OT Exercising Harddrives

Former user wrote on 9/22/2009, 12:35 PM

I know many of you store your projects on Harddrives. And I have read that you need to run them once in a while to keep them from freezing up.

Is it okay just to power them up for a while, or should I connect them to a computer and move the head around (like checkdisk or something).

Dave T2

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 9/22/2009, 1:11 PM

Older Maxtor drives needed to be burned in and "exercised" to be kept functional.

I haven't heard of this need with any of the newer drives in several years. But if you have drives that sit around, spinning them up once or twice a year can't hurt . . .

srode wrote on 9/22/2009, 6:30 PM

I have one for a BU disk with all my data on it - pull it out of the computer when not in use and put it in to update the back up monthly - hopefully that's enough excercise for it

mekelly wrote on 9/23/2009, 12:16 PM

I just spoke to Western Digital technical support about this very issue. Their response was 'while it isn't absolutely necessary to power up the drives, we recommend you occasionally spin them up'. Time frame was every 30-60 days or so.

craftech wrote on 9/23/2009, 1:12 PM

I use one of these, and give each drive a unique drive letter and name. Example: Drive G: (Archived Footage 1).

To "exercise them", I simply insert the drive in the rack and boot up. Then I remove them later and put them back on the shelf.

John