Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Found old HDD last used in 2012 that I want to use again
- Thread starter Hexley
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
First, take off all the information you need while you still can, or if you need to.
Second, after all the information is off, use Disk Utility to reformat the drive with the security option set to write a single pass of zeros over the drive. It's possible that after sitting for a long time without exposure to head activity some of the magnetic signatures have weakened, and this **may** reinvigorate them.
Third, try using the drive and see if it works. The biggest problem you'll likely encounter with drives that have been sitting for years will be weak sectors. A weak sector is a sector that can retain information but the magnetic signature is so low that the drive controller has to repeatedly read it and and average the detected data until it becomes readable. The signal is electrically "noisy" kind of like a faint radio station.
I do beta testing for a product named Scannerz and it, to the best of my knowledge, is the only tool on the market that can detect and identify weak sectors. More info on it can be obtained here:
http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html
I would add that you may not need it. Considering the fact that the drives are old, I'm assuming they may have be seen as "throw aways" at one point anyway. If you re-format and zero the drives out and they suddenly seem to work well, they may not need further testing, but I don't know if I'd consider using them for really critical data. Gaming systems and stuff like that, yes. Tax returns, no.
I actually did that process some time ago for 10 year old drive and it did come back to life, but it was a 10G hard drive and even though I felt proud of myself for having brought an old hard drive back to life, the reality is I have no use for a 10G hard drive, and little more testing was done.
Second, after all the information is off, use Disk Utility to reformat the drive with the security option set to write a single pass of zeros over the drive. It's possible that after sitting for a long time without exposure to head activity some of the magnetic signatures have weakened, and this **may** reinvigorate them.
Third, try using the drive and see if it works. The biggest problem you'll likely encounter with drives that have been sitting for years will be weak sectors. A weak sector is a sector that can retain information but the magnetic signature is so low that the drive controller has to repeatedly read it and and average the detected data until it becomes readable. The signal is electrically "noisy" kind of like a faint radio station.
I do beta testing for a product named Scannerz and it, to the best of my knowledge, is the only tool on the market that can detect and identify weak sectors. More info on it can be obtained here:
http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html
I would add that you may not need it. Considering the fact that the drives are old, I'm assuming they may have be seen as "throw aways" at one point anyway. If you re-format and zero the drives out and they suddenly seem to work well, they may not need further testing, but I don't know if I'd consider using them for really critical data. Gaming systems and stuff like that, yes. Tax returns, no.
I actually did that process some time ago for 10 year old drive and it did come back to life, but it was a 10G hard drive and even though I felt proud of myself for having brought an old hard drive back to life, the reality is I have no use for a 10G hard drive, and little more testing was done.