Killed a 1TB hdd

[ratdude747]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

Send me a bill via paypal for the shipping and I will look at it. If I can repair it or get it replaced I will let you know if not I will use it for parts.

It was a sarcastic statement... I was gonna part it for magnets and laughs.

PM an offer.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

Speaking of hot hard drives, my dad's old Samsung disk (160GB) tends to run around 50-55°C during the summer months and knock on wood: so far so good. Just 18000 hours on the clock though, turned on and off about every day. I do wonder when that disk is going to croak but so far so good.

However I really need to upgrade the OS on that disk. Problem is that it's over a thousand miles away...

[ratdude747]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

Speaking of hot hard drives, my dad's old Samsung disk (160GB) tends to run around 50-55°C during the summer months and knock on wood: so far so good. Just 18000 hours on the clock though, turned on and off about every day. I do wonder when that disk is going to croak but so far so good.

However I really need to upgrade the OS on that disk. Problem is that it's over a thousand miles away...

An old samsung that still works? I didn't know they existed!

Old spinpoints are failure prone... just FYI.

[brethin]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

Been busy but I finally found the time to look at this drive.

First thing I did was clean and inspect it, removed the pcb and cleaned all the contacts etc.

Next I connected it up and found it making a clicking noise and it would not spin up. The clicking wasn't the long loud clicking like the heads moving back and forth but a short fast clicking like the heads were stuck. This is a somewhat common issue for these drives.

The first thing I tried was the freezer to see if that would free them up (cold contracts). After 6hrs they were still stuck.

Next I removed the cover in my make shift clean room box and indeed found the heads were stuck to the platters.

Next I slowly rotated the spindle motor using the proper torx bit and crossed my fingers that the heads broke free before they broke off the arms. Sure enough the heads broke free from the platters and I replaced the cover on the drive.

I then ran all the Seagate tests and it appears to be working without issues. All smart data is good and no increasing numbers or warnings.

I formatted the drive NTFS and placed it in my Dell M6300 and installed Win 7 Ult with no issues.

I got lucky and another dead drive goes back in service.

Many thanks go to Ratdude747 for the dead drive.

[Uniballer]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

I got lucky and another dead drive goes back in service.

Please let us know how this drive fares in the future. I have swapped boards and moved EEPROMs between drives as required, but have never made a mechanical adjustment inside a drive and then closed it back up. I would be concerned that whatever made the heads stick to the platters will happen again. What do you think?

[brethin]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

Please let us know how this drive fares in the future. I have swapped boards and moved EEPROMs between drives as required, but have never made a mechanical adjustment inside a drive and then closed it back up. I would be concerned that whatever made the heads stick to the platters will happen again. What do you think?

This drive has a history of doing this when placed in a hot environment and from what I have found it happens in external enclosures a lot more than when in a laptop since most external 2.5 enclosures do not have any cooling where laptops do.

As ratdude747 stated he had removed it from a laptop and put it in a external enclosure and then had it failed.

I will keep my eye on it and report anything new.

[ratdude747]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

Yeah, it was in a hot car and being used soon after when it failed. I didn't know that particular model was heat sensitive.

Good job on fixing it... around here, if a cover comes off, it's scrap material... but if you got it to work w/o issues, more power to you. I wasn't even close to using it's full space (like under 100gb used)... I chucked the 250gb out of my Asus X83V (it has a 7200 320gb in it now) in the enclosure and copied my backup... business as usual.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

one thing about seagate: they run hot, but they dont like hot!
according to research done by google the best temp for an HDD is around the 32c mark. https://cdn.badcaps-static.com/pdfs/...0fb92118d6.pdf

I don't understand why this keeps coming up, by several other people aswell.
I admit that I'm not English native but still doubt that I could come to such a different conclusion after reading that report, an excerpt below:

3.4 Temperature
Temperature is often quoted as the most important envi-
ronmental factor affecting disk drive reliability. Previous
studies have indicated that temperature deltas as low as
15C can nearly double disk drive failure rates [4]. Here
we take temperature readings from the SMART records
every few minutes during the entire 9-month window
of observation and try to understand the correlation be-
tween temperature levels and failure rates.
We have aggregated temperature readings in several
different ways, including averages, maxima, fraction of
time spent above a given temperature value, number of
times a temperature threshold is crossed, and last tem-
perature before failure. Here we report data on averages
and note that other aggregation forms have shown sim-
ilar trends and and therefore suggest the same conclu-
sions.
We first look at the correlation between average tem-
perature during the observation period and failure. Fig-
ure 4 shows the distribution of drives with average tem-
perature in increments of one degree and the correspond-
ing annualized failure rates. The figure shows that fail-
ures do not increase when the average temperature in-
creases. In fact, there is a clear trend showing that lower
temperatures are associated with higher failure rates.
Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal
of this trend.

Figure 5 looks at the average temperatures for differ-
ent age groups. The distributions are in sync with Figure
4 showing a mostly flat failure rate at mid-range temper-
atures and a modest increase at the low end of the tem-
perature distribution. What stands out are the 3 and 4-
year old drives, where the trend for higher failures with
higher temperature is much more constant and also more
pronounced.
Overall our experiments can confirm previously re-
ported temperature effects only for the high end of our
temperature range and especially for older drives. In the
lower and middle temperature ranges, higher tempera-
tures are not associated with higher failure rates. This is
a fairly surprising result, which could indicate that data-
center or server designers have more freedom than pre-
viously thought when setting operating temperatures for
equipment that contains disk drives. We can conclude
that at moderate temperature ranges it is likely that there
are other effects which affect failure rates much more
strongly than temperatures do.

[ThePCDoctor]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

For much longer than I care to admit to, I've been building and repairing PC's.
So I've had way too much experience with hard drives in general.
My first HD was a Seagate 20 meg, half height drive. It never failed on me.

Today, many years later, I'm still running Seagate drives. But I have no AC and I live in Central FL where it can get pretty hot. The ambient temp here at my PC right now is 90F.

To keep my hard drives alive and well, I always program them to spin down after about five minutes of inactivity, in Power Management (in the control panel) It takes a little more work to do that in Windows 8.1, but it's still doable.

So for my main PC, a mid-tower desktop case, I add a Two-Fan cooler to every one of my hard drives (x2) so they never get but a couple of degrees above ambient. Even on a HOT day, they still feel cool to the touch.

This two-fan cooler, with the large fans, is my favorite HD cooler.


Then to greatly improve cooling, I space the fan above the HD by about 1/4" with the little brass standoffs used to mount a motherboard.



"Heat Kills" and this applies also to Hard Drives. So, keep'em cool and they will usually last a long time. Too bad you can't do that in a laptop.
All you can do there, is minimize your little HD's run time, as I mentioned earlier in this post.

Good Luck,
The Doctor

[momaka]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

I got lucky and another dead drive goes back in service.

Nice save!

I once fixed a Fujitsu 250 GB HDD like that. But unfortunately, I was too lazy to do it properly, so I used a dirty wooden toothpick with some dried up flux on it to separate the heads. Although the flux was dried, it did leave a tiny spec of residue on one of the platters. After about 2 hours of operation, the HDD died (though it might have survived if I didn't torture it with so many scans and tests).

Next I slowly rotated the spindle motor using the proper torx bit and crossed my fingers that the heads broke free before they broke off the arms. Sure enough the heads broke free from the platters and I replaced the cover on the drive.

In the future, use a plastic tool and carefully lift and then release the heads one by one while applying a small pressure on the spindle motor. Also very highly advisable to somehow lock the heads arm in place so that when the heads are lifted and become unlocked, they won't move to the parking area. Before moving them to the parking area, you need to have the platters spinning to prevent the heads from catching the surface of the platters again.

Speaking of hot hard drives, my dad's old Samsung disk (160GB) tends to run around 50-55°C during the summer months and knock on wood: so far so good.

The Hitachi Travelstar HDD in my P3 laptop also runs around that temperature in the summer. I've seen it go as far as 64C, though I do try to turn off the laptop when it reaches 54C.
I've had that laptop for like 3 or 4 years now.

Old spinpoints are failure prone

Where exactly did you read that?
Old Samsung Spinpoint HDDs (as in the 40-160 GB era) are exceptionally reliable.

[lti]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

I unstuck the head on an old 20GB IBM Travelstar by carefully lifting it. The head did end up parking as soon as it came free. That drive ran long enough to recover some non-critical files before appearing blank. Strangely, after formatting it in Windows 7, it still showed some space being used. Using a Windows 98 CD to format it worked, but it has some large groups of bad sectors. I'm using it in an old laptop to test software and operating systems. I won't lose anything when it fails completely.

All of my computers have failing hard drives. One reports good health, but it's a Toshiba drive. The others have bad sectors.

[brethin]

Re: Killed a 1TB hdd

From my experience you never want to lift the head when it is stuck. The heads are not attached in way that lifting helps. You need to rotate the platters very slowly to break the heads free. I use to think lifting was better but I have much more success with the rotation method (the heads don't break off the arm and if you do it slow they don't scratch the platters.