Deth

Fitness and everything else

Old Trusty Hard Drive Giving Smart Errors After 14 Years

This is certainly not a complaint at all, but the past few days I’ve noticed some smart errors from my old 250 gig single platter hard drive I’d bought in 2007. For many of those years it was used heavily, as I’d bought it when I built the computer with a Q6600 processor.

When I did that, I’d skimped out on the ram and that made it use the swap far too much. I figured I could upgrade the ram at a later date, but I never did as ram prices went up, and I just never bothered. Don’t do that! Do it right from the beginning. I also built everything from source on FreeBSD, so that used the hard drive a lot and never had any issues. Since then, I’d been through several 1 TB drives that all threw out errors within a couple of years. That was with just using them as storage, but always had my OS installed on one partition of the 250 GB drive and Windows on the other half.

It was only in the past year or two that I moved the OS to SSDs, which really is a game changer. FreeBSD was the first one I switched over to an SSD when I got one for Christmas, I think. It boots almost instantly now. It wasn’t painfully slow like Windows 10 was when it was on an old hard disk, but it’s avast improvement for sure. Using the SSD really changes everything on Windows 10. I picked up a cheap M.2 one that’s smaller for windows, eventually. It really seems that Windows is extremely inefficient with disk usage, I’d borderline useless without using an SSD. I hate the fact that there is occasionally the need to use windows for something, but it’s not something I can help.

Time will tell about their durability, but I will get another spinning platter drive to keep my stuff backed up on. There’s not a big rush to buy or install. It’s also on the NAS, so I should be good.

The old 250 GB drive was the best $70ish I spent on computer stuff, I think. It lasted on the these years of heavy use with no issues. It survived power outages. A few years ago, a transformer kept blowing up the street and causing the power to briefly go out, so lots of fscking happened. Then there was last summer with our power flicking due to the bad breaker box with random crashes. I wasn’t actively using the drive then, but still, I’m sure it wasn’t good for it.

In this day and age it was nice to find something reliable.