Retiring a fully-functional 12.5 year old drive

[Gizmotoy]

I thought I might start a fun thread for the holidays.  So I have this hard drive that has been in service and in active use for 12 years and 6 months.  It is horrifically slow compared to the modern drives, but it is a trooper.  I really want to let it keep going and see when it will eventually fail, but it feels like too big a risk to keep in my main array.  Plus, as noted, the performance is terrible.

 

I'm going to pull it out of the array next week and let it live out its retirement some other way.  Any ideas or suggestions?  Anyone still running something older than this?

 

Drive details:

Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000

Model HDS5C3020ALA632

 

The drive's stats, according to SMART.  Some of these are astonishing:

Power on hours: 109250

Start/stop count: 5927

Load cycle count: 6071

Reallocated sector count: 0

Power Cycle Count: 116

Logical Sectors Written: 66,681,556,472
Number of Write Commands: 460,521,050  
Logical Sectors Read: 4,704,534,865,919 (4 trillion sector reads?!?  Can this be right?!?)
Number of Read Commands: 7,586,319,622

 

A big salute to you, bulletproof Hitachi I purchased on a whim from MicroCenter in 2011.

 

Hitachi_HDS5C3020ALA632_ML0220Fxxxxx-20231224-2107.txt

[Russ Uno]

I have a few Seagates like that..  Still in great condition after running preclear and long Smart test..

Could use as a warm spare, just in case..

I also use them as external drives for older system startup disk when I need to boot my Macs on an older OS, or even current OS with utilities when I need do Maintenance that I can't do from the internal Boot drive.

Also for secondary backup of little used files.

[TimTheSettler]

On 12/25/2023 at 12:24 AM, Gizmotoy said:

Power on hours: 109250

 

Oh man.  You are incredibly close to my long-serving HDD with 110885.  See the post below.  Mine is still in use but not as much as it used to be (it still sits in an old Windows Server 2008 machine that I use as a backup machine.

 

https://hardforum.com/threads/post-your-hard-drive-power-on-hours.1915865/post-1045205453