The hard drive failure thread

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

ooops i forgot to mention that if a hard drive can fail in so many different ways aside from the traditional click-click-click of death we are so familiar with, personally i think hard drives deserve to become obsolescent and be replaced with something else better. its just such a complex, precise and highly sensitive instrument that there are just way too many scenarios for things to go wrong with it...

[fzabkar]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Seagate's drives have a serial diagnostic interface. You can test the resistances of the heads, dump the defect lists, and much more.

http://ts.acelaboratory.com/index.ph...est-seagate-f3

Note that the above procedure applies only to F3 architecture models (those that give an F3 prompt). Also be aware that lowercase is not always kewl. Typing commands using the wrong case can result in disaster. Also, you must be at the correct level, eg T or 7. The same command issued at different levels will produce disastrously different results.

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

If it vibrates excessively, something is wrong with it, regardless of whether or not there are bad sectors.
You can get SATA to IDE adapters... http://www.satacables.com/html/sata_to_ide_adapter.html so who cares?

[momaka]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

going by momaka's advice, i would try to see if the bad sector count can stabilise and see if there are no more increases in bad sector count

the drive seems to vibrate quite badly so much so that it made the hard drive cage fan rattle!

Might not make it too far if its vibrating excessively. But once you move your important data off of it, try it and see what happens. Generally speaking, though, desktop use won't put much stress on the HDD (especially if it's a secondary drive). However, if you want to see whether or not it really would make it (and possibly get beaten to death), then do a zero-fill / low-level format twice on it. If the sector count doesn't increase considerably after the first pass and stays the same after the second pass, it should be stable and okay to use.

Also, I hope Hitachi uses the spin-up retries entry here for some different data. Otherwise, that could be indicating a dying spindle motor or that the heads were stuck on the platters at some point. Both of these are usually terminal issues.

i then proceeded with a surface scan trying to read every sector. scan found 3 unreadable sectors and the normalized and worst value for raw read error rate deteriorated to 60! next, i tried a write scan by writing lba numbers to the drive. that caused the drive to reallocate 3 sectors. i now have 3 sectors in the reallocated sector count and event count. furthermore, the write scan took unusually long at 6 hours to complete. it shouldnt have taken longer than 3-4 hours.

A 500 GB Seagate ST3500620AS of mine is like that. Actually worse. If I do a read scan, it will take hours to get through even a 10th of the drive's capacity and many sectors will show as red in HDTune. For some reason though, the HDD would drop out and thus not mark the sector as bad. So I was never able to complete a full scan on it. Decided to not mess with it and stuck it in an experimental PC that I use for games only. It's been almost 2 years since I've had it in there. Bad sector count has gone up only by 3: from 741 to 744 bad sectors . But as PhotonicInduction would say, "I ain't having it", so I will continue to use it until it croaks on me.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

lately, i had one out of a lot of five hitachi p7k500 500gb ide drives i got off trashbay fail on me during testing. first sign something was wrong was during power on. the drive seems to vibrate quite badly so much so that it made the hard drive cage fan rattle! unplugged all other drives to make sure it wasnt the other drives and also checked the screws to make sure its securely mounted as well as the fan. the other drives when run individually dont vibrate as much as that one until the hard drive cage fan rattles!

next, booted up hiren's boot cd on a live session of mini-xp to run the victoria hard drive testing program and hdtune benchmark. the hdtune benchmark graph was really fugly. the transfer rate spiked up and down all over the place from 0.1mb/s to 70mb/s. replaced cable, tried different ide channels to no avail. doesnt look like ide cable problems as there are no ultra dma crc errors in the smart data. what was telling was the normalized value for raw read error rate. the raw data value is useless and not exactly useful as its normal for a hard disk to hiccup once in awhile but having a low or decreasing statistical normalized value means a chronic problem with reading from the drive. the normalized value was 80 then.

i then proceeded with a surface scan trying to read every sector. scan found 3 unreadable sectors and the normalized and worst value for raw read error rate deteriorated to 60! next, i tried a write scan by writing lba numbers to the drive. that caused the drive to reallocate 3 sectors. i now have 3 sectors in the reallocated sector count and event count. furthermore, the write scan took unusually long at 6 hours to complete. it shouldnt have taken longer than 3-4 hours.

i also noticed that this live session of mini-xp started to stutter after the overnight write scan. strange... also, i have something like 200-300 slow sectors that take >600ms to be readable/writeable. i think im going to try to make the drive reallocate the slow sectors with >500ms response time using victoria.

going by momaka's advice, i would try to see if the bad sector count can stabilise and see if there are no more increases in bad sector count because this drive is actually quite "young". it has only around 4400 power on hours. in addition, its an ide drive which is no longer being made, so ima see if i can salvage or stopgap the drive instead of just chucking it. if it was a sata drive, i would have instantly just trashed it and used the drive for frisbee! wheeee...

anyway, contacted the seller on ebay with a screenshot of the proof with the victoria smart data showing the reallocated sectors. seller agreed a refund for the one unit because it costs US$50 to ship things back to the usa here. doesnt make sense to ship something back that costs less than the shipping cost itself. much less paying so much to get back something that is faulty.

lastly, if even a live session of windows can stutter when its not even the system drive that is bad, it shows evidence is really crappy coding by m$. no wonder all the good data recovery programs are on linux or run off a boot disk or cd!

[Gabriel]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Had a check on my wd green - WD10EACS, so far it's done 39080 hours and still running just fine.
That's my oldest drive, never thought it would last for so long

[mariushm]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

My oldest installed drive is a 1TB WD Black with 44463 hours (and only 288 start/stop count) - I like to keep my computer running 24/7. That's about 5 years of almost uninterrupted operation.
It has a value of 8 for current pending sector count but the drive works perfectly.

My next oldest drive is a 2 TB Seagate, with 40970 hours (and 179 start/stop count) .. but this one had a "failure" some time ago, there's an area which is loaded with bad sectors so i basically isolated that section of the drive in a partition that I left unformatted. The rest of the drive (about 1.4 TB) works perfectly still.. and it's months since that failure started to manifest itself)

[fzabkar]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

This article is a useful primer:
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

Murata piezoelectric ceramic shock sensors:
https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...4bed671192.pdf

[Ascaris]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I've had pretty good results with the scores of hard drives I have owned over the years. Most of the failures have been laptop drives... I'm guessing because the lack of ventilation tends to make them run hotter than their desktop counterparts. Nearly all of the drive replacements have been because of obsolescence rather than failure.

One of them is a 250GB laptop drive that was originally inside a WD Passport enclosure (WD2500BEVS drive p/n), which I used for backup purposes years ago, before my backup set became much larger than it could hold. It has low hours (only 378) and reports as healthy in SMART when the computer can see it. Sometimes it just doesn't respond at all when I plug it into my USB3 to SATA adapter and plug that into my PC. No device connected sound, no listing in diskmgmt.msc. And then it just decides to work the next time I plug it in!

I replaced the OEM hard drive (another Western Digital 250gb WD2500BEVS) in my Asus F8Sp laptop several years ago. As I am a pack rat, I kept the old drive, and I have it plugged into my PC via the aforementioned SATA to USB3 adapter now, and it's working fine, other than having 1 pending sector in the SMART data. WD's Data Lifeguard utlity says the drive is healthy, and I am not really sure why I replaced it all those years ago. The pending sector has been at 1 forever, and reallocated is still at 0, so I would now be inclined to watch and wait (and keep backups, but I do that anyway). That drive has a touch over 14,500 power-on hours on it (and all but ten or twenty have been in the laptop).

I replaced that one with a Seagate 500gb/7200 RPM (ST9500420AS). After I rediscovered that old laptop (as a focus of interest... I never forgot I owned it) a few months ago and decided to upgrade from the Windows XP that was still on it, I noticed I'd had that little drive in service for 28,000 power-on hours, and without a single hiccup. No reallocated sectors or any sign of failure, and this was on a laptop drive that was hot for most of its life in the poorly-ventilated F8Sp (45C temps were normal).

I even called Seagate and gave them the serial number so they could verify the manufacturing date on it... it was nearly five years old, they told me, and still under warranty (I do recall having bought the Seagate because of the warranty back then, before the warranties fell to a year or two across much of the industry). No need for RMA, I told them; it was working just fine, and I was just curious to know how old it was. I was so impressed with the little Seagate that I posted about it on Newegg.

So then I began the process of reinstalling Vista from a drive image I'd made when the laptop was fresh out of the box before downgrading to XP (on an 80GB PATA Maxtor Diamondmax 3.5" drive, currently in a USB 2.0 external enclosure with a bulging Suncap capacitor-- despite that, it worked fine to get the data onto another hard drive). As soon as the umpteen cycles of update, reboot, update were completed, but before I reinstalled all my stuff on it, I decided to try 7 out instead to see if I could get everything working... and as soon as I got it all set up with 7 x86 and verified it was going to work (but not activated yet), I decided to add more memory and go for the 64 bit edition of 7. Started all over...

In the process of all of that (before it was all done), the little Seagate... died. Unceremoniously and without warning, Windows froze on the laptop. I don't recall exactly what happened when I tried to reboot it, but it didn't make it into Windows again. Fortunately, I am a fanatic when it comes to backups, and I had drive images of every step along the way as I was going through the process, so I would not have to redo all my work again.

I took the drive out and attached it to my USB3 to SATA cable and did the Seatools diagnostic on it. Failed the short test, failed the long test... could not make it through an attempt to mark the bad sectors and get the drive back into a state of usability.

The drive went back to Seagate (in its original box, which I had kept), and I was a little nervous about trusting a refurb drive, which I know is what they would send, so I bought a WD Black 750MB for the laptop.

I got the refurb Seagate drive back as expected, and it is currently the boot device for my sorta-NAS pc (which is cobbled together from leftover stuff, like having a laptop drive in a desktop). All the important data on that PC is on a separate physical hard drive.

I still think the Seagate did a great job, even if it did die right after I lauded it for not dying for so long. 28k hours power on time in 5 years is 64% duty cycle, and with the kinds of temps you see in laptops (especially after the stock TIM hardened and stopped working, before I finally got tired of the fan being on full speed all the time and fixed it).

Part of the reason for the long hours on the drive was that I had the laptop doing phone sentry duty for a while, running 24 hours a day. I've been slammed with bill collector calls looking for people I've never met for years, and I had the laptop running PhoneTray and blocking them.

Other older drives I have that are not dead include a WD Caviar SE 160 GB 3.5" (WD1600AAJS, unknown hours) and a Hitachi 640 GB 3.5" (HDT721064SLA360, 27k hours, healthy but with 11 reallocated sectors that have been that way a long time). I know, you asked for failures, but maybe it's relevant to report older drives that still work!

[diif]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Thanks guys, it was broken on a drive i had on my bench.
I'll see if i have another dead board and transplant it.

[goontron]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Is it a shock sensor?

yes.
http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf...Drop_proof.pdf

[eccerr0r]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Is it a shock sensor?

[diif]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Anybody know what this thing is ? It's not my identical board but the device looks similar. is it a fuse for the motor ? It had the marking 2E H

[Spork Schivago]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Perhaps smartmontools?

[Spork Schivago]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I believe my wife's hard drive in her laptop is dying. But I want to know if anyone thinks it's fixable. It's a Seagate 7200.4 500GB ST9500420AS. Read rates are very low, maybe 400KB/s. SMART is turned on in the BIOS but doesn't report any failures. I know I should probably run a tool to read the SMART data. Anyone have any suggestions on a good free Linux program that can read SMART data? It's an Asus laptop that cost maybe 800$ a few years back. Anyway, the original hard drive died, this is the second one.

I was wondering if the vent hole could be clogged and if so, could it explain issues like this? If it's fixable and permanent damage hasn't occurred yet, we'd like to fix it to get the data off. I don't know if this relevant or not, but the night we noticed it failing, it was making a weird beeping type of noise. Never heard a computer make a noise like this before. And it wasn't coming from the laptop speakers. It was coming from where the hard drive was so we assumed it was the hard drive. It wasn't loud, more like a dying beep, not a squeak. Any ideas?

Also, in 2005, I discovered Seagate hard drives aren't water proof, however, most of the Western Digital drives that where under water survived. Once the water level subsided from the flood, we would take the drives out of the PCs, dry them off, shake them to see if they had water in them, if they did, we'd trash them, if not, we'd hook them up to a USB enclosure and try to copy the data. Almost all the WD drives worked long enough for us to get the data off. The one Seagate that didn't have water on it....we plugged it in and the thing started smoking (which was really cool). Just thought you'd like to know!

[eccerr0r]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

Yay:

Model Family: Western Digital Green
Device Model: WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 060 060 000 Old_age Always - 29268
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 613370

One more will break the camel's back? Or a hundred more? Or tens of thousands more? ... (I used wdidle3 on this disk long ago, but not soon enough to not let it rack up 600K cycles. Not sure how "accurate" the implementation of wdidle3 is in hdparm yet...trying reverse engineered software on something that holds 2TB of data is risky!)

Oh, and it's the "Start_Stop_Count" on that laptop disk that was very high. The load cycle count was not as high as this disk above... but it was a HGST after all...

Model Family: Hitachi Travelstar 4K120
Device Model: HTS421280H9AT00
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0012 039 039 000 Old_age Always - 97602
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 039 039 000 Old_age Always - 96922
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 073 073 000 Old_age Always - 275886
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0

Still good...so far...

[Compgeke]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

You can turn the WD Green parking feature off with WDIDLE utility in DOS

or HDPARM

From my experience with greens you'll want to do do this. Experience has been unless this is disabled they tend to die after a year or so but once it's disabled they last alright.

[eccerr0r]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

I don't remember what model/manufacturer it was, other than it was a laptop disk. It may have been Toshiba actually (but it could have been a Fujitsu? Not sure. Pretty sure it was not WD, Seagate, or HGST/IBM). The load/unload cycles stopped when I was using the disk so it was purely an OS thing or how it was used in its previous life, and not a function of the disk itself.

I also don't recall if it was load/unload or actual power cycles or something else. It may have been the latter, something was actually stopping the disk from spinning during power down. I suppose when the disks are spun down, the heads might well be unloaded...

[goontron]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

You can turn the WD Green parking feature off with WDIDLE utility in DOS

or HDPARM

[Agent24]

Re: The hard drive failure thread

You can turn the WD Green parking feature off with WDIDLE utility in DOS