In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Yes, my present 1TB 5-year old Seagate is starting to develop the odd bad sector. I'll replace with a Samsung EVO Pro SSD for system (younger son uses one and is very happy with it) together with a WD black for data.

Everything on my system is backed up every which way - maybe it's overkill, but rather that than underkill (if that's a valid word)

Picking up on an earlier comment about SSD defrag and Windows 10, I'm running Windows 7 Pro on this system, scheduled defrag is turned off, should I do anything to ensure Windows doesn't try to defrag an SSD?

That's why I bought a SSD as my seagate had 49 bad sectors and getting new ones every few days.

Also did a clean install of win 10 x64 as a dual boot from usb drive on the ssd and it only took 20 mins.

I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Modern SSDs probably have a greater expected lifetime than mechanical disks.

There is a free utility called SSD Tweaker that I used to use for configuring Windows 7 for SSD drives.
https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=ssd-tweaker
Although Windows 7 fully supports SSD drives it doesn't automatically configure them.
This all changed with Windows 8 and later where the process is automatic.
Other than that just check that the SSD isn't included in the scheduled maintenance for defrag, only for optimisation (Trim)
Does it show up as an SSD? In My Computer right click drive>Properties>Tools>Optimise>

Edited by deleted (Wed 02-Dec-15 00:04:21)

In reply to a post by rogerfp:

There is a free utility called SSD Tweaker that I used to use for configuring Windows 7 for SSD drives.
https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=ssd-tweaker
Although Windows 7 fully supports SSD drives it doesn't automatically configure them.
This all changed with Windows 8 and later where the process is automatic.
Other than that just check that the SSD isn't included in the scheduled maintenance for defrag, only for optimisation (Trim)
Does it show up as an SSD? In My Computer right click drive>Properties>Tools>Optimise>

How do you mean by configure, like turning on trim? i used my SSD on windows 7 and trim was on, and the Windows defrager ignored the SSD, the same thing happened to a mate of mine when he was using 7.

i do wonder what some people do with their hard drives, I have got a 250GB drive in my computer that is 6 years old and still not a problem with it. A mate of mine have drives that are older than that and have been pushed a lot harder than most peoples as they are used in a recording studio environment and yet every single one is still fine.

Edited by zyborg47 (Wed 02-Dec-15 08:36:36)

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

Ido wonder what some people do with their hard drives, I have got a 250GB drive in my computer that is 6 years old and still not a problem with it. A mate of mine have drives that are older than that and have been pushed a lot harder than most peoples as they are used in a recording studio environment and yet every single one is still fine.

My Seagate that is starting to get bad sectors is the first HDD that I've ever had an issue with. I've retired others at 10 years as they were too small, but were still going strong.

I've always known that sooner or later I'd get an HDD problem, which is why I've got such a thorough backup strategy (20+ years ago I worked in the Business Continuation sphere (aka Disaster Recovery) and saw some horror stories that I wouldn't want to personally experience), the cost in both time and money need only be marginal, certainly compared to the value - sentimental or monetary - of lost data.

I bought two Seagate drives at the same time, one developed bad sectors the other still going strong.

According to HD Sentinel the Seagate drive that developed bad sectors has read 97tb since installation in Dec 2010, this sound about right?

Just run SeaTools for Windows on that drive.

Lifetime Bytes Read: 1.33TB
Lifetime Bytes Written: 584.23 GB
Power-on Hours: 21825
Annualized Workload Rate (Writes + Reads) * (8760/POH)@ 0.77TB/yr

I bought the drive 9 Feb 2011, so 12.4 hours/day for 1757 days.

Interesting? Maybe, certainly nothing like 97TB you, I think - mentioned.

Will check with seatools later.

Heres my seatools info

Lifetime Bytes Read: 506.08 GB
Lifetime Bytes Written: 314.91 GB
Power-On Hours: 43843
Annualized Workload Rate [ (Writes + Reads) * (8760 / POH) ]: 0.16 TB/yr

This is the identical drive that has no bad sectors, not sure where hd sentinel gets 97,000,000 mb from