A reader asks: “What is the size and interface of the oldest hard drive (not SSD) you regularly use, and why do you still use it?”

How about four identical 14-year old, 250GB ATA/EIDE hard drives? They’re still in use and still run fine.

I use them for archival/backup storage of various photos, software, and virtual machines.

Those drives actually have more miles on them than shown because they were inexpensive remanufactured models. They’d already been in service; had failed or otherwise removed from service; been “remanufactured;” and resold.

I bought the four drives in 2006 for a column I was writing for InformationWeek Magazine: “A Complete Terabyte File Server For About $500.” (Back then, off-the-shelf terabyte file servers normally cost two to three times that much.)

The drives have been bulletproof. After the article ran, I used them for many years in an office file server, and as attached storage.

When the PC that ran the drives finally died, I salvaged the still-good drives and began using them (naked, as seen in the pix) for monthly offline backups.

Using a $10 IDE-to-USB adapter, I’d hook the drives to my PC once a month to update my long-term backup files; then stick the drives on a shelf, where they’d sit until I needed them the next month.

When my files outgrew the drives’ capacity, I demoted the old drives to their current archival/deep backup use. (I now use high-capacity external USB drives for routine backups.)

Nothing on the old drives is unique or irreplaceable — I know the drives will die someday sooner than later. But it’s still sometimes handy to be able to plug in an old drive and have fast access to archival files.

Their days have to be numbered but, so far, those ancient, sturdy drives are still doing fine, a decade and a half on!

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