[SOLVED] Is My HDD Worth Keeping?

[Freakface109]

The only hard drive in my computer is an old HDD. It always takes at least 3 minutes for my computer to boot up, and loading into games or moving files around is unbearably slow. I've decided that I'm going to get an SSD this weekend. I've been looking at the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB for $82 (is this a good one?). What I'd put on it is my OS, recording/editing software and a few games.

That being said, would my current HDD be worth keeping for the extra storage? I attached a picture of the CrystalDiskInfo results. It has 1.81TB of usable space which is super nice because I have gone over 1TB of space used before. But with proper space management, like right now, I'm only using 730GB. I don't know a whole lot about how to read the information CDI gives me, so I'm unsure if it would be better to look maybe for a newer hard drive with perhaps only 1TB of storage? Or is my current one in good enough shape to keep me going for a while, despite being slow?

https://imgur.com/a/4nXF2cK

Thanks for the help!

 

[falcon291]

It seems it is just slow, according to SMART values reallocated sector count is still 0, that means it is still working OK - kind of.

But spin-up value is a concern and I don't expect it to get better so if I was in your place I would not use it. It can fail anytime. HD prices are not really high, so buying a new HDD would be good.

 

[popatim]

There's nothing currently wrong with it aside from the 4 years that it's been running.
It's an older sata2 / sata300 drive and not as fast as modern drives but i wouldn't hesitate to use it.

Always assume your drive could fail at anytime and keep important data backed up. Even brand new drives fail without warning.

 

[fzabkar]

The raw value of the Spin-Up Time attribute appears to be a multi-byte quantity.

• 0007024401CE -> 0x0007 / 0x0244 / 0x01CE
  
  0x0244 = 580
  0x01CE = 462

I'm guessing that these may be the max/min spinup times, or perhaps they are the last two spinup times, ie 5.8 and 4.6 seconds ???

Each increment of the raw Power-On Time probably represents 0.1 hour rather than 1 hour, otherwise it would take 100 years for the normalised value to fall from 100 all the way to 0. You can verify this by reexamining the SMART report after 1 hour. In fact CrystalDiskInfo understands that the Power On Time sometimes takes on a different meaning and it automatically readjusts the reported Power On Time accordingly.

 

[mdd1963]

Life is too short to be lving with spinning drives anyway....

Get a 2.5" SATA Crucial MX500 1 TB drive for $95 or so, do a fresh install, and thank us later...

35K hours is about 12 years of 8 hours per day use.....; IMO, you've suffered without an SSD long enough!

 

[fzabkar]

I'd be a little concerned about Crucial's MX500 after seeing the following thread (and a similar one at anandtech.com):

https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...fast-despite-few-bytes-being-written.3571220/

 

[USAFRet]

I'd be a little concerned about Crucial's MX500 after seeing the following thread (and a similar one at anandtech.com):

https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...fast-despite-few-bytes-being-written.3571220/

Fear mongering.

The hundreds of thousands of other MX500 users, myself included, have not had issues.

No drive or device is impervious to fail.
For a drive, expect complete fail in the next 0.25 sec. Any drive or storage device.
Operate accordingly.

 

[fzabkar]

35K hours is about 12 years of 8 hours per day use

I don't believe that this attribute is reporting the time in 1 hourly increments. I'm betting that it's more like 0.1 hours per increment, in which case the drive has done 3.5K hours.

The OP will no doubt update us ...

 

[falcon291]

There's nothing currently wrong with it aside from the 4 years that it's been running.
It's an older sata2 / sata300 drive and not as fast as modern drives but i wouldn't hesitate to use it.

Always assume your drive could fail at anytime and keep important data backed up. Even brand new drives fail without warning.

Spin-up time and so as he wrote generally slow data transfer of the disk is a problem. There is something wrong.

 

[Mr.Spock]

Nope, Alot of these are server pulls sold as "refurbished" by goHardDrive or Newegg
Suspect that OP needed to defrag these or preallocate pagefile so Win10 doesn't have to at each startup

I don't believe that this attribute is reporting the time in 1 hourly increments. I'm betting that it's more like 0.1 hours per increment, in which case the drive has done 3.5K hours.

The OP will no doubt update us ...

Even the newest drives don't reach the SATA II theoretical limit, so that's just marketing

There's nothing currently wrong with it aside from the 4 years that it's been running.
It's an older sata2 / sata300 drive and not as fast as modern drives but i wouldn't hesitate to use it.

Always assume your drive could fail at anytime and keep important data backed up. Even brand new drives fail without warning.

 

[fzabkar]

Nope, Alot of these are server pulls sold as "refurbished" by goHardDrive or Newegg

Look at the Normalised value of the attribute. It has lost 4 points. That's 4 points in 4 years, so 1 point per year. In order to lose all 100 points, the drive would need to run for 100 years. That's illogical Mr Spock.

The OP could easily clear this up by allowing the drive to run for an hour and checking SMART in between. CDI will learn how to interpret this attribute and amend its Power On Hours report accordingly.

 

[fzabkar]

Spin-up time and so as he wrote generally slow data transfer of the disk is a problem. There is something wrong.

The normalised value of the Spin-up Time is 139, which is significantly above 100. This would suggest that there is nothing wrong here. Also, the Spin Retry Count is 0.

Here are other SMART reports which suggest that the spin-up time is within the normal range.

https://pastebin.com/aLdGRGC3 (100)
https://github.com/linuxhw/SMART/blob/master/HDD/Hitachi/HUA7220/HUA722020ALA331/7C1A043E6230 (149)
https://github.com/linuxhw/SMART/blob/master/HDD/Hitachi/HUA7220/HUA722020ALA331/FE9A52EBB882 (117)
lists.spline.inf.fu-berlin.de/pipermail/eisfair/2018-January/026219.html (123)
https://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=2046758 (129)

 

[popatim]

Even the newest drives don't reach the SATA II theoretical limit, so that's just marketing

Correct but that is not what i meant by older/slower drive. When Hitachi rolled out the next generation drive there was something like a 20% increase in performance from these 7k2 drives.

 

[Mr.Spock]

servers are up 24x7 - a simple look at the number of power cycles will corroborate the duty cycle for most of its lifetime - they're resold after 4-5 yrs and then the power-on cycle increase as they're used in a daily driver.. I've had these with 43 power cycles! and 17000 power on hrs

I don't believe that this attribute is reporting the time in 1 hourly increments. I'm betting that it's more like 0.1 hours per increment, in which case the drive has done 3.5K hours.

The OP will no doubt update us ...

 

[fzabkar]

The OP's drive is averaging about 20 "units" of power-on time for each power cycle. That's either 20 hours or 2 hours. Either way, it's not a server workload, so I don't understand where you got that idea.

 

[Mr.Spock]

it is for a server HDD which was resold after 4-5yrs and now is a daily use

The OP's drive is averaging about 20 "units" of power-on time for each power cycle. That's either 20 hours or 2 hours. Either way, it's not a server workload, so I don't understand where you got that idea.

 

[fzabkar]

@Freakface109, would you please run CDI, record the Power On Hours, and then run CDI again 1 hour later. Does CDI then report 1 additional hour, or 10 additional hours, or does it now report 3,500 hours in total?