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New hard drive with power on hours

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Erebus

PCHF Member
Feb 23, 2019
20
1
#1
In April previous year (2022) I bought a brand new 2 TB Seagate hard drive (of an old fashioned spinning variety). I installed in my laptop today. So far everything looks fine, but...

when I went into Speccy, I got the following:

Power On Count 38 times
Power On Time 9.0 days

As far as I remember, the HDD was on display. Not in a sealed package. After I installed it, diskmgmt.msc actually prompted me to set up a partition table. I did that and created a new partition after that. I do assume that HDDs are factory tested, but 9 days looks too much.

P.S. I actually studied the SMART data. These entries are of interest:
Start/Stop Count 38
Power-On Hours (POH) 8d 23h
Device Power Cycle Count 38
Head Flying Hours 1d 13h
Total LBAs Written 7,174,268,022
Total LBAs Written 7,174,268,022

That's after I created the partition.

SMART reports that the drive is in "Good" condition.

Is this normal? Or they (re)sold me a returned item?
 
#2
it has been used by someone, somewhere in the supply chain.

it has only happened to me once in all the 100's of drives I have purchased in my years.
installed the 'new' drive as a 2nd drive and found personal files already there!
 
#3
I'm using the drive now. I produces some audible chirps now and then. Is this normal? From what I remember HDDs do produce some sounds. SMART still shows that the drive is OK.

I'm a little bit worried, because I installed it without a rubber bracket it should be installed with. The bracket plus shipping cost around ~50 USD which to me is a bit expensive. I couldn't justify paying half of drive's price for a piece of rubber. So I installed it with some double-sided adhesive foam strips.

I'm afraid my makeshift foam bracket could be squeezing the drive. Can I trust SMART that the drive is healthy?

Also it seems that the drive never stops spinning. Shouldn't Windows 10 stop the drive when not in use? At least Windows 7 does that with my 3.5" desktop drives.
 
#5
HDD units are very robust, either the 3.5" or the 5.25" varieties.
I don't see how you could squeeze it by simply screwing into some mounting bracket.

it should go to sleep based on the power options set in Control Panel.

can you link a video of the noises it is making?
there should be head movements noises only, nothing more. and even those should be very muffled.
 
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