[rescue] limited shelf life of hard drives ?

[Don Y]

Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. wrote:
> OK... now this is just plain weird...
> 
> Today marks the second system in 3ish months I've powered up after
> sitting fo 6-12 months... and the hard drives in both are dead !
> 
> The 9G 10K WD enterprise SCSI drive in the PC has media errors and
> has hosed the FAT32 filesystem... I can probably at least recover
> what little data I need off that one.
> 
> The 8.4G Seagate ATA drive in my Ultra 10 (which has less than a
> few hundred hours of use on it), won't even initialize... it spins
> up... want's to read whatever it has to read to 'position' the heads/etc
> to go 'ready'... and makes a horrible noise as it tries.... after
> trying several times it goes 'nope... I'm toast, have a nice day'.
> (and when I put it in the U10, it was a new (I think remanufactured)
> drive from Seagate).
> 
> WTF ?
> 
> How many of the upteen drives I've had not spinning on a shelf for
> 2 yrs are going to be dead now ?  are the voice coil magnets slowly
> deteriorating the recording on the platters if they are left not
> moving for a long time ?  or what ?  This makes no sense.
> 
> Anyone experience this sort of problem before ?
> 
> I bet if I pull my old Micropolis 600Meg 5.25" full height drives out
> of Storage, or my 1.3G Seagate Elites... that they'll spin up after
> the 6-8 or more years they have been idle and access every last bit
> stored on them....  yet the crap they make today dies if not used !?

Where have you had the drives stored?  (i.e. ambient conditions)