Where the blazes did you hear that? Every now and then there will be a dud or a bad batch, but hard drives are designed to last for a typical life of a system, and beyond. If they didn't last, big companies that rely on such things and spend big $$$ for them would switch to something else.
There are many "modern" technologies that are intentionally designed to self destruct 5 seconds after a warranty expires to force you to spend more money, but as far as I know hard drives are not yet one of them.
Green drives park the heads a lot for power saving/general laptop usage, which can lead to decreased lifespan. WD Blue/Black/Red/Purple/Ecru don't have this though.
Green drives park the heads a lot for power saving/general laptop usage, which can lead to decreased lifespan. WD Blue/Black/Red/Purple/Ecru don't have this though.
I am using a desktop WD Green drive. Should I still be concerened? I don't have a big enough drive to use for backing up data from this drive.
Green drives park the heads a lot for power saving/general laptop usage, which can lead to decreased lifespan
Incorrect. Parking the drive head prevents head crashes over the data area, which increases the life span of a drive, especially drives that get tossed around.
Agressive head parking does reduce performance, hence why most desktop drives don't do that.
I have at least four WD Greens amongst others drives in my home server, and one in another box. I'd say they are around 2-3 years old by now. I've had no trouble with any of them except for one, which after about 12 months started developing quite a number of bad sectors over a couple of weeks. The bad sectors stabilised but nevertheless decided not to use the drive for anything I would care to lose. What surprised me was after completing a full format, the 2GB drive had 800GB of 'used' space, then a quick format would revert back to 2GB as the sectors marked bad didn't seem permanent. Using a disk monitoring utility, it came up saying there was several hundred bad sectors, but that's not enough to consume 800GB.
I think the drive was originally bought at an office supply store (Staples equivalent) that sells external drives, which one day happened to not work at all via USB. Thinking it was just the SATA to USB circuit board that died, I pulled the casing apart and plugged it directly into SATA. While the PC would now detect it and access it, that's when the bad sectors were detected. As a guess, regularly transferring 10GB MKV movie files when it was an external drive might have been the cause, by generating too much heat which the case wasn't designed to dissipate. I think one night a mate of mine wanted to copy the entire drive, so it probably didn't help either.
Green drives park the heads a lot for power saving/general laptop usage, which can lead to decreased lifespan
Incorrect. Parking the drive head prevents head crashes over the data area, which increases the life span of a drive, especially drives that get tossed around.
Agressive head parking does reduce performance, hence why most desktop drives don't do that.
Parking the head simply involves moving the head from the data area to a reserved area. That movement is really no different than any other random seeking.
Similarly, spinning up and down does not wear out the drive motor.
Also, reading and writing data does not wear out normal hard drives. One could set a drive to constantly read write data for 5 years and reasonably expect it to keep working. SSDs, however have a write limit.
The enemies of hard drives are vibration and heat.
You have an an insanely small magnetic read/write assembly designed to detect the magnetic field of just a few molecules, and it hovers over a surface moving at incredible speeds, only cushioned by a small amount of air.
Excessive heat or even cold will throw that all out of alignment. Ideally they would be kept at a constant temperature, but they are designed to cycle between room temperature and normal usage temperature. Poor enclosures or faulty laptop fans can damage drives.
Then you get people throwing laptops around like monkeys throwing around shit... Those heads ARE going to impact the surface, leaving scraped up bad sectors or damaging the heads.
I'm honestly surprised most laptop hard drives can even withstand a day of "normal" use.
WD Green drives are designed to use less power. I haven't owned any personally but I've seen a handful in the field. I've heard of the higher failure rate and seen a few fail but it's not been beyond the rate at which a Seagate Barracuda fails.
It's hit and miss like any other hard disk. I found if the disk is likely to fail you're going to see it within a few weeks of first use. After that just watch SMART periodically. If you have READ errors reported rule out SATA controllers and cables first. The drive is built with a certain amount of reserve sectors to use when it needs to mark some bad. Normal wear and tear can make a few sectors go bad but it's not the end of the world if it's just a handful and the count of them is not steadily rising. If it is well, backup.
The enemies of hard drives are vibration and heat.
You have an an insanely small magnetic read/write assembly designed to detect the magnetic field of just a few molecules, and it hovers over a surface moving at incredible speeds, only cushioned by a small amount of air.
Excessive heat or even cold will throw that all out of alignment. Ideally they would be kept at a constant temperature, but they are designed to cycle between room temperature and normal usage temperature. Poor enclosures or faulty laptop fans can damage drives.
I think that this may be a reason for why external hard disk drives often fail, since the drive enclosure would presumably consume far more heat than they would either outside of the case entirely, or within a well designed case or enclosure with proper cooling and ventilation.
Then you get people throwing laptops around like monkeys throwing around shit... Those heads ARE going to impact the surface, leaving scraped up bad sectors or damaging the heads.
I'm honestly surprised most laptop hard drives can even withstand a day of "normal" use.
Well, I have always been careful with notebook PCs, but I understand that some people don't quite seem to get the fact that even notebooks and tablets have to be taken care of properly. Add to that the fact that people often don't understand how hard disk drives are designed and so simply wouldn't realize that treating a PC in that way can seriously damage the drive itself resulting in endlessly massive data loss.
Honestly, I can't stand having a mechanical drive in a laptop. Not only for speed, but also for power consumption and the risk of damage from movement. Things like the Air Bag protection and whatnot are ok, but can sometimes result in a slight hiccup in whatever you're doing. For example, playing music or watching video.
Parking the heads certainly wouldn't cause any motor wear, since the heads are primarily moved by magnetism anyways.
However, there is still the small risk of damage to a head leaving the parked position and crashing into the edge of a platter when trying to move over it again, from the few I've taken apart they are usually snapped right off or horribly mangled, but the platters don't show any signs of damage, thus strongly suggesting collisions with the side of the platters.
Comments
There are many "modern" technologies that are intentionally designed to self destruct 5 seconds after a warranty expires to force you to spend more money, but as far as I know hard drives are not yet one of them.
Still, don't forget to make backups!
I am using a desktop WD Green drive. Should I still be concerened? I don't have a big enough drive to use for backing up data from this drive.
Agressive head parking does reduce performance, hence why most desktop drives don't do that.
I think the drive was originally bought at an office supply store (Staples equivalent) that sells external drives, which one day happened to not work at all via USB. Thinking it was just the SATA to USB circuit board that died, I pulled the casing apart and plugged it directly into SATA. While the PC would now detect it and access it, that's when the bad sectors were detected. As a guess, regularly transferring 10GB MKV movie files when it was an external drive might have been the cause, by generating too much heat which the case wasn't designed to dissipate. I think one night a mate of mine wanted to copy the entire drive, so it probably didn't help either.
I was always told that this wore out the motors.
Parking the head simply involves moving the head from the data area to a reserved area. That movement is really no different than any other random seeking.
Similarly, spinning up and down does not wear out the drive motor.
Also, reading and writing data does not wear out normal hard drives. One could set a drive to constantly read write data for 5 years and reasonably expect it to keep working. SSDs, however have a write limit.
The enemies of hard drives are vibration and heat.
You have an an insanely small magnetic read/write assembly designed to detect the magnetic field of just a few molecules, and it hovers over a surface moving at incredible speeds, only cushioned by a small amount of air.
Excessive heat or even cold will throw that all out of alignment. Ideally they would be kept at a constant temperature, but they are designed to cycle between room temperature and normal usage temperature. Poor enclosures or faulty laptop fans can damage drives.
Then you get people throwing laptops around like monkeys throwing around shit... Those heads ARE going to impact the surface, leaving scraped up bad sectors or damaging the heads.
I'm honestly surprised most laptop hard drives can even withstand a day of "normal" use.
This is what I would be concerned about.
It's hit and miss like any other hard disk. I found if the disk is likely to fail you're going to see it within a few weeks of first use. After that just watch SMART periodically. If you have READ errors reported rule out SATA controllers and cables first. The drive is built with a certain amount of reserve sectors to use when it needs to mark some bad. Normal wear and tear can make a few sectors go bad but it's not the end of the world if it's just a handful and the count of them is not steadily rising. If it is well, backup.
However, there is still the small risk of damage to a head leaving the parked position and crashing into the edge of a platter when trying to move over it again, from the few I've taken apart they are usually snapped right off or horribly mangled, but the platters don't show any signs of damage, thus strongly suggesting collisions with the side of the platters.