7 year old MyPassport - Health still 100% after >1040 days power on

tpriest said:

I have an external 2TB 2.5" WD MyPassport drive... I realised the other day that it's now over 7 years old, bought February 2014. ...Powered on time 1040 days, 21 hours....
Despite the apparently good stats from HD Sentinel should I continue to trust it, or should I look to replace before it fails, potentially suddenly.

Ha, a mere 'youngster' My System One below is still running on it's original HDD (from around 2011) and has now clocked up 1210 days 11 hours.



Some drives just seem to go on forever, while others can fail within a year. HDDs tend to fail gradually, often with warning signs in advance. If the SMART data shows a Reallocated Sector Count or a Pending Sector Count that is above zero, then the drive may be about to fail. If either of those counts start to rise then it's definitely time to replace the drive.

tpriest said:

... this is the SMART data. Comments welcome.

The 'Data' column is what to look at, and in all the important indicators (those with the green 'tick' mark) they are all zero. That is the data you'd expect from a drive that's in perfect working order.

More on predicting failure from Backblaze here....

For the last few years we’ve used the following five SMART stats as a means of helping determine if a drive is going to fail.

Attribute		Description
SMART 5		Reallocated Sectors Count
SMART 187		Reported Uncorrectable Errors
SMART 188		Command Timeout
SMART 197		Current Pending Sector Count
SMART 198		Uncorrectable Sector Count

When the RAW value for one of these five attributes is greater than zero, we have a reason to investigate....

What SMART Hard Disk Errors Actually Tell Us

tpriest said:

.....Despite the apparently good stats from HD Sentinel should I continue to trust it, or should I look to replace before it fails, potentially suddenly.

An empathic YES(!) for replacing it, even if HD Sentinel reports 100% !.... Especially if you don't have regular full backups of this drive. (Which you should otherwise you will pay one day dearly for your ignorance of not having done so)

Here's why:
in 2010 I upgraded my data storage which was on several separate drives in a data server to a single new 2 terabyte drive.
I checked it regularly, de-fragmented it and had always HD Sentinel running. It performed well with an above average sustained data transfer rate.

HD Sentinel always showed 100% performance and 100% health. Fast forward to 2020.
By now this data storage disk which ran 24/7 had accumulated over 87,600 operating hours, in other words, over 3650 days. Automatic backup was continuously to a well-known cloud backup service.

The drive was well cooled never exceeded 35°C and was regularly serviced as in de-fragmented etc.
In early 2020 after the first lock downs and much time at my hands I looked at various system data in detail again and saw that this 2 TB HDD having been 10 years in constant operation still reported 100% health with no weak or problematic sectors or data transfer errors. Amazing! What a drive!

Looking at the lifetime data writes I had to look twice in astonishment as it had reported over 126 PB (Peta Bytes!) In data written! WOAH! All in perfect 100% health. Amazing! Amazing!

A few weeks later, one morning, working on a project, I saved a file and retrieved another one. That other file never came and instead I heard "click...click-click" repeatedly and the HD Sentinel always green icon blinked frantically in the red. Opening up HD Sentinel I found that the health was now 1% and rapidly declining with a barrage of warning messages. Doing a surface test produced right away an endless chain of defective sectors. And then it was all over. Nothing. The system could not get even and identification from the hard disk.

Like a healthy 100 year old person you had a beer yesterday with, all over a good agile conversation, the following day the 100-year-old person inexplicably died.

Slightly over 10 years of perfect flawless operation, the 2 TB HDD died literally overnight, at the very latest that morning where I saved a file and wanted to open another one. Puff! Out. 100% dead. No chance of recovery whatsoever. No sectors found, no ID, unable to read or write. Full "cardiac arrest" after a loyal dutiful life of over 10 years writing over 126 Peta Bytes!

I hope this little true short story didn't bore you but instead inspired you!

PS: After opening it up for a postmortem examination, and autopsy of its innards, I found the cause of death: the tiny heads which are bonded/glued onto the actuator arms had delaminated and came off, one of them dangling still on the two thin wires. While the disk platter was still rotated with 7200 RPM it had carved a beautiful pattern....
Everything else, bearings and electronics was still in perfect shape and functioning.
PPS: I did take a picture but can't find it as I'm writing this. If hopefully I do, I will post it here.

If smart is all good and no other symptoms, you should be good, you can do a chkdsk /r and also verify all your backups made by reflect to be sure they are all readable, if those are both fine I would be ok to carry on using the drive.

I had a Seagate HDD that had been working fine for almost a decade before I replaced it months ago due to "The IO operation at logical block address xxxxxx for Disk 0 (PDO name: \Device\000000xx) failed due to a hardware error."

Nevertheless, HD Tune found no damaged blocks on it, and the health status was OK.
HDD is about to fail, bad sectors...