[rescue] limited shelf life of hard drives ?

[Curtis H. Wilbar Jr.]

OK... now this is just plain weird...

Today marks the second system in 3ish months I've powered up after
sitting fo 6-12 months... and the hard drives in both are dead !

The 9G 10K WD enterprise SCSI drive in the PC has media errors and
has hosed the FAT32 filesystem... I can probably at least recover
what little data I need off that one.

The 8.4G Seagate ATA drive in my Ultra 10 (which has less than a
few hundred hours of use on it), won't even initialize... it spins
up... want's to read whatever it has to read to 'position' the heads/etc
to go 'ready'... and makes a horrible noise as it tries.... after
trying several times it goes 'nope... I'm toast, have a nice day'.
(and when I put it in the U10, it was a new (I think remanufactured)
drive from Seagate).

WTF ?

How many of the upteen drives I've had not spinning on a shelf for
2 yrs are going to be dead now ?  are the voice coil magnets slowly
deteriorating the recording on the platters if they are left not
moving for a long time ?  or what ?  This makes no sense.

Anyone experience this sort of problem before ?

I bet if I pull my old Micropolis 600Meg 5.25" full height drives out
of Storage, or my 1.3G Seagate Elites... that they'll spin up after
the 6-8 or more years they have been idle and access every last bit
stored on them....  yet the crap they make today dies if not used !?

Confused, pissed, and in possession of one more car chock...

-- Curt