I have some 2tb and 3tb pairs of drives for valuable data archival purposes which have been sat on a shelf unpowered for about 3-4 years and was wondering if these drives would deteriorate much ?
Since hard drives are magnetic media, the information on them will slowly degrade as the written magnetic fields weaken if the drive is sitting around collecting dust in a closet.
So my question is, how would one go about "refreshing" a drive that isn't in continuous use? A defrag might work once, but only on some of the ? Or running chkdsk? Or does the information actually have to be written again in order to bring it back to 100% strength which would mean perhaps copying the contents of the entire drive to another drive and then back again, or at least copying the entire contents of the drive to a new drive (and leaving it there) then formatting the original and using it to start fresh with new data. I was worried about possible motors or heads getting stuck , platters losing magnetism , errors occurring etc
Since hard drives are magnetic media, the information on them will slowly degrade as the written magnetic fields weaken if the drive is sitting around collecting dust in a closet.
So my question is, how would one go about "refreshing" a drive that isn't in continuous use? A defrag might work once, but only on some of the ? Or running chkdsk? Or does the information actually have to be written again in order to bring it back to 100% strength which would mean perhaps copying the contents of the entire drive to another drive and then back again, or at least copying the entire contents of the drive to a new drive (and leaving it there) then formatting the original and using it to start fresh with new data. I was worried about possible motors or heads getting stuck , platters losing magnetism , errors occurring etc
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