Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

Paul · 2004-04-18 01:21:33

Just wondering...
I've jumped from distro to distro many times & compiled quite a few programs/kernels. Of course, if mine did wear out, I could get a new one with a 8 mb cache... ^__^

Paul

aCoder · 2004-04-18 03:23:14

My 60Gb IBM has been around for 2 years, and I've constantly abused it the whole time. I've yet to even see a drop in performance, however, an old Western Digital (3.5 Gb) in my HP I had back in the day got really loud for a while, then one of the discs came lose, and yeah... that kind of sucked...

Dusty · 2004-04-18 03:37:50

Eventually. Its called a head crash. The read/write head hits the surface of the disk and pfffft.

Drives usually become obsoletely small capacity before that happens though, at least nowadays.

Dusty

aCoder · 2004-04-18 04:10:14

Drives usually become obsoletely small capacity before that happens though, at least nowadays.

Oh, come on! You wouldn't use a 3.5 Gb HDD anymore?

Paul · 2004-04-18 04:29:41

Can the disk become demagnetized (through over use)? Or will the head motor wear out?
Dusty: I didn't know that happened! I thought that a violent impact caused that.

Paul ^__^

rasat · 2004-04-18 15:46:13

What I have heard, HDDs are supposed to work fine for 5 years.

Dusty · 2004-04-18 15:59:53

Paul wrote:

Can the disk become demagnetized (through over use)? Or will the head motor wear out?
Dusty: I didn't know that happened! I thought that a violent impact caused that.
Paul ^__^

Violent impact can cause the arm to loosen up by that few micrometers... but so can repeated movement. Friction wears stuff out. :-D

I've never heard of a disk becoming demagnetized from use, but I've never heard that it can't happen either... electric motors wear out eventually too, I suppose, but I suspect that in both cases this would only happen after a long time.

I'd use a 3.5 GB hard drive if I had room for one in my case. I gave a 4GB away a month ago...

Its not the capacity so much though; a 6 year old 3.5 GB drive is going to have a lot longer seek time and latency. Good enough for backups, maybe, but now things are coming full circle... I wouldn't use the drive for backups because there is the chance of the drive wearing out.

Dusty

martinaramirez · 2004-04-23 14:26:11

I'm using a pari of older western digital 4G HD, each is at LEAST 6 years old and they are still trucking! Electric motors do wear out over time, but what wears them out is the amount of current flowing through them. The current flowing through a head motot is so tiny that the disc platters themselves will wear out before the head motor. Also, most drive platters are driven by a special kind of motor called a Hall Effect motor. These are extremely low current, high speed, high reliability motors that last roughly forever. I have however worn out drive cables because of repeated plugging, unplugging and yanking on the cable itself and not the connector as is supposed to be done (I'm a Linux user, why should I follow 'their' rules?). Anyhow, I hope this 2 cents worth helps.

Arch Linux

#1 2004-04-18 01:21:33

Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

#2 2004-04-18 03:23:14

Re: Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

#3 2004-04-18 03:37:50

Re: Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

#4 2004-04-18 04:10:14

Re: Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

#5 2004-04-18 04:29:41

Re: Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

#6 2004-04-18 15:46:13

Re: Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

#7 2004-04-18 15:59:53

Re: Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

#8 2004-04-23 14:26:11

Re: Is it poss for a hard drive to wear out?

Board footer