Unused hard drives, shelf life?

[XLR2XLR]

I have been wondering how long a typical life hard drive (say a Seagate Barracuda)
will last for when NOT in daily use.

I spin my drives up once a month for 5 mins just to keep them running free.

Anyone had a drive fail that's been sitting on the shelf for a long while, is it an urban myth, or do they really cease up?

I suppose I have around 6 drives that need such spin up treatment.

thanks

[Shadow_7]

I don't even do that much. I have several old PCs that I've had sit for years, sometimes outdoors in non-climate controlled rooms. And I've never had any issues with harddrives related to shelf life.

That being said, you want to keep them climate controlled if possible. You want to keep them away from magnets (headphones / speakers / other harddrives). You don't want to jar them (i.e. drop them). And you probably want to keep multiple copies of the good stuff, just in case. And in a more pro sense, you want to keep one copy OFF location. In case of fire, terrorist attack, or other unquestionables. Even with all of that you may want to do fresh writes of the data periodically just to insure that the magnetic information doesn't fade over time. And that probably requires something a little more than just spinning them up. Like moving or recopying the files between drives.

And of course never have just one copy of something critical on a drive you don't trust. I generally put my drives through a few paces before putting them into production use. Tape is probably the king in terms of long term storage. Even if those fail, you can still get part of the information recovered. Flash drives seem a little more trusted these days. No moving parts and such makes them useful for vehicle mounted video cameras. But I've got one that's barely used that would indicate their reliability in day to day operations to be equal to or less than harddrives IMO.

[mac black]

I had no problem going back 4 years .

[DanDan]

Roger Nichols had an article floating around somewhere on the subject of archiving. He reckons HD's do suffer from 'Sticktion'. You should be able to find the article on his site or at Eq mag.

DD