Hard Drive remaining lifespan.

jamieboo

jamieboo

jamieboo

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Joined
29 Oct 2009
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369
Hello folks
Building a new system soon. I'll be buying some nice new SSDs, and now I have a question about my current HDs.
I have 3x 5 year old Western Digital 640GB Caviar Blacks. I'll be keeping one but giving the other two to members of my family.
The one I'll keep I'll just be using for a bit of light archiving - the kind of thing I'm not that worried about using an old drive for, but the one that I'm giving away might be used as a OS drive.
Is there anyway I can find out the comparative health of the 3 drives?
I ran the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic For Windows (A Western Digital utility) and all the drives 'Passed', but is it possible to find out more relative specifics?
Basically I want to know which of the 3 drives is going to last longest. I want to try to make sure that the drive I give that might be used as a OS drive isn't going to be the one that fails in 6 months!
Is there anything that can help? Perhaps a utility which can somehow predict an approximate number of read/writes left for the drive.
Thanks.
 
Honestly, they'll be fine :)

The scratch drive in my server is a 500gb Samsung I bought about 10 years ago, and that's still as good as the day it was bought. This drive normally sees ~100gb of writes a month, so that should tell you something!

I also have a 120gb IDE drive from ~2001 that's in good working order still, although not in daily use. Was using that as the root drive for the server, but ran out of spare drive bays and so had to replace it with a partitioned larger drive :p

-Leezer-
 
Keep two of the HDD's and RAID 1 them.

The read speed will be higher and any data you have on there will be safe, yes I know you plan on not using them for crucial stuff, but hey.

This is what I do with old drives anyway, keep them paired and mirrored.

My oldest two are almost 15 years old now, still going strong.
 
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