The Little Drive that Could

The Little Drive that Could

We always check the health of hard drives in computers we work on, in case hardware issues require them to be replaced. I noticed that this particular drive was unhealthy, but not failing. And that it had an extraordinary number of hours.

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Look at the Power On Time line item under General Information. Now take a look at the born-on date in the top right corner of the white label on the drive at the top of this blog post. This drive was made January, 2008, (in Thailand) and was purchased in late February or early March of the same year right here in south Florida. Then, it ran for 62,902 hours (87 months, 10 days, 22 hours). That's 7 1/4 years non-stop until we removed it from that computer this past June.

So, just how unhealthy is it? Well, it's old and 48.3% looks scary. However, the DriveDx overall ratings state that it is "AVERAGE - current health state is not perfect but sufficient and normal".

Then, we have that lone error near the bottom of the window. A single instance of a UDMA CRC Error Count (the '1' after the health indicator text) was likely due to a momentary power outage, or something happening to the data cable connecting this drive to the computer during the many years of operation.

And, that's it.

We could probably connect this drive to another machine, fire it up, and watch it run for another 7 1/4 years.