Should I replace my old WD1600JB?

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[H]ard|Gawd
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Jul 25, 2005
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I have an old WD1600JB that has been very reliable so far. But I'm beginning to worry I might see failure soon simply because I have had it for what I believe is 5 years. Is there any way I can find out the actual age of the drive?

At the moment I'm running an error scan in HD Tune. I'll update with the results when it finishes.

UPDATE: Silly me, the date is actually printed on the drive itself. Its date is listed as March 2005. Also HD Tune finished with zero damaged blocks. So am I just being paranoid or should I look into another drive soon?
 
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Hard drives are cheap these days. So might as well get a newer and faster hard drive if you can afford it.

With that said, hard drive failure is pretty much random. Some drives die after 6 years, some after 6 days. So yeah, nothing to worry about.
 
The SMART information usually has a field that displays how many hours the drive has been turned on. But not all drives have this. 2 of my 3 drives do. The label on the drive may also have a manufacturing date.

Ironically enough (since drives tend to fail more when they're very new or very old), any new drive you get now may have the same chance of failing in the next 3 months as your current drive :p

I'd still replace it, since modern drives are much faster than your 160GB drive, and you can always use one drive to back up the other.
 
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