Without regard for the age of the drive, if the enclosure and it's
power supply are 5-10 years old, I'd replace it as well. Just to get a
pore modern and probably more robust power supply.
More than 50% of my hard drive failures over the years turned out to
be power supply failures. In a new enclosure, the old drives worked
fine.
Joseph McAllister
[email protected]
On Dec 26, 2009, at 11:09 , Graydon wrote:
On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 12:49:30PM -0600, William Robb scripsit:
----- Original Message ----- From: "paul stenquist"
Subject: OT: Hard drive enclosures?
My oldest external drive failed. It's close to 10 years old and is
only
about 130 meg. It was fully backed up, so it's not a problem. It's a
3.5 SATA drive in an enclosure. I'm wondering if I can use that
enclosure for any SATA 3.5 drive. I'm going to replace it with a
1.5
terabyte Seagate 7200 rpm 3.5 SATA. Are all enclosures created
equal?
BTW, amazon currently has that Seagate drive for $114 with free
shipping.
You should be able to just drop a new drive in and keep playing.
I think bigger drives produce more heat, so if the enclosure
doesn't have
a cooling fan, the new drive might have a rather short life.
I'm reading Paul's description as the *drive* is nigh 10 years old,
and the
enclosure is newer. (I certainly don't remember SATA external
enclosures being available in 1999 or 2000.)
If that is the case, *and* if the enclosure is one of the solid hunk
of
aluminium extrusion ones, terabyte drives won't be a problem; the
enclosure gets warm but that's _why_ it's a solid hunk of aluminium
extrusion. If the enclosure is the bulky, air-gap kind, yes, you
should
probably make sure it has some kind of cooling fan.
The other possible issue is the SATA standard supported by the
enclosure
and its various generational permutations; a very first generation
SATA
enclosure will work, but it'll be a good deal slower in terms of
read/write throughput than a new terabyte range drive itself is
capable
of being. That might not matter for one component of a backup.
The thing I will note is that terabyte range drives are not
particularly
robust; I wouldn't plan on getting nigh 10 years out of it.
"Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus..."
http://tinyurl.com/ndmfhb
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