[plug] Odd drive firmware issue

[Brad Campbell]

On 10/05/16 15:48, Chris Hoy Poy wrote:
> Not the only drive on the market with similiar issues. I've had
> countless different drives,  enterprise or home.
>
> Don't rely on it in any drive.
>
> Past 45000 hours is when it shouldn't be in an enterprise environment
> anyway, unless you explicitly plan for just dealing when they fail.
>
> 65k hours is 7.4 years - that's a pretty good life for any spinning media.

Yeah, absolutely.

This box has 18 spinners and 6 SSD in it. Most of the big drives are old 
WD 2TB greens, and most of those are 5 years old now, so I've budgeted 
for an upgrade early in the new financial year.

That was just an anomaly I'd not seen before as I generally replace 
drives every 5 years. That particular unit had somewhere in the order of 
25k hours on it when I picked it up. It'd been sitting in a chassis as a 
hot standby for nearly 3 years and had almost zero read/write.

I had some interesting correspondence with an engineer at Maxtor back 
when they were still doing enterprise stuff (probably 10 years ago now), 
and he said the trick is to keep the drives below about 40C, keep them 
spinning and keep the heads loaded. Apparently below 20C they had 
trouble writing to the media and above 40 they saw degradation in the 
various lubricants.

I've been pretty lucky with drives over the years, but it does seem that 
it's stop-start cycles that kills them faster than anything.