I keep hearing people say that hard drives won’t last long and to always have backups. But if it is like that, that means you would have to be buying drives consistently? Has anyone ever had a hard drive work for them successfully for a decade or even more where they wouldn’t have to be buying more?

  • michrech@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’m in the same boat as others that have commented – I’ve got some old IDE drives sitting on my shelf, and every time I’ve ever pulled them down to see what was/is on them, they always fire right up.

    I’ve never had any in continuous use for decades, though…

    • Mercadi@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’ve seen one with near continuous uptime from the 90s. It finally failed to detect, but some canned air cleaning did the trick.

    • exoticsamsquanch@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I also have an old IDE drive about 25 years old that’s still working. My PC is about 20 years old and the mobo has 1 ide slot so I leave it plugged in for the hell of it. My PC doesn’t run continuously but it has a lot of damn hours on it.