Poll

HDD Replacement

This poll has expired. Voting is no longer possible.
31 votes were received.

Retire aging mechanical drives	14		45%
Wait until the grinding or smoke appears	14		45%
HDD? Don't have any.	0		0%
Other, please explain	2		6%
i'm M A V I C (or play him on TV)	1		3%

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While configuring my cMP 12-core I noticed the 4TB 'data' HDD was 6+ years old.
And, I already knew the external 4TB TM was aged.
Instead of waiting for a catastrophic event, replaced both! Got deals on a 4TB Enterprise HDD
and an Amz Warehouse deal on a 6TB USB-3, which is now the back-up for the 4TB.
Added two 1TB SSDs I already had as new TM drives internally. (All the internals are
SATA-III SSD's except the Super Drive)
I'm going to need a bigger box for all these old HDD's laying about

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39°36'17"N 75°44'43"W

DuckDuckGo
The search engine that doesn't track you.

I have a stack of Hard drive platters on my desk thinking some day I will make a wind chime?

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Staunton, Virginia

when software starts reporting stuff, its time to replace. Just yanked a 1 TB that had mounting issues, and my Windows 10 craptop has sector allocation warnings. My 13 yo WD Black 2TB is showing sector allocation issues too.

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********************************************
The police have no duty to respond. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005) or Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981)

I run Hard Disk Sentinel in Windows 10. I do a full surface test. If there are ANY bad sectors revealed, I trash the drive (goodbye ALL of my Seagate ES1 drives).

I recently semi-retired 4 WD Green drives that are 11 years old, based on age and being very close maximum load/reload cycles. Instead of 24/7, they are used for general storage.

Unless a drive is failing prematurely, I have upgraded based on space (out of necessity or finding a good deal) before I have had to make a decision about EOL on an otherwise functioning drive.

I'm actually doing maintenance on a bunch of my backup arrays this weekend. I hadn't checked in on my remote server in a bit and Softraid noted 4 different drives in three arrays as predicted to fail. They are RAID 5s and working just fine... including the one with two reported. I really need to turn on the email notification, but I used to log into the mac mini more often.

Long story short - between RAID 5 and softraid, I don't worry about drive failure till Softraid sees a predictive sequence which typically is months ahead of an actual data error/failure event. These drives are 5-6 years old and in a 24/7 operation, so I guess about in line.

I will say that the newer drives of the last decade just don't last as long as the drives of the prior decade. With the higher data densities and greater complexity to put now up to 16TB of capacity in what only 10yrs ago maxed out at about 1TB... and 5 years before that -500GB was about the max in the same size physical displacement.

Pretty amazing...

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OWC Larry
Other World Computing
[www.macsales.com]

I've never had one fail.
Matter fact, there is a WD120G in my brothers iMac 20yo CRT G3 iMac that I replaced the OEM with. Still spinning music for him.

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!#$@@$#!

If there are spelling issues, please pardon, Owen the cat is sitting on my keyboard.

A customer and MRF friend sent me his 40GB On-The-Go Pro from 2002.... still going.

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OWC Larry
Other World Computing
[www.macsales.com]

Quote
Fritz
I've never had one fail.
Matter fact, there is a WD120G in my brothers iMac 20yo CRT G3 iMac that I replaced the OEM with. Still spinning music for him.

You are VERY lucky.

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Mr. Lahey: A lot of people, don’t know how to drink. They drink against the grain of the liquor. And when you drink against the grain of the liquor? You lose.

Randy: What the @#$%& are you talking about?

.....they just.....fade away......

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_____________________________________

I reject your reality and substitute my own!

I tend to give them to family members who don't have a backup system. Plug it in once a day/week/month/whenever you remember and have a backup incase @#$%& goes bad...

Getting ready to consolidate / retire 3 1GB backups for a big ole honking' drive. I will pass one to each of my sibs with some old family pictures and videos that already are on youtube/iCloud.

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San Antonio, TX (in the old city)


"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Eli Weisel

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." - Theodore Roosevelt (1918)

"I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it." - Billy Graham 1981

"Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise" - Barry Goldwater

Until they die.

Each has a backup, done hourly, so the worst that could happen is Id lose an hour of backup.

Main boot drive (maybe 500 GB total) + external working drive -- both everything backed up to a single large drive. Plus backblaze.

Main working drive is a RAID 0 with two 3 TB drives, 6TB total, both over 4 years old. 10-12 hours a day, with constant R/W pretty much all day. Its just over half full, so no need to replace anytime soon.

Backup drive, via TM is a bit small, 5TB, so not a ton of incremental backup... but thinking maybe something larger is due.

Eidt: And now of course, right after posting this, my backup drive keeps mounting and unmounting for no reason.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2020 02:36PM by jdc.

My media server data is in triplicate so I either need more space or wait for failure. The trend is to buy a new set about 33-50% bigger than the last as space gets tighter, make that the new primary, and demote the older one to 2nd in line. Old 2nd is demoted to 3rd and usually isn't big enough to back everything up, so I either decide that some data isn't important enough or I use one of the previous 3rd drives to manually back up that remainder.

Current sets:

Primary: 20TB (4x5TB)
2nd: 20TB (2x10TB, just put in about 2 weeks ago, this will become the primary soon)
3rd: 16TB (2x8TB, newer than primary but SMR so it's a backup only)

current data size is 15.4TB so 3rd is still big enough, size has finally stagnated after 20+ years of growth from a single 46.1GB DeathStar whenever that was the biggest you could get.

previous 3rd: 12TB (4x3TB)
1 step older: 8TB (4x2TB)
1 step older: 6TB (4x1.5TB)

I think there should be a 3x4TB in there somewhere but I may be misremembering.

Quote
Rick-o
You are VERY lucky.

I know people .....

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!#$@@$#!

If there are spelling issues, please pardon, Owen the cat is sitting on my keyboard.

I just cant imagine that much data.

My main working drive has 20 years worth of files on it... barely 3.5 TB. Largest client takes up 2.2 TB of it.

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

.....didn't Data die.....in one of those movies.....???

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_____________________________________

I reject your reality and substitute my own!

Quote
jdc
I just cant imagine that much data.

My main working drive has 20 years worth of files on it... barely 3.5 TB. Largest client takes up 2.2 TB of it.

some like HD pRON.

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********************************************
The police have no duty to respond. See Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005) or Warren v. District of Columbia[1] (444 A.2d. 1, D.C. Ct. of Ap. 1981)

About 10 years ago I had 3 drives die in 12 months and lost about 3 years of files. I had a main and backup, then went to backup as main with a new backup. The new main died and I started using the second backup and it died before I got a new backup.

Now I always have two backups and took to heart the edict that "data does not exist unless it is in three discrete locations" (if you do a file compare and it fails, you need a third copy to verify one is correct).

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