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I have done some research and found that unplugged hard disks slowly lose their magnetic states over time, therefore I need to refresh the data periodically.

Some answer in Superuser suggested I should periodically copy the entire data to a different disk. This will surely work, but it could be very cumbersome if you have a lot of data.

According to the following answer, a hard disk refreshes the data on its own when powered. This sounds much easier because I do not have to do anything but periodically power on the disk and keep it that way for a while.

A drive in use has the magnetic strength regularly refreshed, either by actual writing to disk or by the drive's own low level system, which periodically reads and rewrites sectors. (https://serverfault.com/questions/51851/does-an-unplugged-hard-drive-used-for-data-archival-deteriorate)

The questions are...

  1. Do all modern 3.5-inch hard disks (Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, etc) have this feature?
  2. Most operating systems spin down hard disks when nothing is read/written for a period of time. Should I disable this in order to keep refreshing going on? Or does a hard disk refresh itself even when it is spun down?
  3. Do they refresh only the sectors that have not been refreshed for a long time, or just from start to end sequentially?
  4. Is there any method to know if all sectors that need refreshing are refreshed? If not, generally speaking, how long should I keep the disk powered to refresh 1TB of data?

2 Answers 2

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For mechanical disks you can use tools which reads/writes every sector and check the healthiness of the disk this way.

This will as a side effect refresh all information. Mechanical Disks don't do this automatically (in contrast to SSD).

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    Indeed, the linked answer is wrong and disks do not automatically read and rewrite sectors when idle.
    – psusi
    Dec 26, 2014 at 3:34
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    SpinRite is one such commercial tool
    – Andreas F
    Dec 26, 2014 at 12:07
  • What are some free tools for this?
    – mxmlnkn
    Aug 6, 2019 at 19:20
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For Windows operating system users, an excellent free tool is DiskFresh

It is simple to use and works with FAT32 and NTFS file systems.

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  • Hi root, As such this is a link only answer and may get deleted. You could improve it by providing more information on it. Such as a list of features or screenshots. Oct 18, 2023 at 5:48

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