[TriLUG] do hard disks have a shelf life?

Aaron Joyner aaron at joyner.ws
Thu Sep 6 16:36:40 EDT 2012


To your precise question about the surface of the disk degrading over
time, I don't think so... but I know just the guy to ask.  I'll get
back to you on that.

In general, in an abstract perfect world, solid state components
should have a very long shelf life, in the low to medium single digit
number of decades.  Unfortunately, when that perfect world meets
reality, some solid state electronics do have a much shorter shelf
life (and commensurately, operational life), usually due to lower
quality materials or chemical combinations used in manufacturing.  The
most classic case of this is capacitor failure on motherboards
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague).  Other components are
susceptible to similar breakdown of components over time.  This can be
exacerbated if they're exposed to temperature changes.  One nice
aspect of a warm running hard drive is that it stays at a fairly
constant temperature.  I doubt this is exactly your case, but if
hypothetically you'd left those drives on a shelf by a window, and
they heated and cooled each day, they would eventually develop small
fractures in the traces of the PCBs, leading to premature failure.

In summary, they probably shouldn't, but they probably do.

Aaron S. Joyner


On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
> For home use I replace disks after about 2yrs and after checking them with
> badblocks and smartctl, put them on the shelf for projects. The disks are
> labelled with the date of first use, their read and write rate and the date
> of the last badblocks and smartctl run
>
> In the last 4 weeks or so, I put into action, 5 disks 3-8yrs old, that
> haven't been used for maybe 2-5 yrs. Everyone of them failed within a week.
> One of them is a 1.5TByte disk that the highest 300G of sectors (is this
> inside or outside?) is unwritable. Others failed with clicks of death, bad
> lba's according to smartctl or just not booting.
>
> It's hard to imagine that electronics would go bad in 2-5 yrs sitting on a
> shelf. Does the surface of the disk degrade with time?
>
> Thanks Joe
>
> --
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
> generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
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