Has anyone heard of an HDD dying, sitting in storage for almost 15 years, and suddenly (barely) working again once plugged back in? Because that's the miracle that's happened tonight. I don't understand it. Are external HDD mounts or windows more fault tolerant now than in 2010? - ThreadSky

antonhand.bsky.social • 57 days ago

Has anyone heard of an HDD dying, sitting in storage for almost 15 years, and suddenly (barely) working again once plugged back in?

Because that's the miracle that's happened tonight.

I don't understand it. Are external HDD mounts or windows more fault tolerant now than in 2010?

Reposted from Anton

Holy shit. While cleaning through old boxes I just found a set of bare hard drives.

On the first one I tried, I just found ALL the documentation of my early VR work (from 2005-2006). Stuff I thought I'd lost for good.

I'll be sharing it in the future as I organize things.

Overwhelmed right now.

Comments

alfax.bsky.social•57 days ago

External HDDs are legit bunker tier tech. I have one from like 2004 and it still runs lmao

mrsarkasm.bsky.social•57 days ago

It's likely the mechanical bits that are inoperable after prolonged time sitting unused. There's high chance that the data is still there on the disk, you'd need to talk to data recovery tech.

kavidevs.bsky.social•57 days ago

Definitely happens. Probably something to software as well, but that spinning rust is magic sometimes. Kudos on finding your time capsule :D

flipperpa.bsky.social•57 days ago

It isn't that uncommon, external drive enclosures are of extremely varying quality, but all have come a long way in the past 15 years. Was this your Xeniversity stuff, from the Xenius Revere days? Very cool!

antonhand.bsky.social•57 days ago

Yup! ALL my Second life stuff. Documentation, source files. The whole shebang. It's overwhelming.

flipperpa.bsky.social•57 days ago

Sheesh, I still have a lot of my stuff, but got rid of a lot too. Selling https://SLBoutique.com got rid of a lot of it, since so much of my stuff was in-world/out-world communications. If you were to ever teach a weekend bootcamp showing how to make a basic VR world Quest application, I'd pay!

talkren.bsky.social•57 days ago

Spinning disk drives are witchcraft, man. Used them for ages in our datacenters at Microsoft and some of the weirdest shit would happen with them. You can impact read/write speed just by the vibration of sound. The move to SSDs was the best.

onyx-raven.bsky.social•57 days ago

Happened to me with an index base station, broke, sat in storage for years, plugged it in on a whim, works great now

miyeaou.bsky.social•57 days ago

Same thing happened to me. I bought a kit that lets me turn any old HDD into an external.
Expected nothing from my very old drives, since I remember replacing them once they broke. I think one even has a burn stain. It took about a minute after turning on the power when they suddenly turned on.

miyeaou.bsky.social•57 days ago

It was strange looking back at what I was like back then, seeing what I was doing and recovering stuff I haven't seen in forever. Also I looked at browser data and found out that safari took screenshots of EVERY website I visited.

mrkingl.bsky.social•57 days ago

For the most part Externals are just normal SATA drives put in a Catty, you can do something called Sulking the drive and turning it into a internal drive. but ya for the most part externals are supposed to be Cold Storage Drives ment to hold storage for several years at a time.

mrkingl.bsky.social•57 days ago

What prob happened is since its been out of power for so long it prob went through a S.M.A.R.T Test when it was booted up then once it passed it started reading. What i would recommend is getting all data off that drive, checking it with Crystal Disk Info to see if its still good, then reusing it.

antonhand.bsky.social•57 days ago

These were internal data drives. They died. Couldn't get them working any way back then. I kept them because I'm a sentimental hoarder.

Plugged them in on a lark tonight into an external cradle, and they're working (though disconnect if I open folders too fast)

Don't understand it

therealkuji.bsky.social•57 days ago

Because you turned it off and on again extended edition.

mrkingl.bsky.social•57 days ago

YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY IT WORKS MORE THEN IT SHOULD!

mrkingl.bsky.social•57 days ago

Oh wow that is weird. could be a number of things that could had caused it, prob getting not enough power to itself, it detected a failure and Windows stopped recognizing it, or a failed S.M.A.R.T Check

mrkingl.bsky.social•57 days ago

Def attempt to get everything off that drive then its prob a ticking timebomb if it fails again

sinistergamer.bsky.social•57 days ago

Yes mechanical drives will fail as the grease inside that lubricates the moving parts begins to dry out. There's also bit rot to contend with.

drach.bsky.social•57 days ago

Yeah that can totally happen. If you want to read some crazy stuff I recommend "200 ways to revive a hard drive":
https://okb-1.org/images/200ways.pdf
Or search in google if you dont trust the link

linkshinigami.bsky.social•57 days ago

About 20 years ago i did a stint at a tech shop and was told you can do the drop trick on 3.5s but it was too dangerous for the softer 2.5s... so the trick for them was to put them on their side and literally beat it with a pencil.

Hard drives are so damn weird

drach.bsky.social•57 days ago

THAT scene from Whiplash but they´re trying to recover data from a dead HDD 😂

vesperakiiri.votv.dev•57 days ago

I love how no one read what you said....anyway, yes, it has been known to happen, albeit rather rare. Could be a number of things from mechanical glitches, some loose connections that rejoined in storage temporarily, brief power surges, or head alignment righted itself.

vesperakiiri.votv.dev•57 days ago

Either way, major win to take advantage of and save what you can before the issue comes back.

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