How to ensure longevity of hard disks

Question

I have a few external hard disks (two 1.5 TB ones - with the same data on them for redundancy and two 3 TB ones - ditto) on which I have stored lots of photographs and home movies. I want to do a ask a couple of things:

• Ensure that these disks do not break too quickly. I have heard that tests have shown that disks that get used either too often or seldom break quicker than those which get moderate use. Since these disks (especially the two 1.5 TB ones, which are now full) are seldom read from and written to, since they are only used for long term storage, how do I use them more often in order to ensure they live longer?

• Is there any software that I can use to check the integrity of the disks and the data on the disks?

Answer 1

I am assuming from the drive sizes that you are talking about regular mechanical drives as opposed to SSD disks- so we can forget about the wear-levelling algorithm discussion.

Spinning up and down too often (aggressive power saving settings) on a hard drive can cause some additional wear. I have my drives set to never sleep, and they have been happy for many years on a system running 24/7.

Also, as long as you avoid the following, you are doing all you reasonably can:

• bumping or jolting the PC while the drives are spinning (one of the worst things you can do to a mechanical HDD)
• HARD shut downs (risk of a head crash if it doesn't have time to park properly)
• Excessive heat. Touch the surface of the drives after they have been active for a few hours, and see what sort of equilibrium they reach. Mine used to run too hot, but I just put an extra case fan in front of them, and now they are barely warmer than room temperature.

You should ensure S.M.A.R.T. monitoring is enabled in the BIOS, so you have a good chance of getting an early warning if a drive failure is imminent.

You're doing the right thing by having a RAID 1 array if that data is valuable. Sooner or later one of those hard drives will fail, and you will be ready for it. Just be sure to swap out the dead drive quickly once the array is in a degraded state- and don't forget to backup the array to another location every once in a while.

Answer 2

1. Heat is a mortal enemy to all electronics. Well, extreme temperatures in general. So avoid any frosty freezes, too (although a simmering sauna of heat is a more likely scenario). Clean the dust off your drives (and other electronics), too, lest it become a nice, toasty-warm blanket for your little digital ones.

2. Jarring movements/motion. Secure the drive to your case. And for the love of 1's and 0's, don't ever drop or jar your drives! (like leaning back in your office chair and accidentally Van-Damme-kicking your computer case, etc.)

3. Spin-ups/Spin-downs. The greatest stresses (internally) come from the acceleration -- the spinning up and spinning down of the drive. The more the drive is powered on/off (spun-up/spun-down), the more wear and tear it does on the mechanics, and hence, the faster it ages. However, this isn't anything to be overly concerned about, as the drives are made to last past thousands and thousands of spin-ups/spin-downs.

It's always good measure to keep an eye on drives' SMART attributes. These are internal attributes (on the drive) which are used to signify drive aging or potential, approaching problems. There are a number of freeware programs to monitor these. I use one called CrystalDiskInfo (as I also use their drive benchmarking utility, too):

Another is ArgusMonitor. This one has the ability to actively monitor attributes and plot them on a graph over time.

Answer 3

Seems chkdsk couldn't hurt from time to time, but there's usually manufacture specific tools that can at least predict imminent failure.

Here's a few of the more known disk manufacturers:

• Western Digital - Data Lifeguard Diagnostics
• Seagate - SeaTools
• Hitachi - Drive Fitness Test

Still, what you really want to look at in buying future hard drives is Mean Time to Failure. Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Issue 1: Enhancing Lifespan

I would submit that the best way to get maximum lifespan out of these drives would be to only power them up a few times a month or year and thus have them spinning less than 200 hours per year. You could also keep stop/starts under 100 per year.

You could accomplish this by only powering up the device they're in when you're actively performing backups.

Properly securing the drives against noise/vibration/harshness is important and making sure that you or your service technicians / system builders have done a professional job of installing and mounting the drives is also an important concern.

Your drives could be hooked up to or downstream from a UPS and you should make sure that the alternating current feeding the UPS is coming from a properly grounded outlet. Check your UPS manual to see if it has lights or software management tools that can provide you with assurance that your AC is grounded.

Issue 2: Detecting Failed Disks

If possible, I would check with the manufacturer of the enclosure(s) that the drives are in to see if there are any software tools or indicator lights available that can be used to verify that no issues have been detected by any logic in the enclosure.

Aside from that, running CHKDSK periodically isn't a bad idea. There's no fool-proof method of predicting all impending drive failures, but CHKDSK certainly improves your odds.