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I had two ST 250 GB PATA drives fail after a few years, with either weak heads or debris inside. They are only slightly older model than the 320 G. Clearly anecdotal experience with one doesn't apply to the other.

New drives since 2012 or so have a built in function to park their heads after a short period of idle time. This normally only happens when power is removed. The drive might accumulate tens of thosuands of head parking cycles during normal use (S.m.a.r.t C1). This could be disabled by changing the advanced power management (APM) value using a procedure that applies a DCO and inadvertently also saves the APM value. On the most recent models this doesn't work. One must use Seagate OpenSeaChest utility (requires NT 6.1 or making Linux boot disk).

I am still puzzled by he hours counter. Would be good to hear if anyone has it at greater than 66,000.

Edited by j7n
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3 hours ago, j7n said:

I had two ST 250 GB PATA drives fail after a few years, with either weak heads or debris inside. They are only slightly older model than the 320 G. Clearly anecdotal experience with one doesn't apply to the other.

New drives since 2012 or so have a built in function to park their heads after a short period of idle time. This normally only happens when power is removed. The drive might accumulate tens of thosuands of head parking cycles during normal use (S.m.a.r.t C1). This could be disabled by changing the advanced power management (APM) value using a procedure that applies a DCO and inadvertently also saves the APM value. On the most recent models this doesn't work. One must use Seagate OpenSeaChest utility (requires NT 6.1 or making Linux boot disk).

I am still puzzled by he hours counter. Would be good to hear if anyone has it at greater than 66,000.

I usually run the WD tool to disable the stupid idle parking.

But it won't work on 8TB, sadly. You know why? Cause 8tb is NOT WD anymore, they bought Hitachi and it's just a re-labeled Hitachi sold as WD, that's why the tool doesn't work.

Seagate always failed me. I had only one good seagate 4tb (enterprise model 5400RPM). But it was so damn noisy ! 

66k ? Nah, I usuallly ditch old drives, not safe to use. The oldest I found here with me is abot 33-34k on it, guess you won't be impressed.

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  • 1 year later...
Posted (edited)

Drive C was in Caution for about a year before I ran into some slowdown and Bad Blocks, so it had to be replaced. The replacement disk is the same size, but it already has 128,673 hours (14 years) on it.

qaAhBSK.jpg

My two PATA disks are at 177527 and 177682 (20 years)

Nen5ThM.jpg

djHWekE.jpg

And an odd-ball situation, this disk was not in the original post but it has the wrong hours showing at just 1487 which is a couple of months. This disk is over 10 years old so not sure why the hours are showing at such a low number.

HUrd18A.jpg

EDIT: Mystery solved regarding the low hour drive. What ended up happening was that I have both the C and G disk in an enclosure, and both were WD800AAJS. I got the serial number of the C drive and marked it on the disk, but I didn't mark the G drive. I was counting on being able to tell which were the original disks by the amount of dust on them. BUT one of the potential replacement disks was also a dusty WD800AAJS. I ran into problems cloning the C drive because Clonezilla was not erasing the destination disk and had multiple partitions, so the clone was always failing. And then when it did work, the OS booted into startup repair because it had the bootloader from the replacement disk and the OS from my disk. Eventually I got it sorted but in the end what ended up happening is that I put one of the potential replacement disks into the enclosure and ended up imaging my C disk to my G disk. And the new G disk is low hours because it was the actual replacement disk I was supposed to be cloning to. I have the data backed up so it didn't turn out to be a problem in the end but I was sweating for a bit once I realised what happened. 

Moral of the story: mark all of your disks before doing this kind of work.

Edited by Tripredacus
Mystery solved
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