Will a (used) hdd die by itself after a prolong period of inactivity?

Recently I have encountered two cases relating to used hdd which makes me wonder if hdd makes a reliable backup medium for storing your seldom access but important data.

The first case was with a used 3.5G Quantum Fireball hdd which I have retired it many years ago(8 years+ ???) and have kept it in a drawer since then. It was in very good condition when I retired it. Recently I tried to access this hdd to see if I have left any important data before tossing it away. But after I connect it to my computer and booted up my PC, it makes some noise like it has difficulty moving it's arm, the bios can't even recognize it.

In second case, it involved a 120G Seagate, I put this piece to rest about 4 years ago because it started to accumulate bad sector, but other than that, it was perfectly accessible. Yesterday I connected this 120G to my computer, the bios detect it no problem, I try to boot into my windows which is in a partition in another good hdd, it took a very long time to boot, after about 3 minutes of waiting I finally gave up and halted the boot process. I took out my Magic Boot Disk v2.0 downloaded from this site(thanks to the creator of this program) and tried to use MHDD to diagnose it but I can't even go in the program, the screen show only a blank screen with a cursor blinking on the upper left corner, the usual option like SCSI/USB driver support not even show up. If I disconnect the 120G Seagate, then I can go in MHDD without any problem. Apparently the program was trying to access the hdd before it do anything.

Any one here has any good suggestion?

Case 1 (the Quantum) can perfectly be, case 2 is odd.

seagate aka crap drives

just had a 1tb go down on me that less then two weeks old

they gone cheap cheap cheap


would not buy seagate anymore

I have seen Hitachi desktar 80G, Quantum, and 20, 40G WD, ....20G Samsung, so iguess yes it will damage, worst is Hitachi Deskstar.

Hi,

Yes a drive will go bad all on its own.......

Very interesting case a couple of years ago with an old Apple 540c Motorola based powerbook. (Quantum drive 160mb)

The disk drive just would not load the heads, motor was going , so left it to "warm up" , ended totally ruining the drive.

After strip down it was discovered the rubber bearings and a rubber safety head stop had "liquidised", the warming had made it more liquid , after the heads moved they dragged the liquid rubber onto the platter surfaces, then the head hit the crap on its next circuit.

Seen glues and other plastic parts degrade, but hay after 10 years what do you expect?

also remember that Electrolytic caps on PCB's dry out or corrode internally.

_________________
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So it's normal for a hd to fail if left unused for a long time? Funny that I have a Seagate 20G which I bought about 8 years ago and I'm still using it for storing not so important data. It was used as a system drive for many years in my old pc with limited RAM and imagine all those disk trashing to and from the swap file. Yesterday I test it with MHDD and found only 3 slow (red) sector with no bad sector at all.
Seems like we have to make our drive working to keep them in good shape.

I would like to know if there are any storage medium that we can use to store our not frequently access data and put it aside and still in healthy shape when we need it 10+ years later. Compact disc is definitely out of the question, it is extremely not reliable. Tape drive I think is mainly used by large corporation and I believe the price will not be cheap, plus it is mechanical so I think the reliability is also in question. Then there is SSD, it's history is still too short but I think it looks promising.

If you talk about china quality CDs at 5 cents each or the crap CDs you get on the internet the answer is yes. There are certified CD/DVDs that obviously cost way much more that are meant for long term storage and according to the manufacture they are intended for 100 years storage (of course it is a projection and an accelerated aging test). I have the 1st CD-Rs from middle 90's still readable, but the storage was ACCURATE. Same for the DCxxxx tapes I have from last 80's : few weeks ago I needed a file that was stored on a DC2000 (40 MEGABYTES!) tape, it took some minutes to retrieve the file, the tape was perfectly readable. Again, the storage was accurate.
About tape, it is widely used and is a perfect medium (it can resist even to NEMP - oh yes, maybe it would be the last problem ).
SSD is a fable and actually is somewhat a complete flop.

Of course if you want the famous pig thant give wool, can be milked and you can put a saddle on it to have a ride, it's another story (I assume you want something like 1TB space, that will last 1000 years , cost 1 cent and is small as a CD).
At present the cost per megabyte, interchangeability and life expectancy of tape , to me is unbeatable. In the cost per megabyte I include the cost of tape drive , TCO , life cycle and assuming a reasonable maintenance.
I am talking about industry standard tape formats like DLT / ULTRIUM and DAT not proprietary formats even if they are based either on QIC or 4 / 8 mm tape technology.

And finally, this discussion is pointless : in 10 years data will be no more consistent or necessary for majority of case, and also the main problem is not media, is the drive for reading it (will it still exist / spare parts available etc.) - unless when technology changes you copy or duplicate into new media.