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Is this WD MyBook 6tb drive still good?
(thelemmy.club)
The drive has been only been powered on and used for read over the last 3+ years. CrystalDiskInfo reports it's bad but CrystalDiskMark shows decent read/write speeds. Only wrote to it in the very beginning when I dumped a lot of archives into it. Otherwise, very few actual write cycles which is making me think it's still ok to use. However, this isn't a NAS drive and is consumer-grade bought many years ago.
It's not worth risking with anything important. That being said I have a few drives that are in bad shape still being used for a Steam library. I'm comfortable with that use case because if the disks die I can just re-download the data. So unless you have a similar no consequences use case I would retire that drive.
I do the same! Failing drives are nice for storing games. They tend to still last for longer than we expect
Another option is to use some old/bad drives in a raid setup with lots of redundancy. I still wouldn't store anything mission critical on there but it's fine for most things