’t need to make backups!
only to hear them whine because their drive crashed and burned
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Very true one 10TB drive is a lot of data if you fill it to lose.
Mechanical drives worked well enough for several years though, what changed?
Although I guess an interesting datapoint would be how rapidly the oil/gas/mining market’s impact-resistance-rated laptops switched to solid state - and what kind of mechanical drives were they using previously?
Mobile market today is evolving, and it’s probably due to technologies from the silicon side. It’s smaller and we’re up to 7nm now. There’s consequently a ever more demand for thinner, and bezel-less powerful devices. I just think HDD holds that progress back. They’re bulky, makes noise, and heavier. I think this is what changed over several years ago.
Personally, I don’t really see the point in ultrathin laptops. If it’s too thin to house a 2.5 mm in drive, it’s probably too thin for me to comfortably use.
There is one great advantage to HDD’s over SSD’s that I haven’t seen mentioned. HDD’s are a physical medium that can be recovered in the event of catastrophic drive failure. Platters are easy for a recovery shop to remove and place in another drive. SSD’s are much harder to take apart to salvage the data from the chips in a dead drive.
I consider my 3 SSD’s as expendable. I keep no data permanently stored on SSD. When I work with large files I use a temp directory on SSD and copy the data to an HDD when done. Of course my SSD backups are on multiple HDD’s also.
Honestly, I have no issue with loading my data from HDD. The files are relatively small and the 1 or 2 second wait isn’t a big deal for me. I do keep all of my programs and games on SSD for faster load times.
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I assume you mean 2.5in.
I kinda agree though. I like my XPS 15 just fine as it is.
Remember back in the day when laptops came with DVD drives?
A DVD is less than 2.5mm thick.
Just kidding 
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Good advice, droogie. My olde ThermalTake case provides more than ample airflow over my hard drives which are situated directly in front of the 240 mm fan, sideways, to provide maximum cooling where it is needed most. I’m still of the persuasion that modern mechanical drives are made more cheaply and are of poorer quality than the older ones of which many in my possession are still running without complaint. I use a UPS because I don’t like taking chances with dirty power plus I use a server grade surge protector in conjunction with it. My 1000 Watt PSU can run half an hour on my heavy duty UPS (I just had to test it) so I don’t think in my case this is an issue.
Still this is good advice and I concur with what you have stated as fact.
Oh, it’s somewhere in this monstrosity, my friend. Perhaps it was only briefly touched upon but I recall reading something about it. Back in the day we used to back up mechanical hard drives with mechanical hard drives. Critical data was also backed up on CD and later on DVD. So what is to prevent one from backing up an SSD with another SSD? i realize RAID is not backup but it sure saved my bacon when I was running RAID 10 on an LSI card and an SSD actually failed on me. (First one in ten years of using SSDs). To be honest I have had at least 20 times as many mechanical hard drives fail on me in the last ten years than an SSD fail. Plus backups to an SSD are so much faster.
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the platters themselves were never changed unless done in a clean room environment
the controller cards were swapped out with cards from like models.
while head damage can occur in reality it was kind of rare for that to happen.
generally it was the controller card would burn out from excessive heat buildup.
actual platter and head damage occurred when the drive was jarred sufficient to cause a brief crash on the disk surface.
the Bernoulli effect barely raises the head off the platter and a bump can overcome it.
Which is why I can’t fathom people using mechanical drives in lap tops. They get bumped, banged, jostled, and dropped so often that cloning the drive to an SSD is the only sensible thing to do.
I can’t fathom people using laptops. Small screens, limited performance.
I had to use one to service installations as a technician. But as soon as I could ditch it I was off a laptop.
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