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Should I be concerned that my HDD, which seems to be working fine, is 8 years old? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 days ago by communism@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It appears to work fine (it contains my home partition for my main machine I daily drive) and I haven't noticed signs of failure. Not noticeably slow either. I used to boot Windows off of it once upon a time which was incredibly slow to start up, but I haven't noticed slowness since using it for my home partition for my personal files.

Articles online seem to suggest the life expectancy for an HDD is 5–7 years. Should I be worried? How do I know when to get a new drive?

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[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Don't forget to scrub and checksum your drive before making backups. You don't want to copy over rotten bits.

Same goes for the backup. And the backup's backup.

[–] tkw8@lemm.ee 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Don't forget to scrub and checksum your drive

What is the process for doing this?

[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Use a modern filesystem that manages file integrity for you.

I use btrfs.

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Lol, so the process is "go back in time and change how you initially formatted the drive". Come on man.

Good knowledge for setting up new drives though.

[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world -2 points 4 days ago

Well, sure. If you did it wrong the first time around. For everyone else, just run "btrfs scrub "

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

how can i do it on ntfs and ext4?

[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Use btrfs-convert to convert ext4 to btrfs.

NTFS is 31 years old and not modern by any standard. Avoid if you care about your data.