Storage Solutions Shelf life of Used Hard drives?

[ahit]

I have two hard drives of WD 1TB(internal) mainly used for backups but now they are full with data and I intend to keep them safely at some nice dust-free place as I won't need to access them for sometime(few months to 1-2 years max).

So I want to know can hard drives go bad just by sitting idle for few years,anyone has any experience of UNUSED hard drive going bad OR not going bad even after many years.
Because if there is even a little chance of them going bad this way then I may plan to access them regularly after some interval.

thanks

 

[cranky]

I have no drives sitting around idle that long, but I have a total of about 18TB space, of which I'd say about 5TB gets used regularly and the rest don't see use beyond 10-20 hours a year.

No problems yet (knock on wood) because of long-term storage. I've had drives go bad in active use more often than pulling a drive out of storage to see it's gone bad.

 

[ahit]

I have no drives sitting around idle that long, but I have a total of about 18TB space, of which I'd say about 5TB gets used regularly and the rest don't see use beyond 10-20 hours a year.

No problems yet (knock on wood) because of long-term storage. I've had drives go bad in active use more often than pulling a drive out of storage to see it's gone bad.

But you are kind of using them regularly say every 4-5 months ,even if it is for 1-2 hours only,so the lubricant and other mechanical parts dont get a chance to dry up and get stuck,which may result in case of 1-2 years without use.

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