[rescue] limited shelf life of hard drives ?

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

On Tue, 2006-05-02 at 23:00, Don Y wrote:
> 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)

In the house... temps from 65-90ish depending on time of year...

-- Curt

> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue