HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

[Curious.George]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

[retiring shelfs after a few years of uptime]

Must have some different corporates there, lol. These have been in RAID array, all of them have quite high runtime. I could try testing it the partition way I guess, especially the small WD one which I still have here, and also it is small enough so it won't take half a day

I've often encountered boxes full of identical drives and discovered they all had PoHrs of 43502, 43513, 43508, 43507, etc. Or, 34788, 34792, 34777, etc. So, you know they likely came out of the same device (or set of devices).

If you assume they are left spinning 24/7/365 (disk farm), then that's ~5 years (or 4 years for the 30K's) of continuous uptime.

I take a peak at the number of remapped sectors and, if not 0, consider the drive as scrap.

[Behemot]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

get a Linux live disk and read up on the DD command.
or type "man dd" for the onscreen manual

and remove the pcb's and check the pads for tarnish.

Tried scratching it a bit when moving PCBs around. It seems that the drives are HW calibrated for some time now and require re-doing it, or transfering the EEPROM with the data to the other board.

Most likely pulled from a shelf where they have been spinning, nonstop, for 3 or more years. Look at the SMART data before even attempting to use! Note that many companies just retire systems after a certain number of calendar months without actually considering how much "useful life" they may have remaining. caveat emptor



YOU probably can't. I write little programs to seek to specific spots on the "raw" device, write, seek to next, etc.

OTOH, you could split the drive into two (or more) partitions and verifying that the entire surface can be accessed -- by scrubbing each partition, separately.

Must have some different corporates there, lol. These have been in RAID array, all of them have quite high runtime. I could try testing it the partition way I guess, especially the small WD one which I still have here, and also it is small enough so it won't take half a day

[Curious.George]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

Most of the bad drives were some 3TB Barracudas tested under Vista on SB710 southbridge. Since they have already been ditched by corporate as bad, the problem is definitelly in the drives. Tha last one, WD2500BEVT, also suggests it is nothing with capacity.

Most likely pulled from a shelf where they have been spinning, nonstop, for 3 or more years. Look at the SMART data before even attempting to use! Note that many companies just retire systems after a certain number of calendar months without actually considering how much "useful life" they may have remaining. caveat emptor

With what can I start writing from the end? Everything I know always starts from the beginning.

YOU probably can't. I write little programs to seek to specific spots on the "raw" device, write, seek to next, etc.

OTOH, you could split the drive into two (or more) partitions and verifying that the entire surface can be accessed -- by scrubbing each partition, separately.

[stj]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

get a Linux live disk and read up on the DD command.
or type "man dd" for the onscreen manual

and remove the pcb's and check the pads for tarnish.

[Behemot]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

Been using HD Tune, with one of the drives I actually thought it is good and put it in my IBM server (NAS) I just started writing ton of movies onto it.

Most of the bad drives were some 3TB Barracudas tested under Vista on SB710 southbridge. Since they have already been ditched by corporate as bad, the problem is definitelly in the drives. Tha last one, WD2500BEVT, also suggests it is nothing with capacity.

With what can I start writing from the end? Everything I know always starts from the beginning.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

If the BIOS didn't support the size of HDD, then you simply would get a sector-not-found error in DOS or its ilk. (until you shrunk the LBA, which can be done by setting the HPA)

Or an error of a bad block in the event log, in NT-based Windows. Or simply an error being reported while attempting to write or read past a certain point in Windows.

Or an OS crash.

[Uranium-235]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

does the controller/drivers support +2TB drives? Something in my memory is telling me there is an issue with certain certain older stuff and +2TB drives

[Curious.George]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

sounds like whatever supplies current to the head is overheating or has a bad connection either directly or upstream.

a test,
write to 25% of the surface,
wait 5 mins
write to the next 25%
repeat until it's complete - or resets.

Simpler test: write to the LAST block, first, then move towards the START of the volume. If it still fails at "2/3 progress", then you know you're at a different LBA than when writing front to back. (this aims to disprove any surface defects causing the problem)

If the only tool you have is something like dd(1), then make a note of what block number it fails at, each time. Then, try increasing the block size (not to change the "block number" but, rather, to reduce the overhead, per transfer, in the hope of getting further into the drive in a given amount of time.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<whateveryourOSnamesyourdrive> bs=1024K

vs.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<whateveryourOSnamesyourdrive>

You can also try creating TWO partitions on the drive and see if you can write each completely -- though one at a time.

[stj]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

sounds like whatever supplies current to the head is overheating or has a bad connection either directly or upstream.

a test,
write to 25% of the surface,
wait 5 mins
write to the next 25%
repeat until it's complete - or resets.

btw, what drives are they??

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: HDDs shutting down at 2/3 of the surface when writing on them?

Sounds like a bad board or a bad head connection. Maybe a bad head amp.

And HDDs usually don't power down by themselves, in the case of giving up on a sector, likely a click-of-death that can only be heard with an ear up real close...

I had a Maxtor "slimeline" model give a quiet click-of-death before, probably when one of those little bastards failed at SpinRite, IIRC.

[Behemot]

I have been lately experiencing this issue in way too many cases which makes me think this is some kind of new failure mode. Basically especially large-size drives (2+ TB, but also seen that for 250GB 2.5" drive too) read the whole surface fine, but when writing to it, at aprox. 2/3 the surface, likely after reaching a particular sector, they just shut down. After power cycling them they appear to work fine, but the same happens if I write to them again.

Cuting the rotten space off by partition and using only the first 2/3rds of the total capacity appears to work.

So what the heck is this?