Will This 15-Year-Old Hard Drive Still Work?

Originally recorded March 6, 2024.

Back in Octember of 2023, the hard drive in my Dell Latitude D505 laptop had started to fail. I was able to eventually replace the drive and clone everything over to the new one, and the machine is still working fine. But there was a little collateral damage in the repair. I had to borrow a drive power adapter I had for a particular reason, and when I hooked it back up to the drive it was connected to, the hard drive didn't spin up. Not good. There's nothing imperative on that drive, but I do store some non-essential data on it from time to time, so I'd like it to work. I was about to buy a new USB drive adapter, just for the power supply, but then out of the coner of my eye, I spotted one I had forgotten about. Perfect! And the drive came back to life and all was well.

That is, until recently. I had some data I needed to put on that drive, and it wasn't showing up. I checked connections, all were good. I had no other drive adapters around to test it with. I did, however, have a spare hard drive that I believe to be good, and the power supply didn't spin that one up either. Bad power supply? Yes, quite possibly, but the possibility of 2 dead hard drives is also there. Less likely, but there nonetheless. As a tech, I think about all possible issues causing the problem and rank them from most likely to least likely. I simply start with the most likely and work my way down the list.

This time, I had no parts to test with, so I went on Amazon and ordered up a couple of drive enclosures and a new drive adapter to have on hand. Next day they arrived. So now mount the drive in the enclosure and call it a day?

The part I didn't tell you is that the drive wasn't spinning, but was making some odd sounds when connected to that possibly questionable power supply. And chances are good it had been sitting for a few days like that without my realizing. This is a "new" drive at only 15 years old in my collection, and otherwise has been working flawlessly, but did that bad power kill it? Watch and find out with me!

Related videos:
Octember 2023 Failure # 5, Part 1 - Imminent 2.5" IDE Hard Drive Failure, Image & Restore
https://youtu.be/v5xCENyugrQ
Octember 2023 Failure # 5, Part 2 - Jay's Revenge Against The Machine, Growing The Partition To 60GB
https://youtu.be/nwyWB-S-ii0

Видео Will This 15-Year-Old Hard Drive Still Work? канала jaykay18