Long-lasting Hardrive?

[Yami]

well why didn't you say so?

Sorry, I should've been more specific.

i would rather have my eyes removed with a spork than watch what sounds like a riveting video.

lol, admittedly it's not 'entertaining' as such, but it is interesting to see the results (timesaver: it works fine, including the Win95 Minesweeper).

 

[KSoD]

What Carnage has said is correct. No matter what a hard drive will fail in time. Even brand new SSD drives will fail in time. Traditional Hard Drives have mechanical parts that will fail. Nothing lasts forever. SSD Drives have a limited read/write lifetime. The more use you give it, the shorter it lasts.

There is nothing in the world that will extend the life of a hard drive. Some can die quickly. I have had some die in a month. I have had others that have lasted me since my first PC. Granted they are only 320MB in size and no longer in use, but they still work if i plugged them in via IDE connection.

Partitions, formats and everything else will lead the drive to failure. It could be this week, it could be next decade, it could be next century. It all depends on the mechanical parts in use or the amount of read/writes to the drive. Nothing in the PC world lasts forever and there is no Fountain of Youth for parts.

 

[fairfieldfalconsfan]

XP -> Vista -> 7. There's a video of someone upgrading from Windows 3.1 to 7 that way XD

Found it! Or at least one of them: YouTube - Upgrading through every version of Windows

 

[strollin]

... There is nothing in the world that will extend the life of a hard drive. Some can die quickly. I have had some die in a month. I have had others that have lasted me since my first PC. Granted they are only 320MB in size and no longer in use, but they still work if i plugged them in via IDE connection. ...

I have some hard drives that are 30 years old that still work. I wouldn't trust any important data to them.

I worked in disk drive manufacturing for 20 years, we always said, "The question isn't IF an HDD will fail, but WHEN."

 

[phantom555]

In india we get desktops and its accessories mainly built in countries like thailand, singapore and china. Hard drives which can work without fail for a decade might be "made in USA".

 

[iTony]

No, that wouldn't extend the life of a normal HDD. A normal HDD is mechanical and anything mechanical will fail. The platters are spinning and the read/write head is always moving back and forth, no matter if you have part of the drive used or "quarantined" or not.

The nature of HDD's is their space gets re-used; they're a magnetic medium so its just manipulations of that magnetic data. Flash based media, however, have a limited read-write amount and can die much quicker than a normal HDD because of this.



The drive is always being reused. When you delete a file, that space is just made available for re-use, and isn't overwritten until a new file uses that previously occupied space. Hence why there are programs like Killdisk, DBAN, etc to write 0's to the entire drive with multiple passes.

^this