How old is your oldest working hard drive?

writhziden

writhziden

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I have a 20GB 2.5 inch drive from May 2004 and a 300GB 3.5 inch drive from July 2004.
 
Can't really say because they have all been retired and are all sitting in an old shoe box. They worked when I put them in there because I wiped them. But they've been sitting for years now. Not all have dates on them but there is an old 40GB Maxtor that came out of an old XP system from 2002.
 
I was wondering what happened to Maxtor. I didn't realise they were bought out by Seagate 11 years ago. They made some pretty reliable drives.
 
Yeah, there used to be a lot more drive makers. Some just quit making them. Others were bought up or sold off. Fujitsu is now part of Toshiba and Hitachi was bought out by WD. Samsung used to make their own HDs but they sold that division to Seagate.
 
2007 (Sony Vaio laptop).

Not sure of the size or manufacturer.

I also have an XP Pro desktop from 2003/4 that works but I don't use it anymore. Original 250 GB IDE HDD.
 
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Internal we have two computers from 2004. One was built by a friend and runs Win 2K and the other I took from someone who was going to throw it away (power supply died). It's a Dell Dimension 2400 running XP. (The reviews of it are dated early 2004).

External a huge 80GB WD, purchased July 19, 2005. (I don't keep it attached to a computer all the time and it doesn't get used hard. I've actually archived all my floppies before I threw them out.
 
I have a 40gig in a Win XP 1st release version on a old shop PC that has been running continually since 2002(except for 2 shop moves 1 in 2008 the other in 2009 and whenever the power goes out) No updates, no antivirus, no internet connection it runs flawlessly..............................
 
Oldest working HDD - 30GB IDE 2.5" HDD installed in my first laptop (Pentium M Windows XP laptop - the cheapest laptop that we could find in the store!)
 
My current PCs are my oldest --

laptop: HP HDX 64x, running Windows 10 1703 from 2008.
desktop: HP TouchSmart 64x, running the latest Windows Insider Builds also from 2008.
 
Oldest hard drive died 2-3 years ago at the age of 2, it couldn't really take a hit. Don't let a kid come near his laptop when he's angry was my lesson.

Current oldest hard drive is from 2015.
 
axe0 said:
Oldest hard drive died 2-3 years ago at the age of 2, it couldn't really take a hit. Don't let a kid come near his laptop when he's angry was my lesson.

Current oldest hard drive is from 2015.
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My wife has a laptop she keeps out in the living room. We have two cats who have their toys and cat furniture out there, so they roughhouse a lot in the same area. Her Windows installation was constantly becoming corrupted, so I started investigating the hard drive. Seems the cats had bumped the laptop several times and even knocked it onto the floor a few times with the hard disk spinning; bad sectors started accumulating like crazy after a while.

I swapped the HDD for an SSD and haven't seen issues since. I think an SSD might be a good option for kids, too.
 
Seems the cats had bumped the laptop several times and even knocked it onto the floor a few times with the hard disk spinning; bad sectors started accumulating like crazy after a while.
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That is odd. Most hard drives built for mobile use have accelerometers - used as motion detectors - built in and are "supposed" detect when they are falling and quickly move ("park") the R/W head over the "landing zone" which protects the R/W and stored damage. Apple introduced similar technologies into the notebooks themselves to instruct drives to autopark when sudden abnormal movement is detected. Many notebook makers have adapted their own similar feature.

Of course, such safety measures are not fool (or cat) proof and if the notebooks were knocked to the floor several times, it could have been one time too many (or too rough) and luck ran out.

Out of curiosity, were these hard floors?
 
Digerati said:
Out of curiosity, were these hard floors?
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Nope. We have carpeted floors.

I think going forward, I will opt for SSD over HDD for notebook PCs. Even with the accelerometers, there's more peace of mind with less moving parts. It's also better for battery life.
 
Vaio used to be very good and expensive until they released the small ones, its popularity and quality kinda dwindles down from there.
 
I'm still running a 'tiny' external drive with 150GB capacity from Trekstor (3.5 inches and USB 2.0). I guess I bought it in the year 2005.... :D
I'm also frequently checking SMART values: everything is still fine ! :D
 

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