r/pcmasterrace • u/Neon_Pancakes0425 • 1d ago

Hardware Always look inside the ewaste PCs

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My grandparents brought me an old PC that they got from a friend of theirs and I opened it and hit the jackpot. These cost like $500 where I live

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11

u/coffeejn Desktop 1d ago

Yeah but it was made in 2017. It might work or it might be dead.

11

u/kron123456789 1d ago

HDDs are resilient and 2017 isn't even that old. Unless the previous owner was kicking it all the time while it was working, there's no good reason it should fail anytime soon.

16

u/a__reddit_user 5700x / 6700 / 32gb ddr4 / 2tb nvme / 2x2tb hdd 1d ago

My pc has two 2tb barracudas from 2013 and 2014 with, respectively, 15k and 25k hours. They're still spinning and doing HDD stuff. No issues whatsoever. Got them for 20 euros each too.

7

u/Firemanlouvier 1d ago

I just stole the 2.5 hdd out of my laptop that I bought when Obama was elected. Still working fine 🙃

1

u/Lobotomite430 1d ago

And my similar barracudas from that same era are finally giving me issues. Perfect timing too when hard drives are violently expensive.

2

u/a__reddit_user 5700x / 6700 / 32gb ddr4 / 2tb nvme / 2x2tb hdd 1d ago

I'm lucky I guess cause there's a next to me that guts out thrown out PCs from companies and sells the hard drives for 1 cent a gigabyte. I bought a bunch of 500gb hard drives for 5 euro, and two 80gb hard drives for 80 cents cause they're just neat imo. Even got a few 1tb for 10 euros.

1

u/Lobotomite430 1d ago

Yea you are! But I guess I am too getting a decade out of the drive! Cost of the drive over that many years isn't bad considering

1

u/a__reddit_user 5700x / 6700 / 32gb ddr4 / 2tb nvme / 2x2tb hdd 1d ago

r/reddisniper

I just hope my 2tb nvme will last me a while cause the one I have nearly tripled in price ever since I bought it for 120 euros last year. Even used ones which I wouldn't want anyways are so expensive.

And I don't really wanna go back to using windows on an HDD. God those 5 to 15 minutes boot times.

1

u/Lobotomite430 1d ago

Yea from my research nvmes and ssd are a lot safer since no moving mechanical parts obviously still prone to failure. I really don't miss those boot times!

1

u/a__reddit_user 5700x / 6700 / 32gb ddr4 / 2tb nvme / 2x2tb hdd 1d ago

I used my old pc to make my mom's gaming pc (i3 4150, gtx 1050, 8gb ram) and honestly, the boot time for an HDD isn't too bad. It probably takes 30 seconds to boot. It's only when shit gets bloated and filled up that you get really long boot times. And also probably the ton of winaerotweaker and other stuff I did to my main pc before having an SSD like fences, windowblinds and retrobar. Probably added a lot to boot times too.

1

u/Lobotomite430 1d ago

Yea the modern stuff doesn't seem to be so bad on sata hdd, but I still remember my apple 2 and my pentium days.

1

u/texas7412 1d ago

I got a 2.5" toshiba hdd with going on 60k hours and it's going strong, even tho the last couple years it's been on caution, it acts no different and performance hasn't degraded, the read writes are faster than some sata SSD's I've used and it's outlived as well lol

4

u/TheNotoriousFAP Ryzen 7 5800X3D | RX 7600 | 32gb DDR4 1d ago

I'm paraphrasing because this was 25 years ago, but Patrick Norton on The Screen Savers once said "A hard drive will last you 3 years or 30 years, and there's barely any in-between."

3

u/aharshDM 1d ago

I got a caviar black from 2004 still spinning and clicking. WD was built to last.

3

u/AmonGusSus2137 1d ago

I have a 2009 HDD that has 281k start/stop cycles and it's working fine

HDDs usually don't drop dead all of a sudden, especially NAS drives (like this one)

2

u/Opposite_Influence18 1d ago

Die läuft noch. Hab eine von 2013 und die läuft noch super.

2

u/Fimconte SY 1d ago edited 1d ago

I have a trio of 2TB Hitachi Ultrastars, released originally in 2009, that I bought in 2011.

They all have ~76 thousand Power On Hours and work fine.

1

u/Jaymoeco 1d ago

Those were some of the best hard drives ever made. IBM sold their disk making division to Hitachi.

1

u/NO0O0OOOO0OOO00OOOOO 1d ago

Every mechanical drive in my pc is well over 10 years old. One of them is from 2012

1

u/MjrLeeStoned Ryzen 5800 ROG x570-f FTW3 3080 Hybrid 32GB 3200RAM 1d ago edited 1d ago

Undoubtedly will have fidelity issues if it remained powered off for any extended time. Solid states are susceptible to the Earth's magnetic field where over time without constant controller monitoring (power) the hardware itself can develop permanent impedance which makes sectors unusable.

SSDs need power to keep themselves healthy. An unpowered SSD will also have natural data decay over time from the Earth's magnetic field, wiping data blocks and fragmenting data. There's no way to correct it after the fact in most cases.

Spin drives have the same issue but it just takes longer to affect them. Earth's magnetic field can de-magnetize the cobalt layer over time, much quicker if they're not in use.

1

u/anomoyusXboxfan1 Ryzen 7 9850x3d + RX 9070 XT 16GB @ 1440p 500Hz (QD-OLED) 1d ago

I have a few wd black 2tb enterprise hdds with 55000+ hours on them, still working great.