Topic: Do hard drives have a "shelf life"?

[JasonSobel]

As I initially discussed in this thread:
http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=119023.0
I now have a 1TB external hard drive mirrored onto a 2nd 1TB external hard drive.
The 2nd drive will be disconnected the vast majority of time, and will only be used in the case of failure and data loss from the first drive...

Do I need to turn on this back-up periodically and make sure it still fires up and works?  It's basically a brand new drive, all I did was format the drive and then fill it up (with ~10gigs left free).  Should I connect it once a month just to keep it going?  Quarterly?  semi-annually?  Annually?  Or do I just let it sit, unconnected, until the first drive dies and I need to copy data from the 2nd drive?

[easy jim]

Good question!  I'd also like to know.

[Yane]

My girlfriend, a certified archivist, can't answer as to shelf life per se but finds citations that  hard drives shouldn't be left sitting: hard drives should be connected and spun up at least once a year while stored (btw, they should be stored in areas with low humidity, stable temperature, etc). Opinions vary, however -- the technology hasn't been around long enough or stood still long enough for a consensus to emerge.

You can go blind reading more on the subject:

http://www.arsc-audio.org/