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Hard drive shelf life?

S

Strahan

n00b
Joined
Oct 28, 2007
Messages
47
Howdy. I'm planning a revamp of my array box (currently Areca 1680ml2 with 16 WD10EACS in R6). I'd like to build a second box using a 24 bay machine, but I doubt I'll have funds for that so I plan to just yank the 16 1 TB drives and replace with 3 TB drives.

My question is, the motivation right now is twofold. One, my poor array has had data removed from it to make space for quite some time now so I really need more room and two, I'm getting read errors on one of my drives. I went to buy a replacement from Newegg and they're not carried anymore. To prevent this on my new build, I want to buy 3 or 4 extras as cold spares. Just wondering though if a hard drive can be damaged from lack of use as time goes by. Can it? If so, I could buy a USB external SATA drive kit to spin them up periodically. How often would be required?

Thanks!
 
We buy extra hard drives when we buy servers - and just leave them in the box in the closet.
 
It is possible that prolonged non-use could result in the HDD not being able to spin up. That is the sort of thing that is very difficult to test, though, because you would basically need to set lots of drives aside for years to test it.

But I think if you spin them up once a year, you should have no problems.

You should also consider having one or two hot spares in your system.
 
Thanks guys. I had considered having hot spares, but I figured having them run 24x7 would put them in the same danger for breakdown as the other drives. Well, I guess not quite the same, since I assume they aren't being accessed constantly like the main ones.
 
Strahan said:
I had considered having hot spares, but I figured having them run 24x7 would put them in the same danger for breakdown as the other drives. Well, I guess not quite the same, since I assume they aren't being accessed constantly like the main ones.
Click to expand...

Having a HDD spinning constantly, but not reading or writing data, should usually allow it to last a long time. As long as you have a decent power supply (and UPS or surge-suppressor feeding the PSU), I would expect a hot-spare to last as long as a cold-spare (perhaps longer if the cold-spare fails due to not being able to spin up).
 
Other than really-old drives (pre-ATA) you shouldn't have any problems. the "stiction" issues of old drives have not been an issue for a while, and I actually spun up some Miniscribe 8051A's a month or so ago (23 years or so since they were spun up) for a client that wanted to get some old tech manuals from before he retired.
 
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