@TsukaYuriko How much did you pay for the Hard Drive? How much memory did it hold?
It was either 80 GB or 120 GB - the other one was the internal one I had at the time, and I was running out of space... and now that I think about it, my back-then maximum capacity is as much space as a single recent MMORPG takes up nowadays, if not more. Wow. I don't remember exactly how much I paid for it, but it was around the time where capacity in GB = cost in EUR, probably less because it was used.
The contents weren't worth upping the price for, to say the least.
Hard Drives are so inexpensive these days ($32 for 1 TB)...I'd never buy a used one...(Could have a bunch of messed up sectors etc...)
It seems like the typical Hard Drive will last around 7-10 years. I don't think there's any way you can test a used one to see how much life it has left.
Please introduce me to one of those mythical 10 year-lasting HDDs. I've never had the pleasure to meet one. Without exception, all HDDs I've owned aside from my current Barracuda (4 years lifetime now... PRAY!) has died within three to four years. :/
That's the core reason why I now store anything remotely important on at least two HDDs and a cloud drive.
SSD drives have also come way down in price...but not sure if the lower price ones (Under $50)...are as reliable as a under $50 regular HardDrive.
SSDs are one of the few things I'd actually buy used now. They're less vulnerable to wear than their limited rewrite counts would lead you (and a few years ago, led me) to think.
I remember when SSDs were just starting to become more common and I had barely even heard of them... back then, my setup consisted of 2x500 GB HDDs in RAID 0, and I was planning to get an entirely new PC. A 500 GB SSD was basically top of the line, and the aforementioned "capacity in GB = price in EUR" was once again the rule for them.
I made a fuss about this very drive on the old GMC because I was worried that GM compiling test runs to it would kill its life span...
I remember holding it and basically treating it like porcelain (even though it could probably stand more shock and wear than any hard drive I had ever owned). That was back in 2013. It's still going strong and is in use 6 years later - no longer as my system drive, though.
After initially panicking over a bunch of test run compiles... believe me, I've
tried to kill this thing. I can't.
For a while, I used it as a cache for video recording and processing (eventually superseded by an NVMe 500 GB SSD that also was my system drive for a while).
Currently, it's used to hold multiple virtualized instances of a game client and has the pleasure of having its entire capacity written to once per week due to patches of all of those clients and, on an almost daily basis, having a new instance copied over from a backup when one of the active ones starts throwing hissy fits - around 25 GB per instance with around 20 instances total. By now, I can almost hear it going "oh god, this again??" on patch days...
It is the longest-lasting component of my old PC that's still in use nowadays (sharing 1st place with my old monitors that are now part of a three-monitor setup that looks a bit like a mind control center), and I guess I won't find a solid reason not to use it anymore anytime soon. I probably wouldn't be able to sell it for more than a tenth of its original price nowadays, anyway... but I have no doubts it would continue to last for years to come. Ironically, the
one component I thought was going to die on me in a matter of years... just didn't, while pretty much everything else, from hard drives to keyboard and mouse, which I thought would last for years, died. :'D
You haven't had to stress about bidding on eBay for years. Just type in the maximum you're willing to pay and let the site do the rest. It'll automatically up your bid whenever someone beats you until it reaches your maximum.
... thanks, now I feel old. :S I guess I'm extremely out of the loop here... I can probably count the amount of times I've actually used the site in the past decade on one hand.
I remember the times where who won the bid was more or less decided by who had the faster connection and managed to outbid the rest by 1€ a few seconds before an auction closed... including the various shady and not so shady automated tools that merely wanted your account credentials in order to automatically do the bidding for you (pun not intended). Camping for weeks for happy hours where listing new items was temporarily free, or you didn't have to pay additional fees to set the starting price or a minimum price to anything higher than 1€... and preying on those unfortunate souls that didn't wait for them and ended up having a single 1€ bid on their not so popular video game auctions. That was always fun.
Whatever she paid, I suspect the entire episode holds painful memories.
@TsukaYuriko: I hope you didn't need therapy.
I've seen enough to not need therapy over
that, to say the least. ._.'
Kinda made me look at my not so step-dad a bit differently for a while, though.