Using Old Hard Drives

[salg04086]

Hello Folks,

I hope you are all well.

I have a question, I have a 7 year old pc with an Internal HDD which came with my old PCS computer: -

COOLERMASTER CM STORM ENFORCER - GAMING ENTHUSIAST CASE
Processor (CPU)	Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-3770K (3.5GHz) 8MB Cache
Motherboard	ASUS® SABERTOOTH Z77: USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, THERMAL ARMOR
Memory (RAM)	8GB KINGSTON HYPERX BEAST DUAL-DDR3 2400MHz X.M.P (2 x 4GB KIT)
Graphics Card	3GB AMD RADEON™ HD7950 - DVI,HDMI,2 mDP - DX® 11, Eyefinity 4 Capable
2nd Graphics Card	NONE
3rd Graphics Card	NONE
1st Storage Drive	240GB KINGSTON HYPERX 3K SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW)
2nd Storage Drive	3TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 64MB CACHE

I have placed a new order with PCS using the forum to help guide me in placing a new system

I hear a humming noise when using my pc, and gain a slight delay when I access my HDD.

The question is I have already ordered another internal HDD, for my new PCS order. Should I add the existing hdd to my new PC , I am worried the old drive may fail at some point as its seven years old.

My new pc has plenty of NVME and ssd drives and I have also ordered a new internal HDD as well.

What are your thoughts?

I Appreciate your feedback.

 

[GeaFit]

It‘s 7 years old and you think it’s half broken. Nope. Spinning drives are so cheap now no need.

 

[Deleted member 17413]

If you can hear a tell-tale "click" when its spinning...its not worth saving, its near death... 5 years plus is actually not bad for a HDD in constant use either... HDD's are also slower, and depending on how you set your system up, may not be actively spinning the whole time which would explain why you get whirring noises as it kicks in and the slight delay before accessing.

 

[salg04086]

Thanks, My OS is on an SSD, I do not hear a ticking noise, just delay and a constant hum noise when I try and access the internal hdd with my games, documents etc.

 

[SpyderTracks]

You don’t have to make any assumptions if the drive is failing or not, just open cmd prompt as administrator, navigate to the drive in question and then run chkdsk /r

that will fully scan the drive for any errors and attempt a fix. It will take some time and the drive will be unavailable during the scan.

At the end it will spit out a report. If there’s any mention of bad sectors, you know the drive is failing and needs replacing. A bad sector is a portion of the disk that is unreadable, when you fix the drive it will essentially mark those decors as inaccessible and off bounds. Problem is, once these sectors start failing, it’s like a domino effect and eventually the whole drive will be inaccessible, could take days, could take years.

 

[SpyderTracks]

If the chkdsk comes back as being ok, there's absolutely no harm in adding the drive to your new PC so long as the case supports it. A lot of modern cases have limited support for 3.5" SATA drives, so make sure you choose something suitable.

I'm still using drives from builds I had back in early 2000's! I only ever throw away a drive if it's failed, other than that I use them for backup storage or in my current build, hence I now have about 8 drives in the damn thing!

 

[salg04086]

Thank you all, I will complete a chkdsk as a few of you have instructed -just to be sure

Appreciate your help everyone

 

[Stephen M]

This is only really worth it if you have a few old drives but I have a USB caddy which will take a variety of drives, just plug in whichever is needed.

A couple are very old and small laptop drives, 32 GB. Not normally a lot of use but I double back up everything and have a load of Office documents which easily fit on a small drive.

 

[salg04086]

I completed a chkdsk as advise given, and it did not come up with any errors, thankfully.

Thanks for the tips folks, I appreciate it.

 

[ubuysa]

I completed a chkdsk as advise given, and it did not come up with any errors, thankfully.

Thanks for the tips folks, I appreciate it.

It's also worth downloading something like CrystalDisk Info and looking at the SMART data for that drive, that will tell you whether it's starting to give trouble or not. Post the SMART data on here if you like.

 

[salg04086]

all good, status showing good

Thanks Ubuysa