2CPU.com » News » May 2007 » Weekend Topic: Longest running Hard Drive you have currently?

I've been watching some discussions from a few different forums other than our own here at 2CPU. Some members purchase drives with 1 year warranty and some will ONLY purchase a drive with a 5 year warranty. But, I think back to five years ago today and the drive of that time I purchased was an IBM Desktstar GXP 7200RPM. It was about as quiet as Can Opener back then. To this very day, the only purpose that drive serves today is a paper weight.

What is the longest running drive you have currently? Discuss.

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07/31/2004 04:35 PM: Weekend DC Updates by Hooz
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01/24/2003 07:11 PM: Weekend Gaming: Part Deux! by Jim
Last weekend I decided to rally the troops around here a little bit and get some Quake II Deathmatch action going on. We had a fair turnout over the weekend and I know everyone had a lot of fun. This ...

08/19/2001 05:44 PM: Weekend News Tidbits... by Jim
*Yawn*. How are you folks doing this weekend? Work was stressful this week (rolled out a new app, which sucks evidently) so I'm trying to get some much needed R&R. At present I'm kicking back, lis...

08/04/2001 10:13 PM: Weekend News! by Jim
Ah good day to you all. I hope you're all enjoying your weekend. The Heritage Festival is on the go in North Bay this weekend, so the city's population has seemingly doubled. My sister and brother-in-...

07/28/2001 06:16 PM: Weekend News! by Jim
How's the weekend going for everyone thus far? I'm busily polishing off a motherboard evaluation for the HoH after which I'll start writing my Rioworks SDVIC review for you fine people. This board is ...

07/14/2001 07:03 AM: Unrelated Weekend Ramblings! by Jim
Wooo, it's late and yes I'm still awake. uberCory and I bolted to Sudbury to catch the late show of "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within". I really enjoyed it. Prior to seeing it I did hear ma...

02/16/2001 11:17 PM: In Case you Haven't Noticed... The Weekend is Here! by J0rdan
Oh yes! Home, safe and sound in my domicile without the fluorescent lighting and bad air (Government Buildings...). What are your plans for the Weekend? I might just order some pizza, fondle my dualli...

jasonlylevene Dual Personality Posts: 323 Joined: 2002-04-20

#39580 Posted on: 05/12/2007 01:59 AM Well, my son's computer (he's 6) has an old WD 6 Gbyte drive that's probably 8 years old, and I hope it hangs in there another year. My wife's computer has an old Maxtor 40G that's about 5 years old. It lost about 10G a few months ago, but I'm holding onto the $50 it would take to replace it. There's a 15Gbyte 'bigfoot' in there, too, that's probably 7 years old. My 320G WD drive is only 8 months old, and I'm already considering a Seagate 500 just be make certain I don't loose uptime - WD's aren't the highest longevity drives around. Considering what space $100 buys these days, I can't say I'd demand a 5 year warranty, but with a 500 and even a 300, I think we're getting to a space/performance point where it makes more sense than ever. Imagination is more important than knowledge. If anyone other than Einstein had said that, I'd have never thought it was true.

MultimediaMan S3n10R D3s!gN 3ng!n33r Posts: 1457 Joined: 2000-05-12

#39581 Posted on: 05/12/2007 02:15 AM Oh boy...My luck with hard disks has been pretty good over the years. I still have three or four Western Digital 2GB drives from 1995-1996 timeframe which are running; I don't run them everyday, but they have yet to let me down. One of them has a few bad sectors, IIRC. To date, the only drives I have personally owned which have unexpectedly failed have been a Western Digital 30GB drive circa 2001 (which died within days of it's one year warranty) - just up and refused to spin-up one day, and an old Western Digital 3.2GB disk I had been running since 1997 died without warning in 2002 after trying to have Smoothwall format it; no big loss: I used to use it as an OS drive on one of my Windows 98 boxes. Some of my "expected" failures included a "friend" breaking off a power connection on a hard disk, and one dying as a result of one of my kids knocking one off the bench onto a concrete floor. Thus far, you have been adrift within the sheltered harbor of my patience. Heat All of my heatware comes from Transactions on this board. 2CPU.com is the only board I trade on. I can provide references from other board members on request.

proffesso Winner of the Internet Posts: 1485 Joined: 2001-06-25

#39582 Posted on: 05/12/2007 03:42 AM heh, my smallest, non laptop hdd's are 200gb sata's....and those are due for retirement soon :/ only had 2 drives die on me...an 8gb somthing or rather, and a 250gb sata that just shat itself oneday...guess ive been lucky chasing tokyo girls

willturner Old F**t Posts: 90 Joined: 2003-01-17

#39583 Posted on: 05/12/2007 06:39 AM How about two old IBM MFM 40 Meg hard drives in a PS2 Model 8580? these are at least 16 years old and still running strong. This is a 386 25 with 32 meg of ram, running an old Red Hat distro. Friends dont let friends buy dell

danwat1234 Registered User Posts: 232 Joined: 2003-12-21

#39584 Posted on: 05/12/2007 07:49 AM I have a Seagate st1505on hard drive (FAST SCSI, 4GB, 11 platters!). It was made ~1994, and it is running almost all of the time in my Einstein@Home crunching computer. In the past it was for probably about 4 hours every day. But from the past few months it has been running almost constantly. Beat that! OLD:[[ 1x athlon MP 2800+ (running at 2.3GHZ) at 1.775v, 1GB (2x512MB) RAM, 2x 300GB maxtor diamondmax 10 Geforce fx 5600, 430watt Enermax PSU ]] New: G50VT x9100 3.06-3.6GHZ C2D laptop, 80GB Intel G2 SSD, 750GB Scorpio Black, Win8 Pro w/Start8 to bypass Metro w/XP Startmenu logo. Aftermarket new 9 cell battery, Ebay is awesome. Crunches nearly 24/7 on both cores and on GPU, reliable! Stresses those aftermarket AC adapters.

Ryback Emperor of Europe Posts: 1016 Joined: 2002-07-01

#39585 Posted on: 05/12/2007 11:30 AM I have a Ibm 30gb 75gxp "deathstar" still running. I bought it in 2000-2001. I bought 4 of them. 3 died within in months of operation. This one has been running 24/7 for years. [URL="http://www.kiva.org/"]Kiva - Microloans from people to people.[/URL] [SIZE="1"][URL="http://www.xenu.net/"]Scientology[/URL] "Just because you have freedom of choice doesn't mean you should choose to be an idiot." - scythe [URL="http://heatware.com/eval.php?id=55559"]Heatware[/URL][/SIZE]

Perle Registered User Posts: 125 Joined: 2004-04-10

#39586 Posted on: 05/12/2007 02:17 PM I have WD 10 gig that must be over 12 years old....it has been in countless systems..formatted / OS'd a buhzillion times, used for everything a hard drive should not be used for. The past 3 months it has been in a system running Einstein. I got bitten by several Deathstars and recently had 3 Maxtor sata drive fail in a 2 month timeframe. Another einstein system is running an odd 27 gig WD ...it sounds like Mack truck idling and rock tumbler when the drive is being accessed.....I hope it assplodes soon ! Lately I have replacing older drives with the 36 gig Raptors from WD.....They are cheap enough and proven durable. Cooled by Koolance....never a proc over 110 degrees F. 2x x5355 2x e5150 2x qx6700 2x e6700

Pingchan1 Registered User Posts: 61 Joined: 2006-08-21

#39587 Posted on: 05/12/2007 07:45 PM I have a batch of eight or so SCSI hard drives that all still work wonderfully. The first in the batch is a Quantum Viking II LVD SCSI 9GB hard drive with a Dell part number on it, I got it in 1999 or 2000 I think at a computer trade show. After that I picked up seven Western Digital 10K rpm Ultra 160 9GB SCSI hard drives at a local parts store for about $10 each, they were all still in what looked like factory shrink wrapping! Their labels state they were born on the 26th of March 2002. Ive been using all seven of the Western Digitals in a hot swap SCSI array chassis to play around different raid configurations. People often laugh at a 9GB hard drive, but these little guys have given me no problems at all.

aaronbond Registered User Posts: 197 Joined: 2004-10-22

#39588 Posted on: 05/12/2007 10:41 PM I have a 4.3GB IBM drive manufactured in May 98 that's still in operation. It's in my streaming radio box that I have in the garage. Threw 2k on there with 256MB and VNC. Works like a champ. I have my first computer's drive. 640MB baby! It still works, but hasn't seen use since 03.

Lord British Gentoo Folder Posts: 343 Joined: 2004-04-06

#39590 Posted on: 05/13/2007 02:43 PM I don't use them everyday but I have two working Mac SEs with the original hard drives. They were built in the 89-90 timeframe. I also have an Apple 20SC external hard drive that works from 1987! folding@home name: _ryecoaaron # systems: 4 dual core, 2 quads, 1 dual quad, and a PS3

Mavericko Registered User Posts: 8 Joined: 2004-08-02

#39591 Posted on: 05/13/2007 03:17 PM The 2GB Quantum Fireball, which was purchased way back on 1997, still runs & no bad sectors! Currently it is running on a Pentium MMX 200Mhz 256MB Ram & Windows XP So it is a decade for this mate Every harddisk that was purchased later(Seagate, Samsung, Western Digital), had a replacement session at least once! ... Waiting for the flash technology to catch up

B0b have Camera will snap Posts: 742 Joined: 2002-06-26

#39592 Posted on: 05/13/2007 06:03 PM until i sold it i had an SE with a 20MB HDD in that still worked from 1989 my Quadra 950's 250MB HDD is still in working order longest drive in my PC is a 10GB 7200 IBM from 1998 which is my servers system drive.. Photographer

njefferies Munger-in-Chief Posts: 373 Joined: 2005-06-28

#39593 Posted on: 05/14/2007 03:01 AM Seagate ST-225 in an IBM PC Portable. Recently reformatted (G:c800:5 for those who care) and reinstalled with ISM PCDOS 3.3. Tough as nails those drives. Dually: Lenovo C30 E5-2680 v2 128GB Singletons: X9SRI E5-1650v2 64GB | X9SRA E5-1620 64GB | X9SRA E5-2643 16GB | Xinlizhi X79Z 2.4F E5-2643 16GB Laptops: GPD Pocket, Dell XPS 13 neilstechdocs.blogspot.com

ph_hendrix Registered User Posts: 7 Joined: 2003-07-07

#39594 Posted on: 05/14/2007 01:39 PM Longest running drive I have would be a Maxtor 540meg that i aquired out of a used 486sx20 in 1996. I had it running seti non-stop till the end in 12/2005. Dont use it much now, its currently in a K6-300. I've had a 2.5gig bigfoot that I bought in 1997 for $250 and at a $100/gig it was a great deal, didnt last but a year or 2. 7 & 11 gig Maxtors lasted a couple of years. 20gig WD 2 or 3 years. Also had multiple 60 or 75gig Deathstars up at work, most died within weeks. One lasted over a year and then i left the company so i dont know how that turned out.

jbbenson Got Fruit? Posts: 81 Joined: 2001-05-15

#39595 Posted on: 05/14/2007 06:58 PM Longest running drive would probably be the 2.1GB Quantum in my Sparc ClassicX. I can't even begin to guess how old the drive is, but at least I've got a couple of spares. The Sparc doesn't get used much anymore. I was going to use it as an NTP and print server, but its got a buggy parallel port. Intel PR440FX Dual PII Overdrive 333/512k | GA-K8N-SLI Athlon 64X2 3800 | TigerMPX 2466 Dual MP1.2 | Alpha 164LX 533Mhz EV56 | Sun Sparcstation 20 Dual 150Mhz Ross Hypersparcs | Sun Sparcstation 10 Dual75Mhz TI Supersparcs | Sun Ultra 2 Dual 300Mhz Ultrasparc II

celeronpm Registered User Posts: 1 Joined: 2004-08-25

#39596 Posted on: 05/14/2007 10:40 PM I have an old 20GB maxtor, first drive I ever bought. It was the biggest on the market at the time and cost a few hundred. Been running non stop ever since I got it. It is currently in a Pentium II 400mhz which runs as a router under windows 2003 enterprise edition (can't believe it runs!). I don't remember the year, but it was the first year the 20GB hard drives came out. It has been in countless systems, formatted over and over again, and still runs. And I agree, WD's with the exception of the Raptors are not very reliable. I've had about 6 of them go out on me in the lest 2 years!

Warnog Registered User Posts: 61 Joined: 2004-07-03

#39597 Posted on: 05/14/2007 11:27 PM My oldest 24/7 drive is a 9GB Maxtor. I have a few sub-1GB drives at my church that see weekly usage. My oldest drive that worked as of 3 years ago is a 10MB hard drive from an original IBM PC XT. It's prolly from 1982 or 1983. I also have some IBM PC AT's with 10 or 20MB hard drives, but they haven't been powered on for at least 10 years. folding with 31 GHz

posty Beach Bum Posts: 932 Joined: 2000-05-30

#39598 Posted on: 05/15/2007 05:11 AM Priority for SCSI Drives 1. When it is cost vs 5 year warranty, cost comes first 2. When it is 1 year versus 5 years warranty, 5 years is the choice. When it applies to IDE & SATA Drives, it is unimportant whether it has a 1 year or 5 year warranty period. G

The Doctor Jelly baby, anyone? Posts: 647 Joined: 2002-04-20

#39599 Posted on: 05/15/2007 03:57 PM I have an original 10GB drive still running in an iMac G3/400... some form of Maxtor, I believe... that model iMac dates from October '99 to July 2000, so it's pushing seven years. No problems yet (he said loudly... elsewhere Fate pricked up its ears and smiled), even if it does sound a little noisy (in the same way a lawnmower sounds a little noisy). The 20GB drive from my first PC gave up the ghost some years ago and I now use it as a convenient paperweight. The oldest 2.5in hard drive I have running is a 20GB rescued from my now-defunct iBook G3/700, now in a USB caddy. It's about five years old. OH! Hang on, there's a 40MB (yes, that's an "M") SCSI drive still running in my Macintosh SE/30. That's about 17 years old! Duallies Present Gigabyte GA-8I865G775-G (3.4GHz Pentium-D 950), PowerMac G5 (4x2.5GHz G5), PowerMac G4 (2x1.42GHz G4) Duallies Past Abit BP6 (2x366MHz Celeron @ 550MHz), Intel MS440GX (2x450MHz Pentium III Xeon), Tyan Thunder K7 (2xAthlonMP 1900+), PowerMac G4 (2x533MHz G4) "There are three roads to ruin... the most pleasant is with women, the quickest is with gambling, but the surest is with technicians." --Georges Pompidou

zizzo Registered User Posts: 0 Joined: 2005-12-26

#39600 Posted on: 05/15/2007 09:35 PM Very interesting tales, indeed. My oldest working HD is a Seagate ST3635A 635MB mounted in a Compaq 486DX2-66 box that runs Win 98 and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1991). I also have a Samsung 540MB somewhere around here. ...she's so fine, I'm so ugly... Hed (PE) Heat 100 Positive

PatrThom Registered User Posts: 25 Joined: 2006-08-29

#39601 Posted on: 05/16/2007 05:21 AM Originally posted by Lord British: I don't use them everyday but I have two working Mac SEs with the original hard drives. Amen. I still have plenty of SE internal drives. I long ago pulled the 80MB SCSI Quantum Fireball out of my SE/30 and replaced it with a 230MB from my IIvx (mainly because the 230MB actually requires less power!). I also have a 340MB WD Caviar installed in an ol' P75 machine to serve all of my DOS needs (which frankly aren't that many). To date, the only drives I have ever had fail was a matched pair of WD 15GB drives. One failed after about 3 years, and the other failed about 2 years after that. Everything else I've ever owned was either defective when I acquired it, or is still going strong. --Patrick

slarson Registered User Posts: 89 Joined: 2006-07-05

#39602 Posted on: 05/16/2007 07:55 PM My boss has a NeXT turbo that has its original hard drive. It's not running 24/7, but has gotten occasional use for 17 years now. We were just playing some shareware (black and white!) Doom on it I'm not sure of the brand of hard drive that is actually in it though.

alewisa Short squat and obnoxious Posts: 1761 Joined: 2002-11-26

#39603 Posted on: 05/16/2007 10:39 PM Naming no names, but it makes me chuckle looking at the sizes of some drives and the years they were allegedly obtained :-) Couple of months ago I sold my two A4000's, one of which still - until the sale - had an 80mb Quantum SCSI disk purchsed in April 1991, and been used ever since. Still have some SCSI disks from the 1994 - 96 era, 2.1gb and 4.3gb barracudas, working, but essentially useless now. Not sure why I hang on to them! I7 4730K, Asus motherboard, dual Radeon 7950, 32GB RAM, Samsung 840Pro 256GB, 16TB RAID on rust, 2 x 128GB SSD RAID0, Corsair H110i Liquid Cooler 3 x Dell 2713H 27" LCD @ 7680x1440 HP xw9400, 16GB RAM, 2 x dual-core Opteron, HP Liquid cooler, 16GB RAM, Samsung 830 SSD, Matrox RT.X2 Dell 2713H@2560z1440 In-Build - Tyan 2915 dual Opteron 8435 Hex-core, 32GB RAM, GeForce 9800GTX+ AMP Tyan 2895 Opteron dual 285 6GB, U320 RAID, Matrox RT.X100

JoeK Registered User Posts: 0 Joined: 2007-02-10

#39617 Posted on: 05/20/2007 06:36 PM Suprisingly, none of my hard drives has failed except for my wifes' 6Gb Seagate, about 4 years ago. I've a number of older drives, including a 10Mb in a 80286 clone box (that was aquired as a FIND in a junk pile). I turn it on maybe once or twice per year, sometimes it doesn't boot so I flip the switch again and then it's fine. I've a few Quantums (120mb, 540mb, 1Gb & 5Gb) that work fine, if slow (compared to todays). I've always preferred Quantums, then Maxtors, then Seagates - in that order. Funny how the companies were bought out/absorbed in THAT order. A buddy of mine who works as a systems tech at a large local educational institution lets me know what current equipment is failing the most so when I make my purchases, I tend to avoid the current crop of mass failures. Given the prices, I tend to pay $10-$15 more for the product with the longer warranty. I figure the quality has to be better - my data is worth it (especially the crap I download these days... ;-D)

Yel Registered User Posts: 17 Joined: 2006-06-17

#39618 Posted on: 05/20/2007 11:13 PM I can't remember how many HDD's I've purchased, but to date, I've only ever had one fail, which was a 40GB Maxtor. My friends have had fairly bad luck with them also. Since then I've only bought Western Digital drives and they have yet to let me down. I'd guess the reason I've had such luck is that I don't allow the drives to exceed 40dC, I run high end PSU's and keep my systems on UPS's. Currently, my longest running drive is a WD Caviar 24300 4.311MB. It ran in a system for about 4 years, and now is only brought online for special situations. Other drives I have: 7 WD 200GB in a RAID 5 on one of my servers. The system has been up almost non-stop for the last 4+ years. I can't remember when I bought them, either late 2002 or early 2003 but at the time I paid a little over a dollar a gig for each of the dries. The server's data access duty cycle varies from as little as a gig of reading or writing per week to backing up a the TB of data every month or so. For the first two years I ran weekly virus scans. Now I only run them every couple of weeks. The only bad thing I've found about these drives is the amount of heat they put off. They run on the old style of barrings. I think their stat's called 12W TDP on read/wright and 19W on spin up. Together, they put out more heat then the XP-M proc I have running in the system. 1 WD 200GB I bring online on occasion just to ensure it works in case I have a drive failure. 2 WD 36 GB Raptors I bought these right when they came out. I yanked them out and sold them to a friend about a year ago. IIRC they're still running well. 3 WD 74 GB Raptors I bought these alittle over a year ago. They're running in a RAID 0 currently. 3 WD 80 GB drives I bought these back in 2002. All still running strong All of the above drives run pretty much 24/7. They only go off line when I loose power for more then a few minutes. I'm getting worried about the server, and it's almost full so I'll be building a new one soon. I'm thinking of putting WD RE's in it. I know Seagate drives are supposed to be legendary in longevity, but I'll stay with WD until they let me down. Oh, wow, you modified your computer case for your system, isn't that cute. I modified my HOUSE for my system. lol

2CPU.com » News » May 2007 » Weekend Topic: Longest running Hard Drive you have currently?