Storage Triage--How to Upgrade and Reuse Your Old Hard Drive

Posted 01/27/2010 at 9:00pm | by Mark Edward Soper

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It's a new year, a new decade, with bigger hard disks than ever and new technologies like SATA 6Gbps, USB 3.0, and bigger solid-state drives to choose from. So, what do you do with the drives you've replaced (or will replace this year)? There are plenty of choices, so let's get started.

Capacity Cutoffs

If you're staring at a pile of conventional hard disks with less than 250GB capacity (desktop) or 160GB (portable or mobile), stop staring at them, put them through a disk overwriting program to safeguard any remaining information, and recycle them. See "Safe Drive Recycling and Disposal" for details.

Performance Considerations

So, you've culled out the tiny drives from your collection. What's the next consideration? Performance. If you have drives with the same capacity, but some have larger buffers, faster spin rates, or higher areal density (fewer platters for a given storage capacity), use them for high-performance jobs such as RAID 0 arrays or media streaming.

If the drive has already been pulled, check the label for the model number. However, if the drive is currently installed, open Windows Device Manager, expand the Disk Drives branch, and see the name and model number of each installed hard disk.

Once you have the model number, check the manufacturer's website for the information you're looking for. Here's how two of the 500GB hard disks in my inventory compare (note, you'll probably need to look up reviews to determine the number of platters):

Western Digital WD5000AAKS (Caviar Blue series)

Form factor 3.5-inch Internal

Capacity 500GB

Interface SATA 3Gbps

Spin rate 7200 RPM

Number of platters 3

Capacity per platter 166GB

Cache 16MB

Seagate ST3500320AS Barracuda 7200.11

Form factor 3.5-inch Internal

Capacity 500GB

Interface SATA 3Gbps

Spin rate 7200 RPM

Number of platters 2

Capacity per platter 250GB

Cache 32MB

This comparison suggests that the Seagate should have faster real-world performance than the WD because of its larger cache and higher areal density, and a review at TechTree.com bears out this hypothesis.

Drive Condition and Operational Time

If you're looking to recycle a drive that you've been using for some time, you might also want to consider the age of the drive in terms of operating hours and surface condition. This information is captured by the built-in S.M.A.R.T. (SMART) self-diagnostic feature in ATA/IDE and SATA hard disks.

To view this information, you can use a utility provided by the drive vendor, such as Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics or Seagate's SeaTools, or a third-party utility such as PassMark’s DiskCheckup. PassMark’s utility (free for personal use) not only displays this information but also defines (in understandable terms) what each SMART attribute means and can calculate possible future failures based on drive condition.

If you need to recondition a drive to replace bad sectors with spare sectors, use the software provided by the drive vendor after backing up the contents of the drive.

Firmware

If firmware upgrades are available for your drives, you should install them before continuing to use the drives. Drive vendors recommend that you back up your drives before installing firmware updates. Firmware updates are available for Maxtor Diamond Max 22, Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and Seagate Barracuda ES.2 drives from Seagate's website.