Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
I've spun up drives unused for 25 years. Less likely than fade on Flash/SSD, especially higher 3D levels. On Sata there is usually SMART. Any important back up should be on known good media and read to check.
It's loads of on/off cycles that can cause failure to spin up.
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Google has a 13 page paper
Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population (easy to find with a web search. Among the conclusions:
Quote:
Our results confirm the findings of previous smaller
population studies that suggest that some of the SMART
parameters are well-correlated with higher failure prob-
abilities. We find, for example, that after their first scan
error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60
days than drives with no such errors. First errors in re-
allocations, offline reallocations, and probational counts
are also strongly correlated to higher failure probabil-
ities. Despite those strong correlations, we find that
failure prediction models based on SMART parameters
alone are likely to be severely limited in their prediction
accuracy, given that a large fraction of our failed drives
have shown no SMART error signals whatsoever.
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(Emphasis mine.)