When is it time to buy a new hard drive, and what considerations go into buying a new hard drive?

Posted by user1125620 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by user1125620
Published on 2012-04-07T07:00:08Z Indexed on 2012/04/07 11:36 UTC
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hard-drive

I've had my current hard drive for about 4-5 years now, and I've never had a problem with it before, but now it's making whirring noises. It's done this before and, last time, the noise did go away the next day, but I have accumulated quite a bit of information that I wouldn't want to lose on the drive.

HD Tune Pro and Berlac Advisor both said the drive was healthy, and I wouldn't want to get a new one unless it was absolutely necessary or was going to show drastic performance improvements. My only knock against the drive would be that Visual Studio takes longer to load than I'd like it to. HD Tune Pro says the average read speed is 54.3MB/s. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it seems about average compared to similar drives on http://www.hdtune.com/testresults.html.

Model #: WDC WD5000AAJS-22YFA0

So, should hard drives be replaced after a certain amount of time? Has mine reached that point? Would a new hard drive be any faster?

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