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Would you use this HDD
asterisk14
Member
Hi,
I have an old Toshiba SATA 320GB mechanical laptop hard disk from 2014 that I wanted to use in my personal computer as a storage drive. I thought I'd check its SMART using HDTune and found the below:
I then did a full scan and found 5% of the sectors are bad scattered throughout the disk, however the full scan did not change any of the above SMART readings.
Would you use it/trust it?
Comments
No, Toshiba HDD's are poop. I learned my lesson when I grabbed 7x 8TB Toshiba NAS Drives when there was a deal going on. They had a 1 year warranty and right after that year, I started to get bad sectors and they eventually became unusable.
I'd spend an extra $$ and buy a SATA HDD from a better brand like SeaGate's BarraCuda
I'm not going to give it a hard life like in a NAS, I had it lying around and thought I could use it for storage.
May have to give it the full Erase-write-verify scan and see what happens to it
Regardless of opinion of brands (in my opinion every brand has or has had series that you don't want) with these SMART values I'd definitely not use it. I just returned a drive for warranty that has way less reallocated sectors.
Well dont store important stuff on it. But any drive can fail at any time anyway, so you should have backed up important stuff anyway.
i'd store bunch of small archives of old old stuff you want to keep for the rest of your life
then put it in your basement and store in ethernity
one day you might need it, probably not...
The drive is dying, but if you looking for ways to use it other than the trash bin, here's what I would do:
1) overwrite the entire drive with zeroes (easiest on a GNU/Linux machine using dd)
2) read the entire drive to /dev/null (also with dd)
Repeat the above a few times, until #2 gives no read errors for the entire drive (if such a state is even possible with more than 1800 planned bad sectors).
It is fully readable at some point, as DeadlyChemist suggested above put a 4th-5th backup copy of some data on it, and throw it in a drawer or cupboard and forget about it. Or might fetch it in 1-2 years to update that copy with newly added or changed data, or just leave it as is.
If not readable and the bad sectors keep increasing, you can open it (might need a special screwdriver), take out the platters, they are shiny and give a nice ring when hit with something metal, can make a wind chime or such. Also there are a couple of strong magnets which can come handy for something as well.
Back in the days when 20GB was a big hard drive disk, I had a disk with about 50MB of pretty much consecutive bad sectors, which in those days was a couple of tracks worth. I figured there had just been some manufacturing imperfection on the platter, because dust or dirt in there would move around and scratch things up.
The drive seemed fine apart from those specific tracks, so I just partitioned it so that there was a couple of unused tracks before and after. Worked fine as my main disk for several years after that.
This. All brands had major fails.
Apart from dying and making you lose data, you should consider other issues, like slowing down your system on seek/access errors, even if it is not a system drive.
What rm_ said is a good usage scenario.
Looks like getting worse. Current pending sector increased a lot although re-allocated event count/sector are stable!
I guess I will just use it to test various OSes out and just mess about with it
seeking could stall your os badly, crashes can occur, even the tests would be borked.
It is time for replacement drive. This slows down your disk as well, so longer boot time due to slower disk read/write.
Edit:
Only 2.33 years... Normally this happens after 5+ years... I guess Toshiba drives really sucks..
I bought HP and Gateway branded SSD drives that failed in days, that says nothing about the brand, just about some bad batches. of course, if they consistently fail throughout various iterations, then, yeah, but before you stop buying them, the brand already disappears because the costs of replacements and refunds would have driven it under already.
It is normal for electronics to fail within days. It is called the infant mortality rate. It is also normal for products to fail at the end of their lifetime. It is NOT normal for it to fail in the middle unless it is a bad product.
See the following bathtub curve as an example for electronics expected lifetime:
I know that, but it is my belief that such failures stem from either a bad design which makes it more or less a given after a much shorter time than expected or from a low rate of failure present from the beginning, i.e. it is scratching one sector every week but you don't see that until they are so many that it can no longer be masked out and/or the rate increases, i.e. debris accumulate or the arm gets bent a bit from frequent contacts or any other cause stemming from the original failure self-amplified in time.
There can be a disease contracted in infancy which doesn't kill you outright, but it would, eventually, as it gets more and more complicated over time or a genetic defect (i.e. bad design) which makes you prone to greater morbidity and early death.
Had a drive with reallocated sectors that just suddenly stopped reading data, so wouldn't trust a drive with those values with anything important. Online hours was a little above the 2 year mark - it was a wd my passport drive.
Nothing to say ~ ~ , just one word " WORST "
Bastab ^^
Normally drive fails when the magnetic disk gets permanently magnetized OR cannot be magnetized, not due to mechanical failure. If the arm is scratching the disk surface, then your drive is DEAD. The arm tips contains very small electromagnets that gets damaged very easily and cannot even take a single strike with the spinning disks before giving up the ghost.
Relocated sectors is your OS trying to move the data from parts of the disk that cannot be magnetized to empty portions of disk to still give the disk a fighting chance.
I will use such disk for torrent
I also believe in this bathtub theory. Whenever I buy new electrical/mechanical equipment I stress test it for at least 24 hours. If it lasts this period it will most likely be OK.
Haven't done any torrenting in years...Might have to start now.
I still have a Hitachi Death Star that has yet to die on me after over 100,000 hours. Still spinning, he'll crap it out eventually.
This isn't a theory though. It is an established fact and is taught to students who pursue a Masters degree in Electronics. The actual graph is drawn up by manufacturing fabs to promote their lab's capabilities to major companies who want to use the fabs to create their electronics.
You do know why they are called the "Death Star", right?
I completely agree. I suffered a huge loss due to hard disk damage.
That's why I keep 3 sets of backups.
Originals on servers SSD.
First backup on server's HDD.
Second backup on backup server on local network.
Third backup on remote server in a different country.
Some cases, I'll even backup the scripts to my github account, but since that process is manual, i do not count it towards my backup.
No, tell me!
The Hitachi "Desk Star" HDD got the nick name "Death Star" because of their high failure rates.
You did it right, which ensures that nothing will go wrong.
Let's just say I learnt it from "bad experiences"....
Nothing wrong with Death Stars. I have 2-3 that are >10 years old and still going strong.
Guess what? I bought another Death Star to replace this PoS Toshiba, the SMART and surface scans are solid with 161 on/off and around 180 PoH only. Comes with a 24 month guarantee too.
Bargain for £1.