On Freitag 25 September 2009, Dale wrote:
> Paul Hartman wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:59 PM, Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> One thing I have noticed about hard drives in my experience. When you
> >> plug that puppy in and power it up, let it run for a good long while.
> >> Overnight is good, a few days is even better, a week or more is even
> >> better still from the mechanical point of view. I remember this from
> >> when I rebuilt my Moms old motor in her car years ago. It said in the
> >> book and from several mechanics, once you crank it, run it for at least
> >> 30 minutes and at different rpms. The longer the better. It should get
> >> to its normal temperature before even thinking about cutting it off. Do
> >> NOT cut the engine off unless it is really serious. The first few
> >> minutes that a motor runs is crucial. If you start it and just run it a
> >> couple minutes, it won't ever be the same. I was also told that driving
> >> it is really good.
> >>
> >> I also remember this from way back when I was working on puters. I got
> >> a new job when winder 3.1 came out. Anyway. If a electronic device can
> >> survive the first couple to six months of usage, they usually last a
> >> while from the electronic point of view. That is short of spilling your
> >> beer in it or it getting hit by lightening or something like that. I
> >> have two 80Gb drives right now. One is a Maxtor and the other is a
> >> Western Digital. I bet there is a few people on this list that hate
> >> each one because they had one that failed. I haven't had any trouble
> >> with mine at all. They all fail eventually tho. I just hope one of
> >> mine fails when there is nothing important on it is all. ;-)
> >>
> >> Still comparing all the options. I got to start looking for a good SATA
> >> drive now. Just when I had a decent IDE drive all picked out too. LOL
> >
> > When you look at hard drive reviews, they tend to be either 5 stars
> > ("Perfect! Never a problem after 10 years!") or 0 stars ("Horrible,
> > died after 2 minutes! I got 2 more and they did the same thing!" etc).
> > I don't think there are a lot of ways for a hard drive to go bad
> > without it being catastrophic. Maybe bad sectors... but I consider
> > that catastrophic because they always seem to spread like cancer. If
> > there is one bad sector on a drive, I simply can't trust it.
> >
> > That being said, I've had lots of hard drives from many brands and the
> > best combinations of price/speed/reliability I've had is Samsung. I'm
> > using 6 of them right now and after 2+ years of 24/7 usage none has
> > died yet. I'm sure someone here will have a horror story about a
> > Samsung drive to add to this thread. :)
>
> I saw where the drive hours was displayed a long time ago. I thought it
> was hdparm that displayed that but I can't find it in the man page and
> -I doesn't seem to show that. Can someone tell me if there is a way to
> get how many hours a drive has been running? I know I saw this before
> but no clue where it was.
>
> Dale
>
> :-) :-)
>
smartctl -a
