Your oldest drive still in use?

A

arcturus

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 28, 2000
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So I'm dusting out my box and took notice of the drive inside ... Maxtor 6L080L4 80 GIG. Almost daily use since Sept '02. Yes, it's frequently backed up. Yours?
 
The oldest I have in my server is WDC WD800JB-00FMA0 80GB drive... I don't know how old it is, but SMART reports 6,5 poweron hours...

Matej
 
I'm running off an old 40GB IDE drive right now. I originally used two 750G drives in windows software RAID1, however, one of them had a weird issue where it would only work in IDE mode. Of course, that one had the bootloader on it so I set up the 40 gigabyte drive just for the OS.
 
10gb wd, slow as crap. Fits xp sp3 with all updates and like 500mb to spare. (no system restore though).
 
37.4gb WD Raptor.

Also have a 160gb Seagate 7200.9 (from 2004, IIRC) that I don't have any PATA ports for, still works though.
 
I just took a 40GB Samsung 7200 RPM IDE drive out of service about 2 weeks ago. Bought it based on price/performance ratio in the summer of '99 or '00. Never thought I'd use it this long.

I also have a 20MB drive in my early 80s kaypro clone, but that is more of a museum piece than a daily use PC!
 
had a WD 40gig IDE drive from july '03. It literally just died today though. luckily it was just an OS drive in a test system. Now the oldest working drive left is an 80gig IDE from '04 or '05.
 
I have an IDE USB enclosure with an 80MB - MEGABYTE

Seagate drive from 1994 inside it. It's my 386 games collection.

Yet my pathetic Seagate drive from 2004 died in 1 year.
 
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Oldest drive is a 6GB Western Digital in a box with a P2 333mhz and 64MB EDO RAM. Drive still works and PC still boots and is running Windows 98 SE.

It's from around 1998.
 
SirMaster said:
Oldest drive is a 6GB Western Digital in a box with a P2 333mhz and 64MB EDO RAM. Drive still works and PC still boots and is running Windows 98 SE.

It's from around 1998.
Click to expand...

You outta contact WD and see if they wanna buy it for promo reasons
 
We got (in a laptop) some old 12gb drive (from 1999-2000), still running like a charm with Win 2000 Pro on it (quite slow and noisy of course). Not sure SMART existed back then but I wish as I would love seeing the power on time/power cycles count :D

[a bit OT but...]
The laptop is from 2000 (Compaq) and has a 600mhz cpu, 192mb of ram and 4mb ATI GPU. It belonged to one of the guys who invented the .jpeg format so he used it loads on the plane etc before we bought it around 2003 IIRC. (he's a friend so it was nice and cheap)

I think the power supply died again recently though (it already died a few times before but my dad always managed to fix it) and the battery doesn't last too long, just a few minutes (yes it's the original one).

I wonder if my dad will want to fix it again now that he's got a brand new PC though.
 
2 WD 100GB ide drives from 2002 which use to run in my main system in raid0.

Now they are in my 2nd system-still going strong.
 
2x200gb Seagate 7200.7 from 2004.

Started life together as the systems workhorse drives, became the systems data/temp/swap drives when I added a SATA drive and finally found home in USB caddies as archive drives.

They have the most annoying feature of doing a head reset check ever 10 seconds or so if they were idle forcing me to have something write a log to them to shut them up.
 
My oldest, although I might be able to dig up something a little older, appears to be a Samsung 2.1GB IDE drive from June 1998, don't know if it works however, so it might not qualify.
 
I have a Quantum Bigfoot 4Gb drive in use (at my grandparents house) :) it just wont die! Doesn't get much use these days though.

As for my current systems, well, the head's kind of screwed in my 80Gb 1.8" ZIF drive that i have in my Latitude D430, very loud click every 5-10 seconds but has been doing it for the past 3-4 months. Looking for a replacement but it's hard to find one that's worth the money.
 
Oldest drive that still works? I bought a Conner 420 megabyte drive in 1991. Still has Win 3.11 on it. I don't know why I still keep it with my old 5 1/2" floppy drive. Nostalgia I guess. I pitched all the 40 megabyte drives I had.
Otherwise next in line is a WD 36 gig Raptor. It's still as loud as it was the day I brought it home.
 
Oldest is a 320gb 7200.10 Seagate from 2008. I can't stand older (slower) hard drives, I replace them when I can and will be happy when we live in an all-SSD world.
 
oldest in my arsenal i think is wd 1t eads or some 1,5t smg
decomissioned last box with ide 120g drive 6months ago, its still working and usable, but runs too hot and is too small even for parents pc
 
My current komputer has 4 drives, 1 of them is a swap drive (I just put PAgefile), temp files etc. on it. And it's a 32GB Ultra 320 SCSI drive from fujitsu. My back up computer, P4-1.3GHz, is still downstair, and it's running on 2 x 20 GB IDE drive
 
June 2006 Raptor 74gb ADFD. It's actually my boot drive still :D

the 2nd oldest is the WD 640GB AAKS drive from April 2008
then comes the WD Black 1TB from Dec 2008
and then the WD Green from Feb 2010.


I believe I actually have a 160GB Hitachi PATA drive on another rig from 2005.
 
Oldest still in use, a WD 80G from about ummm 5-6 years ago. Strictly used as third redundancy for some data.
 
I wouldn't necessarily say I use it on a daily basis but I hit it from time to time for some old data. And that would be my Quantum Fireball AS 30GB hdd. Fireball, indeed. Could make some bacon on it.
 
I have 6 Seagate Cheetah 18GB SCSI drives that still work to this day. They sit in an old Dell Poweredge server in a RAID 50 configuration.
 
I had a 120 GB IDE Samsung that died two days ago that was in my Linux box. Refused to spin and would not show in the bios.

It went many years!
 
Oldest and still kicking it is my normal 7200 rpm Maxtor 60GB drive from 2001 or 2000 I think! So, that's what? About 10 years? Some newer scsi drives failed though!

Interesting topic.
 
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I have a 40 gb Maxtor laying around. I just bought a IDE to USB adapter so I can see what is on it and a few other IDE´s I have also.
 
Oldest I have in my machine is a 250GB WD from 2004. it's been running near 24/7 since I got it.
the other 8 drives are much newer, 2007 to just a few months ago.

That 250 is going to be replaced really soon too. I've got a 2TB Samsung sitting on my desk waiting to go in but my shoulder and back have been hurting so I haven't been able to install it.
My rig is 60lbs and needs to lifted from the shorter side desk to the main desk.
http://transamws6.com/pics/pc/2010/cube-drives.jpg
 
Actually, my Amiga 3000T, which I hook up every now and then, has a 120MB and 500MB SCSI Drives from 1993 and 1995 and they both worked last time I fired up the machine.
 
I had 2002 30GB Maxtor that was in all the time use. In the fall of 2010 I gave it to friend. Where it is installed again and working well.
 
Just retired a batch of 40/80GB IDE drives that I've had since about 2000. They all still run but they just take up more space than they are worth now haha.
 
I've got a Western Digital 80GB drive in my first rig from 2001 with a screaming fast Pentium 4 1.6 GHz proc that my wife uses now every day. Still works like a champ and is why I'll only ever use WD.
 
My dad's still using a 2.1GB Western Digital drive on the machine I built him in 1999... It's not the main OS drive... I replaced that with an 80GB WD SE back in like 2002 or 2003...

Yeah, he needs an upgrade.
 
I had a 2GB WD that lasted some 9 years, I think it needs a low-level format. I used another 2GB WD to replace it, that one still works, but not in use.
 
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