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SMART Warning - advice?

mlcarson

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 12, 2009
Messages
398
I've got a Reallocated Sectors Count of a raw value of 1 on an old Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 3TB HDD as reported by CrystalDiskInfo 8.0.0 with a health status of Caution. I didn't realize how old this was until looking at the Power On Hours of 61823. So that's 2575 days or 7.05 yrs of power on time. Is that possible? I see articles going back to 2011 on the drive so I guess so. Looks like I purchased it back on 10/15/11. Stablebit's surface scan shows the disk healthy but with that single reallocated sector.

It's partner has zero errors but has 61722 power on hours so is about the same age.

I'm assuming that just based on age that the drives should probably be replaced and disposed of even though the one drive hasn't got any SMART warnings.

The system currently has 2 other Seagate 3 TB HDD (ST3000DM001) drives and 2 new 10TB HDD (WD100EMAZ). I'm thinking of doing a 13TB Drivepool and then just mirror/duplicate it to the other drives
 
If its redundant it could last another several years, if it was a single disk then maybe look at pre-emptively replacing yeah.
 
If the value starts going up rapidly then it's time for a replacement. Otherwise, a small fixed number of reallocated/bad sectors shouldn't be much of an issue.
 
The value is not going up. I think I'm more worried about the power on hours (age) at this point. I'm kind of surprised that I can still get the same drive on Amazon for $50 as refurbished. There aren't many computer parts from 7 yrs ago where that's true. The system that the drive was pulled from is still using an i7-2600k which is from that same time period though. It's role has changed from primary system to media server but is still trouble free. I'll probably retire it from duty when Zen2 comes out and existing Ryzen 1700 will replace it.

I've generally been of the belief that HDD failure rates correlate with age after the initial infant mortality rate is discounted and have a usable lifespan of 5 years after which the failure rate starts increasing exponentially. The drives might last a couple more years but generally become a liability. I can replace 3 of them with a single 10TB HDD which will generate less heat and give me a larger maximum storage pool while having less risk of an impending drive failure. So, the one reallocated sector may not be anything to worry about but the drive has an increasing risk of failure just due to age. I might keep them around in a test machine or use them for transportable media but at this point they're coming out of the media server.
 
I have few old Seagates 200/320GB that still roll since maybe 2004-2006. They have more than 90,000 hours Power-on-hours. I have one 500GB seagate on maybe its 80,000 hour, it has 15 reallocated sectors for about 4 years and not going up.
It's all on luck. Keep it for less important stuff and look at its SMART from time to time.
 
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