The oldest hard drive I'm still using is ...
Displaying poll results.30997 total votes.
The oldest hard drive I'm still using is ...
It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong. -- Chris Torek
It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong. -- Chris Torek
Frist! (Score:2)
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I'm still using a 200MB (yes, MB) drive in one of my old firewalls for logs. I think it's a Seagate and to be honest I have no idea how old is is, probably early 90s. I had it lying around so I decided to use it for something. One of the three R's is reuse, so that's what I did. :) They sure don't make drives like they used to.
I think I still have some 1-4GB drives unused in a drawer right now too, come to think of it...
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I've got a 125 running with a couple of 250s in a 486 (well, AMD 5x86 OC'd to 133MHz), but I'm pretty sure the original hard drive in my Color Turbo NeXTStation is older.
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30 GB Seagate here, when it was new it was the biggest disk I had, now it's the system disk in my home server and it's old enough that I'm worried it'll give up and die any day now...
1-3GB 5.25" full height SCSI, circa 1995, uVAX III (Score:2)
Still going strong with 1-3GB 5.25" full height SCSI drives, on a microVAX III no less...
lots of 4GB 3.5" SCSI drives...
and 100-200MB IDE drives, also circa 1995.
a bunch of ST506 drives lying around, along with 5.25" 1.2MB floppies, but not really used...
Depends (Score:2)
what kind of use counts? (Score:5, Funny)
I have a wall clock made out of a Quantum Bigfoot drive, does that count as use?
Re:what kind of use counts? (Score:5, Interesting)
It looks like this: http://junk.kegetys.net/xzy/quantum_clock.jpg [kegetys.net]
I have seen similar clocks made so that the platters are visible and the clock hands are made out of the read heads. That way it looks better, mine is just quick hack job out of clock parts I had lying around that happened to fit inside the drive casing :)
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Nice!
IBM DJNA 13.5 GB from '99 (Score:2)
When IBM still owned it's hard drive fabs => Immortal HDs.
hah (Score:5, Funny)
My CoCo 3 and Tandy Model 102 are sitting in the corner, looking puzzled.
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I love showing people the boot time on my Model 100.
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Well, since neither had a hard drive, that makes sense. Now a older Model II... it could be in the running since a HD was an ( expensive ) option..
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Oldest computer at the office (still working):
SGI O2 Running IRIX 6.2, with original Ultra Wide SCSI HD (4GB).
It's been running strong since around 98'.
Next oldest machine is an iMac from circa 02'.
Next is an AMD machine we use to clone disks that has been going on since 06' or so.
All of them on their original HD.
20MB (Score:4, Interesting)
20MB (MFM unless I'm mistaking, a purring hard drive) in a PS/2 286. Older than that, 1541 drives (3 of them) and a 1541-II humming along on 2 C64s, and a 64HDD machine (with about 3-400 5.25 floppes). The C2N Datasette cassette drive and Koala touch pad are also still working. Didn't even bother to test the modems...
Don't have the Apple ][e clone anymore, so its floppies will probably go to 8-bit heaven unless I decide to buy an old catweasel card to transfer stuff :(
Software RAID, incrementally updated (Score:2)
I use ZFS on FreeBSD on my home server and routinely rotate out old drives. I currently have a 750GB, 1TB, and 2x2TB drives, adding up to about 2TB available storage (min(sizes)*(num_drives-1)). When the 750GB gets decrepit or I need to expand, I'll replace it with a 2+ TB drive and bump my online storage to 3TB (1TB*3). Replacing the 1TB with a newer 2TB drive eventually will bump that up to 6TB available.
BTW, even the current 2TB pool is vastly larger than I actually need. It's just at 30% full, but that
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Really? How do you backup 2TB?
Lots and lots of tape. Seriously, though, I'm currently using less than 600GB right now. That's a manageable amount even with an old DDS-4 drive, given how little actually changes on a daily basis.
You might as well just remove the 750GB and 1TB drives because they aren't adding anything at all. RAID-Z (or RAID5) with 2x2TB drives will give you 2TB free.
I'm more into IOPS than capacity right now, and more spindles implies more concurrency.
RAID-Z2 is the way to go (or RAID6 if using normal RAID). It takes way too long to rebuild a new 2TB drive to trust that you won't lose another.
In general, I agree. In this instance, I disagree. I like having the extra space available and can live with the ~2 hour rebuild time for the space I've used.
I'm always running out of space. Media storage and backups from other systems is what's using most of it.
Part of that 600GB is Time Machine backups. I ripped my CD collection
Quantum Fireball Plus LM15 (15 GB; 7200 RPM) HDD (Score:2)
On Thanksgiving 2011, I finally retired this old IDE/PATA HDD from Y2K. It was in my old 2005's Debian box. I decided to do a clean Debian installation from scratch with a SSD. Also, the HDD's SMART showed very old age and newsgroup people [google.com] said this was normal. It did bug my smartctl to e-mail me daily about it. :P
People were surprised that I was still using it. Yes, it's slow but damn it was reliable!
RLL drive... (Score:2)
I use an RLL drive as a doorstop. Does that count?
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It just says still using...
Doesn't specify still using as a hard drive.
Which means I've got lots of old dustcatchers, drawerstuffers, and shelf fillers that qualify. : - )
Media center PC's drive is 4 years old (Score:2)
Newer, just to reduce the power bill (Score:5, Interesting)
Then later in life I got married and bought a house. I started to notice the power bill and decided to try to reduce the power consumption of my PCs. I now have fewer systems, with fewer HDs, running continuously, and the ones that are on a lot are either doing important stuff (and still optimized to minimize power consumption) or are set to be a frugal with power as possible.
So now I think my oldest drive is only ~5 years old, its the one in my webserver. I do have an older drive in my wife's mac, but that isn't powered up all that often. I have, of course, even older drives in file cabinet drawers and in USB adapters, but nothing that is running regularly.
And while I would like to think this makes a meaningful difference to my carbon footprint, I admit it is more because I am not a fan of big power bills.
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If you're not a fan of big power bills, why do you keep a webserver running 24/7 in your house? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to just get some cheap hosting somewhere?
That is a fair question, and I have looked into it. There are a few things that caused me to favor running my own, some of which I didn't mention in this thread previously:
Re:Newer, just to reduce the power bill (Score:4, Informative)
P4 desktop I picked up for nothing a while back - hence not a huge power suck
Hate to burst your buble, but the P4 is about the worst CPU power-wise you can get, if it happens to be a northwood it isnt THAT bad, but prescott based P4s are frickin space-heaters. You should put a kill-a-watt meter on the thing and calculate its power-cost, chances are that replacing the P4+mobo with an Atom-based mini-itx might work out in a year or so.
As for the carbon footprint thing, if you are just replacing drives for the power-usage (rather then needing more space), i do not believe you could ever compensate for the CO2 produced in the production/shipping of the new drive. (not within its operational lifetime anyway)
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Hate to burst your buble, but the P4 is about the worst CPU power-wise you can get,
Actually, we have another system in the same room - my wife's G5 that is dramatically worse. The system we are actually discussing, though, is a small form factor system made by compaq. With a monitor and an external HD it can easily boot up on a UPS that refuses to power up the G5. Admittedly that is an extremely vague comparison but it certainly isn't a space heater either.
chances are that replacing the P4+mobo with an Atom-based mini-itx might work out in a year or so
I would, but I'll never find a motherboard that will fit that case, and right now I'm not inclined to buy a new case, mobo, cpu, r
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replacing the P4+mobo with an Atom-based mini-itx might work out in a year or so.
Be sure to check your electrical power bill first.
Its a fixation on /. that all of us live in afghanistan and run off a generator where each gallon of diesel costs $500 or whatever to ship in.
I calculated once that running all my boxes (not just one) costs about $15/month. Most people pay ten times that per month for cellphone service without blinking, so I'm not overly concerned.
Even if the atom mini-itx were free, I couldn't pay just for the shipping alone by power savings justification here.
The other is
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Oh, I have. About 4-5 years ago I swapped out a beige box P3 (might have been a Celeron) in the 1 - 1.5GHz range that I had cobbled together out of spare parts with a G4 Mac Mini. My power bill dropped approximately $15-18/month. Considering my power bill at the time was around $60/mo (tiny studio apartment) that was a
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Cheap hosting can be had for something below 10$/year, but likely includes just apache, php and mysql. If you want to run something else (e.g. some python based framework, rarer php libs, or you just want a shell to keep a permanent irc presence) you probably need a VPN, at more than 50$/year.
A small home server with http can be done using a low power, arm based device like the "plug" ones, using less than 10W (including a 2.5" hard disk), or 87.6 kWh/year.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrici [wikipedia.org]
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87.6 kWh/year....with the US at 9.81$
Where do you live that you are ripped off for almost 12 cents per KWh? I'm like half that.
The other issue is for about 9 months out of the year, every KWh I get from my computers, is a KWh I don't need to get from burning natgas. Now natgas is a bit cheaper per KWh of heat than electrical outlet power, but still the correction factor needs to be considered.
I figure that every additional KWh I use costs me about six cents of electricity and saves me about 2 cents of natgas, for a year round net of probably
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In California the marginal price per KWh can be over $0.40. The pricing is tiered, and if you run a lot of tech in your house, you end up in those tiers quickly. Reducing consumption by a mere 10W can save you a few bucks a month.
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Same thing going on here. My desktop and media centre used to be always on. Now I've sorted out standby mode properly (3W in standby, wakes in about 4 seconds), and just the server stays on permanently.
My server was at its peak using 11 drives: 5 x 400GB, 6 x 500GB, which made quite a bit of noise, and used quite a bit of power. When I worked it out, I reckoned there was about 50W power to be saved. I decided to get rid of the RAID configuration, and replaced them with a pair of 1.5TB greenpower discs.
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"...preventive obsolescence ..."
Have you just, unintentionally, coined a new term, exact meaning to be determined later?
I mean, I've heard of planned obsolescence, and of preventive maintenance...
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Intentionally. :)
It's where preventive maintenance meets planned obsolescence. All computer equipment becomes obsolete with age, but hard drives in particular become an active hazard when kept in service too long. I consider them to have a net-negative value: you don't know when, but they're GOING to cost you.
How ever old 40 GB drives are... (Score:2)
8" floppy.... (Score:2)
Mega-Giga-Tera? (Score:2)
I lost track of hard drive capacities. My first was 5 megabytes. Lately I have a 2 Terabyte drive, OMG!
Two 500GB SATA's in RAID mirror (Score:2)
When I got a job working from home for a .com I added a second 500GB sata drive to my current config for redundancy, since now I rely on my computer to make a living (which is why its going to get replaced sooner rather than later, though its only 2yrs old).
The first drive is a Western Digital Green 500GB, which made sense when I built the machine for low noise and power, but the second is a Seagate 500GB drive that's just standard 7200rpm. Its about 1.5 years newer than its green counterpart. When I replac
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Most drives live only a couple of years for me (Score:2)
Just the other day I logged into a remote myth backend that I maintain at another location and found the main 2 TB drive was failing (i/o errors). Only a year old. On my personal workstation, the main 1 TB drive failed recently after just a year and a half, but that wasn't due to bad sectors or smart errors. A component on the circuit board burned up and fell off.
Of drives that are three years old, I have one 2 TB drive still running, but another 2 1 TB drives that have failed. These are both seagate an
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I am reminded of the old adage: "There are two kinds of hard drives in the world: those that have failed, and those that will".
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"But what do you do with 1 TB drives these days?"
Put them in older TiVos.
Sometimes with the correct SATA/IDE adapter.
Or in your TiVo's computer to back shows up on to.
RL01 (Score:2)
Depends how often it takes to count as really using it ... but my DEC RL01 (14" 5 megabyte cartridge drive) still works whenever I spin it up. Those things are built like tanks!
5 - 10 years, with reason. (Score:2)
Hurricane Ike took care of all of my older drives. I've got a couple sitting around older than 10 no longer in use with old data I still need to salvage, but nothing that old in actual use.
Western Digital 540 MB since 1994 (Score:2)
20MB Mac Plus drive! (Score:2)
The oldest drive I'm still using is the 20MB external hard drive for the Mac Plus I bought from one of my CS professors around 2003. I'd guess that it's from about 1986.
It was a bit touchy at first, but these days it works every time I boot the computer up!
Dan Aris
10MB Digital RD-51A Winchester (Score:2)
still churning away in my print server (Dell Dimension XPS P60 FS) as swap drive. I expected it to have died years ago, the thing just doesn't want to give up! Still not a single bad sector! Best fifteen hundred quid I ever spent.
Over 10 (Score:2)
Still over 10 years old, although I recently replaced a 15+ year old drive that was acting as my home server's boot drive with a 10+ year old 2.5" drive. Just to make it quieter, cooler and more energy-efficient, the old drive still works fine.
so-called "hard disk" (Score:2)
I have what some users used to call a "hard disk" (i.e. a 3.5" diskette, because of its hard plastic case) that I still use after power failures to boot the firewall/router on my home network. That disk has got to be at least 10 years old.
Other than that, I have assorted antique hard drives with capacities measured in tens of megabytes that I occasionally use when I play around with my old computers... like the late-80s Mac that I configured as a web server, just to see if I could.
Oldest? What about average? (Score:2)
My average hard drives (not to mention whole systems) are older than 10 years.
Using VS Working (Score:2)
I have a pile of HD 10+ years that I *could* use because they still work.
However they are A) so small in size now its not worth taking up a slot, B) use IDE connectors, so as to have to be also connected to an old MB, or use adapters, which aren't worth it either.
Some are still connected to working machines, that I don't actually use really.
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I have a fully working Mac Performa 460 with a 200MB SCSI drive. It's not the original drive (that was missing when I acquired the Mac second hand) but it is from around 1995. Sadly, without a 10BaseT card the old Performa can't communicate with my modern machines. I'm constantly debating whether I should spend $30 for the network card, or the same $30 on a good quality USB floppy drive for my Mac mini so I can transfer files reliably.
SCSI drive in a musical instrument (Score:2)
The oldest hard drive I'm still actively using holds patches and sample data in a keyboard--a little 200MB SCSI drive. I think it may eventually outlive the keyboard itself. At one point in time, the keyboard itself also had the largest RAM of any computer I owned, at a whopping 64MB. When I was driving it back and forth from college, the keyboard was insured for more than the car it was in.
MTBF seems to be about 4 years (Score:2)
For mechanical HDs (once you get out of the infant mortality area, that is). At least 3 out of my 4 RAID disks failed in year 4.
A long, long way from the manufacturers insane 80-170+year MTBF estimate.
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I work in the electronic Q&R field, and I realize my sample size is small in what I just quoted. However, there is more than just my small sample size to go off of here. Several studies (below is only one) conclude that the HD manufacturers overstate their MTBF by a factor of 4-20x+. Actually the more correct term would be MTTF, since HDs are essentially never 'repaired' just replaced.
Technically speaking the MTTF is the MEAN time to fail, I.e. the time point at which 50% of the sample has failed.
SCSI? ATA? (Score:2)
But in inventory (Score:2)
I have a 100MB Toshiba bought 2nd hand in 1992 which until around 2006 was used in a small shuttle firewall box (and previously in other pcs). It was always on 24/7 and afaik, would still work if installed again. It's quite the beasty size wise too.
10mb hard drive from an IBM (Score:2)
I actually have an old 10 megabyte full height MFM hard drive that I occasionally use in a PC/XT clone for kicking around a couple of XT-only programs that don't run that great in emulators. (I forget what brand the drive is off hand) Interesting thing it is formatted to about 15 megs using an RLL controller card and has never had a problem. Occasionally run Norton Disk test and Spinrite and it is always fine. The MFM Seagates always had problems with that on the inner tracks. Somewhere I also still have a
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Similar here. :) I'm amazed at all the people talking about 10 and 20 GIG drives as if they're old. I'm running an IBM original XT 8088 with a 20 meg HDD.
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Oldest drive I have (Score:3)
Depends what you mean by using (Score:2)
Server running on a just-turned-10 HD. (Score:2)
Still works great. It's a home server, and is backed up via HD cloning daily, so if it does fail, I can quickly switch to the clone. And that's only the boot drive, the data drive is much newer.
Also have a vintage original Macintosh with external Apple HD20 (made in 1985) that I boot about once a week that works fine, its hard drive is now 26 years old.
Oldest that is currently powered on? (Score:2)
A VERY OLD Shugart SA1004 8" 8 Megabyte monster! It's running right now in my basement in an old WANG minicomputer... Funny that the survey would be about that, I just fixed the disk controller a couple days ago so it's been running for the past 72 hours! :) (Yes, 8"! although I also have 14" drives)
Old, not quite dirt... (Score:2)
Got a Quantum 40MBdrive that's still doing some work out of my old 386. Considering it's been running non-stop for the last 15 years, I'm sure if I turn it off at this point it'll never start again. Sometimes that almost old as dirt hardware really did work well, even if it wasn't the fastest.
Re:The feet one makes no sense. (Score:5, Informative)
Monty Python reference, I believe. Context was discussing how bad off you or your family was "way back when", etc. etc.
Re:The feet one makes no sense. (Score:4, Funny)
A reference to the Four Yorkshiremen sketch [wikipedia.org], I'd say.
Links! Luxury! back when I was a lad we had to TYPE the whole URL in by hand, including the fiddly h-t-t-p-:-/-/ bit. And if we got it wrong our dad would thrash us within an inch of our lives and we'd have to start over again. But we were a happy lot.
Re:The feet one makes no sense. (Score:4, Informative)
telnet en.wikipedia.org 80
Trying 208.80.152.201...
Connected to en.wikipedia.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET
HOST: en.wikipedia.org
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2011 06:11:45 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Cache-Control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Content-Language: en
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Last-Modified: Wed, 07 Dec 2011 18:16:58 GMT
Content-Length: 49272
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Age: 396746
X-Cache: HIT from sq60.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from sq60.wikimedia.org:3128
X-Cache: MISS from sq74.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: MISS from sq74.wikimedia.org:80
Connection: close
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html lang="en" dir="ltr" class="client-nojs" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Four Yorkshiremen sketch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"
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It's based on the assumption that one would buy feet before purchasing a hard drive. That might not hold true in the /. community, though.
Indeed, unlike feet, a hard drive is actually good for something.
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Feet / Flintstones ... that's how they drive. With their feet. It's hard.
Too poor, you don't even have feet to drive.
?? Seems to make the most sense to me.
Re:The feet one makes no sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're on the right track. It's the final line in this argument:
1. I had to drive 5 miles to school when I was a kid. ...
2. Drive? I walked so far, my shoes fell off
3. You had shoes?...
4. You had feet?....
5.
At least that's how I took it. Could be wrong - it is pretty confusing.
Re:huh?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
The question was about oldest HDD in active use. As long as it spins, it's good enough for low-importance backups and other simple jobs. Just because we still use the old junk does't mean we don't have brand new ones.
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Re:huh?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
So joking aside, there's plenty people responsible for the fucked up state of the economy. You'd do well to start with the gambling addicts running investment banks, and to put the criminals who destroyed the wall between investment and commercial banks in jail, and to put the people who whored out the "ratings" agencies up against a wall, before ranting at poor people for not spending money they don't have.
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you mean the companies that have every congressman, senator, and even the President in their back pockets?
The US has plenty of corruption, we just call them PACs here (or more specifically, Super PACs).
In 2008 these were the largest contributors:
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers - keep the linesmen (power line stringing) monopoly alive. Enforce state level oppressive permits for trivial tasks (hey, they a
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A big chunk of investment is rooted from retirement funds and nest eggs, that span the range of risky to slow-growth. People's desire to have some semblance of "security" for the future are a portion of this entire mess, demanding growth of their investments and ditching funds/companies that don't provide it. It's not all just out-of-touch suits that are a single root of this.
Re:huh?!?! (Score:4, Informative)
But the people who are in those percentiles are not the same. Only 5% of the people in the lowest 20% stay in the lowest 20% after 20 years.
This [economicmobility.org] says otherwise. "Forty-two percent of children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution remain in the bottom, while 39 percent born to parents in the top fifth remain at the top". This was in the period late sixties to late nineties/early "oughties".
Sure, those were children, while you ostensbly talk about all people, but I'm having difficulty believing that (almost) all the parents of the earlier generation somehow got ahead, at the same time leaving their children behind. Just doesn't add up IMHO.
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Well, it'd be nice if that were true, but if you read the whole report that's not what you come away with.
We were talking about the bottom 20% surely that's not "degree" territory? Also, since we were comparing parents to their children, the "senior widget maker"-effect shouldn't come into play. The father/mother would already be a "senior widget maker". So all you're saying there is that an individual will probably make more money later in life than earlier, and that parents make more money than their chi
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INteresting note (Score:3)
Look the the link you proved, then compare it to housing costs.
Average house in 1965 13,500.00
Average House in 2003: 200K
13,500 adjusted to 2003 dollars = $78068
\So, in 1965, the bottom 20ths percentile could easily afford a home. That's why home loans used to be 10 years.
Bear in mind rent adjusted up as well.
And THAT is why there was a bubble. Over inflated housing cost coupled with fraudulent business practices.
Can't imagine why we have a homeless problem~
Housing cost should be less then half what they ar
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Average house in 1965 13,500.00
Average House in 2003: 200K
13,500 adjusted to 2003 dollars = $78068
The average house size has been rising (1973=1525sqft 2003=2137sqft) and there are differences in what is commonly included. How many 1965 homes had central AC vs. now? The population is becoming more urban, which skews averages upward (more expensive land). There are also new materials and building codes.
Housing prices may still be inflated due in part to the causes you claim, but that is not the whole story.
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It would be best if wages (in appropriate fields) would move away from hourly pay and towards output. You do twice as much work in 8 hours as the guy next to you, then you should get twice the pay he does.
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How am I the 1 vote for brand new?
Why would the oldest hard drive you still have in use be brand new? How does that even work? You only use one hard drive and had it replaced recently or something?
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Why would the oldest hard drive you still have in use be brand new? How does that even work? You only use one hard drive and had it replaced recently or something?
I think I have 10 to 20 physical working machines at home. I've only got three machines with rotating magnetic media left... Everything else went SSD, either recently or years and years ago.
My mythtv frontends have tiny little 4 gig SSDs, back when those were still made and sold for maybe $100 each. Silence is golden, and worth it. My homemade compute cluster made out of surplus parts didn't have enough working rotating 9 gig drives left to populate the boxes, so I replaced them all with relatively small
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1 GB is a lot (Score:3)
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You remind me of those times when people said "a whole book fits on a tiny floppy, and on a CD-ROM, fits a whole library rack!"
This was around the time the word "Multimedia Computer" was popular.
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I'm still running 486/K-6/Celeron/Pentium machines with 1, 2, 10, and 13 GB drives in them from the early to mid 90's. The trick is to never turn them off...
I think the trick with drives that old is to get lucky. Nothing else.
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True, my dad runs two hard drives of about 500 mb, both systems get turned on and off every work-day.
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Old Disks need strict discipline. Take my 15 year old 1Gb Seagate. Lazy thing won't even boot the computer without a swift kick in the chops.
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I had those too... RK05 was 1.25MB... there was a fixed RK05 that was double density, 2.5MB.
The actuator/position sensor was a combo of a incandescent light bulb and a photo cell. The drive was 19" by about 6" by 20+".
the first Unix distributions were provided on RK05 packs (3 of them I think)...
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Western Digital. No, seriously. I have two 2TB external drives upstairs that have been churning merrily away since June. The Seagate external next to them is making some weird-ass very loud clicking sounds that I'm certain is something to do with the barely-sufficient power supply, and it's been doing that since I bought it.
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The current round of Seagates seem fine so far. The ones from 3 years ago rather unreliable. Although I've never had a drive failure for anything that wasn't being used pretty heavily.
I monitor most of my drives for errors and take them out of service before fail "in production".
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they don't build 'em like they used to.
I don't expect the 2TB drives to last twenty years like the Winchester has.