Question Aging backup harddrive?

[YuliApp]

Ok bear with me, it might sound stupid but...
We've been reading stories about hard-drives not being good enough for long term storage, but how bad is it actually and what means it is not good? As in fading? Failing?

I have one harddrive now which has about 6 years old backup on it. It is already USB3, wd, etc etc, should be nothing strange. Problem i have that while i can read all of the data there, the reading is very slow (2-3MByte/s). Could it be sign of data faded on the storage and it needs more retries or different reading mode? The SMART shows nothing relevant and acoustically it is also not "retrying".

Observed on two hard-drives, but the second one mechanically failed so cannot go into more details on that one.

Any similar experience?

 

[nathanjo]

Ok bear with me, it might sound stupid but...
We've been reading stories about hard-drives not being good enough for long term storage, but how bad is it actually and what means it is not good? As in fading? Failing?

I have one harddrive now which has about 6 years old backup on it. It is already USB3, wd, etc etc, should be nothing strange. Problem i have that while i can read all of the data there, the reading is very slow (2-3MByte/s). Could it be sign of data faded on the storage and it needs more retries or different reading mode? The SMART shows nothing relevant and acoustically it is also not "retrying".

Observed on two hard-drives, but the second one mechanically failed so cannot go into more details on that one.

Any similar experience?

hey,

yes, i had a similar issue like this but that was specifically becausei had bought some cheap hard drive, which was not branded. i had bought a good branded hard drive as well, which is 7years old now and is till working fine. so i feel, it depends on the quality of the harddrive as well.

 

[YuliApp]

hey,

yes, i had a similar issue like this but that was specifically becausei had bought some cheap hard drive, which was not branded. i had bought a good branded hard drive as well, which is 7years old now and is till working fine. so i feel, it depends on the quality of the harddrive as well.

yes definitely, but i always bought brand names, mostly WD and seagate, so while there were often green or cheaper drives inside the USB casing, never had such issue with them. But this was also my first (and only and last) 6TB USB

 

[mindless1]

If this is valuable data, it is time to replace a 6 year old hard drive. You can choose to gamble past that age (or even to it), but I would not recommend it for someone else's data.

I did have a similar situation with an 8-1/2 year old external HDD (Seagate Expansion 3TB) not too long ago. It wasn't particularly valuable data and I had redundancy so wasn't too worried, but never the less, it did start doing very slow reads on certain files and then, could not read the entirety of some files. These were large video files so I could watch window's copy progress meter, sailing along at normal speed then get stuck for a while before speeding back up again.

I did a surface scan and it found 80-something bad clusters, but if I were you, I'd copy the data onto another HDD first if it's your only copy. The scan took several hours and I wondered if the drive would survive that long... yet it is still working now, a few weeks later, but probably still losing clusters. I'm keeping it running as an experiment at this point, to see how long till it's completely inoperable.

 

[YuliApp]

If this is valuable data, it is time to replace a 6 year old hard drive. You can choose to gamble past that age (or even to it), but I would not recommend it for someone else's data.

I did have a similar situation with an 8-1/2 year old external HDD (Seagate Expansion 3TB) not too long ago. It wasn't particularly valuable data and I had redundancy so wasn't too worried, but never the less, it did start doing very slow reads on certain files and then, could not read the entirety of some files. These were large video files so I could watch window's copy progress meter, sailing along at normal speed then get stuck for a while before speeding back up again.

I did a surface scan and it found 80-something bad clusters, but if I were you, I'd copy the data onto another HDD first if it's your only copy. The scan took several hours and I wondered if the drive would survive that long... yet it is still working now, a few weeks later, but probably still losing clusters. I'm keeping it running as an experiment at this point, to see how long till it's completely inoperable.

thank you, i have a cloud backup but this is my only local backup, yes. I definitely aim to get it duplicated as soon as i find some decent drive to buy.
That what you observed is also what i would expect from rarely used drive. Simply worse and worse reading performance during the less strong magnetization or something. Maybe newly written data to it would read fast as they would be magnetized fresh, but before backup is done i am afraid to do any testing.

 

[mindless1]

^ At least one of the files that couldn't be read, had been written to it within the past few weeks.

 

[YuliApp]

^ At least one of the files that couldn't be read, had been written to it within the past few weeks.

weird

 

[mindless1]

Newegg currently has a WD Elements 14TB on sale for $210 but the promo code is only good for another 8 hours or so:

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

Personally I prefer fewer platters, fewer eggs in one basket and got an Elements 6TB 3 weeks ago when it was on sale for $95.

 

[YuliApp]

Newegg currently has a WD Elements 14TB on sale for $210 but the promo code is only good for another 8 hours or so:

Are you a human?

www.newegg.com

Personally I prefer fewer platters, fewer eggs in one basket and got an Elements 6TB 3 weeks ago when it was on sale for $95.

i am not in the US so not much value for me and yes, i also decided now to stick with 3TB/4TB max

 

[biostud]

Also different usb ports on your setup or the enclosure could be faulty. If I use the USB3 port on the front of my computer to import NEF from my camera some files are corrupted, while the ports on the back works perfectly.

If your computer is a desktop you could take the hard drive out of the enclosure and connect it internally with sata, to see how it performs.

 

[YuliApp]

Also different usb ports on your setup or the enclosure could be faulty. If I use the USB3 port on the front of my computer to import NEF from my camera some files are corrupted, while the ports on the back works perfectly.

never seen this, how is it possible? I thought USB has error correction on data transfer?

If your computer is a desktop you could take the hard drive out of the enclosure and connect it internally with sata, to see how it performs.

i will once the backup is done and no other fault is found. too scared to open it now. I heard that sometimes the filesystem is not readable between controllers?

 

[biostud]

never seen this, how is it possible? I thought USB has error correction on data transfer?



i will once the backup is done and no other fault is found. too scared to open it now. I heard that sometimes the filesystem is not readable between controllers?

I only think that is if you switch, the controller on the hard drive. Most usually use a standard sata interface.

Don't know about the USB error correction, but I know 1/50 has graphical errors if I use my front USB.

 

[YuliApp]

I only think that is if you switch, the controller on the hard drive. Most usually use a standard sata interface.

so far on the other drives when i tested it it worked fine, yes. still not wanting to risk it until backup is done

Don't know about the USB error correction, but I know 1/50 has graphical errors if I use my front USB.

hm that is weird indeed

 

[YuliApp]

Ok i promised the update and it is as follows.
I made the backup of the drive, from what i had stored locally, rest long days downloading at painful speeds. When i was sure it is all backed up, i run a scandisk/checkdisk from tools menu, it run for good 3-4 hours finished, no report shown. Then i defragmented it, to "refresh any magnetism"...

EDIT: forgot also what i found during the extensive testing that some delay was because of windows files access rights (which were set by another computer and had to be overridden)

Now i can read files at full speed (well around 40MB/s, but...).

Also run the hdbench to test the sectors and speed and it runs well, on quick test, only slows down drastically at the middle. So i decided to just fill it up and had it as another backup but not really use it anymore. I have now two independent cloud backups on two continents + one USB drive in office and local copy so hopefully ready for anything.

Thank to you all for cooperation

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'd have to inspect the posts a bit more, but I've seen HDDs of my own in USB 2.0 external storage boxes showing the same speed profile you describe. These were always surplus SATA spares used previously with direct SATA connection. I never paid much attention to it, because they've been used for ad-hoc backups as opposed to regular, daily or weekly scheduled backups.

On my main system, slightly contrary to advice other posters made to avoid 2.5" drives, I use a licensed Macrium Reflect to back up my system daily (incremental), weekly (differential) and monthly (full). It always occurs in the background; the incremental backups take at most a few minutes, the differential and full may take an hour or longer.

I've never heard of conventional HDDs getting "stale" after months or even years without being powered up. I'd be interested in any feedback about such a phenomenon. I certainly know that SSDs need to be powered up from time to time to maintain data . . .

 

[YuliApp]

I'd have to inspect the posts a bit more, but I've seen HDDs of my own in USB 2.0 external storage boxes showing the same speed profile you describe. These were always surplus SATA spares used previously with direct SATA connection. I never paid much attention to it, because they've been used for ad-hoc backups as opposed to regular, daily or weekly scheduled backups.

On my main system, slightly contrary to advice other posters made to avoid 2.5" drives, I use a licensed Macrium Reflect to back up my system daily (incremental), weekly (differential) and monthly (full). It always occurs in the background; the incremental backups take at most a few minutes, the differential and full may take an hour or longer.

I actually like 2,5" drives as ad-hoc backup. I feel less weird from frequent power on-offs than hearing the big drive spin up every time explorer decides to read something.

I've never heard of conventional HDDs getting "stale" after months or even years without being powered up. I'd be interested in any feedback about such a phenomenon. I certainly know that SSDs need to be powered up from time to time to maintain data . . .

Really? I googled it and seems to be real? Did anyone experienced that? I definitely had notebooks sitting around which i powered after months