A Colossal HDD Failure

[Dan81]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I still have two Seagate drives in my main PC (2x Barracuda ES.2, ST31000340NS - one is Seagate normal, and the other is a IBM branded drive) and both are near brand new condition (I think the normal Seagate one has 1 bad sector and that was solely caused by me). 10 seconds for both to spin up, 5 second each.

As for platters, some WDs were way worse. I've had a 1TB WD Blue (Apple branded no less) LITERALLY pass the seek test with the platters looking the same as momaka's 1.5TB drives.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

normal Seagate one has 1 bad sector and that was solely caused by me

Do tell how you created exactly one bad sector, this will be interesting

Or is there the possibility of more damage than just that one sector?

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Do tell how you created exactly one bad sector, this will be interesting

Or is there the possibility of more damage than just that one sector?

Likely toying with hdparm and it's

--make-bad-sector

option.

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I junked every Seagate in the house a long time ago, except my dad's old external and a 2004-era 40GB drive, which resides in my Network Bridge Machine.

Eh, don't get me wrong - I still don't mind Seagate HDDs. But all of their newer HDDs (as in, made in the past 10 years), I don't trust. Many seem to develop bad sectors too quickly or just can't read/write anymore, despite SMART passing all parameters with flying colors. And then there's the above 7200.10 HDDs that just plain-straight fail dismally.

Seems the more capacity they've been packing, the less reliable they have become. (Not that this surprises me in any way - more data per given area means smaller and smaller target zones for the heads, and smaller heads riding closer to the surface than ever before.)

Their 7200.9 series is more or less where I draw the line on their reliability, with some of the 7200.9 drives being... well, not so reliable, but still miles better than anything that came after. All in all, though, the 7200.9 line is OK.

7200.7? I'll use and trust any day (not to say I won't keep backups or never expect it to fail, of course.)

Barracuda ATA V, IV, and III? - Same as 7200.7 - old, but reliable workhorses. Too bad they only came in IDE and SCSI variants. At least 7200.7 came in SATA as well.

I also found an old 40 MB (MegaByte) Seagate ST-251 5.25" in the scrap pile at work. Someone removed its top a long time ago just to look at the inside and never put it back on. The thing was dusty as heck when I found it. I gave it a gentle wipe with alcohol. After this, I powered it on, just for shits and giggles and guess what? IT WORKS!!! Seeks, positions, and is ready to work another day... even though I have no system to connect it to. It's a beautiful piece of hardware and makes an awesome boot-up sound. Took it home and definitely keeping it for my retro collection of old PC stuff. No way I could let them get that scrapped.

[BigTroll]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

the last seagates I thought were any good and I would see over 50k hours with no problems were the 7200.7 series, I also loved how loud they were.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I had what I think was a lemon 7200.7 in 2005. I bought it at the Claremont, New Hampshire Wal-Mart, on May 14, 2005, IIRC. I returned it on June 2, 2005, after I was hearing a random squeaking when seeking and utilities expecting HDD failure in less than 1 year, IIRC!

June 2, 2005, was when I came across the Maxtor 6Y060P0, which are virtually unkillable! Those are not the "slimeline" Maxtors.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Likely toying with hdparm and it's

--make-bad-sector

option.

but he could just --repair-sector and it's no longer bad because it wasn't really bad to begin with?

[Dan81]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Do tell how you created exactly one bad sector, this will be interesting

Or is there the possibility of more damage than just that one sector?

I shut off my PC from the PSU switch every time I am done working on it. That's how.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

interesting...thought for the most part hard drives shouldn't kill themselves by doing that...

[Xenon-Codex]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

This 7200.11 failed at quite high power on hours. It was not recognized by any computer, until one last time it started and I got all data recovered. It came to me from trash, and I used it at least 3 years as my main HD (for photos etc).

[Dan81]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Try resetting SMART. Saved a 2TB drive that way.

[momaka]

A Colossal HDD Failure - Part 3 / SOUNDS

Perhaps only hardcore geeks may appreciate this post, as I am including an attached file with the *sounds* from the two failed HDDs. Hope you enjoy.
failed HDD sounds (112 kbps mp3) ZIP file

What's interesting is that while the 2nd HDD was in storage, the heads (or whatever was left of them on the actuator arm) got stuck to the platter, so the HDD couldn't spin up and made this beeping noise instead (which I recorded as well. ) I opened the 2nd HDD up and gave it a manual spin, then closed it and recorded the sounds.

And what do you know, it works now!
.
.
.
.
.
Nah, just kidding.
Both HDDs are still dead as a rock.

In any case, I decided to disassemble the 2nd HDD and clean it, as I had a project in mind for it. So the first thing to come out for the cleaning was the headstack assembly. Notice the missing heads. I found a few of them (in pieces) stuck to the actuator arm magnet.


While at it, I noticed the bearing on the actuator arm had some seriously rough spots when turning it by hand (suggesting failing/failed bearing.) I wonder if this is from wear from high # of power On hours. Perhaps this is what caused the heads to touch the platters? Or was this rather a consequence of when the heads got ripped off from the actuator arm and the force from that damaging the bearing? As you may recall, I mentioned in the first post that as I had the 1st HDD running for the first time, it made a loud *whack* noise after spinning for a while. When that happened, the HDD jumped a little from where it was resting (perhaps that was most likely another / the last of the heads getting ripped off?) If this happened, I imagine the actuator arm bearing saw quite a bit of force exerted on it.

Another thing I noticed while removing the actuator arm from the 2nd HDD is that I didn't need to loose the screw on the bottom of the bearing. Once I removed the top screw (that holds the actuator arm bearing through the top cover), the screw holding the bearing from the bottom was already loose. You can actually see it in the pictures shown below that it's still sticking up from the bottom. Normally getting to that screw requires removing the PCB and also a few shiny warranty-like stickers.

This makes me wonder, since this is a refurbished HDD, if someone at Seagate didn't torque the bottom actuator arm bearing screw properly. And if so, perhaps this is what led to the head crash. After all, why did both of these refurbished HDDs crash the same way? Given where the HDDs came from (CCTV recording equipment), they probably had high # of power On hours and probably a good number of reads/writes (though nothing excessive, I imagine, as the footage was low bit rate.) Still, I don't think that kind of wear alone could loosen the bottom bearing screw. Or could it?

Anyways, I gutted all of the “unnecessary” components away from the 2nd HDD (for the project I will show a bit later.) With that said… let me just warn everyone once more - DO NOT get that fine platter dust on anything you care about! It's really fine stuff and really hard to wash out. I imagine it's probably bad if you breathe it in too, given how fine it is. Luckily, it's magnetic and prefers to stick to metal surfaces rather than stay too long in the air. But it can stay up for a little. Regardless, DO NOT breathe that dust in!

Also, this dust was so fine and sticky that I couldn't just brush it off (and for the above reasons, I had no reason to anyways.) Thus, to get the HDD clean, I had to remove all of the platters and wipe everything down with damp paper towels soaked in soapy solution. Here are a few more pictures I snapped while doing that. (BTW, notice the scratching occurred on ALL platters and not just the top one.)




Kind of ironic about the cleaning part, given the project this HDD will be used for.
Stay tuned!

[momaka]

A Colossal HDD Failure - Part 4 / HDD Bench Grinder

And here’s the project I was talking about.


It’s a desktop bench grinder!
(Get it? OK, maybe not so funny… I’ll lay off the excess water drinking. Clearly it’s drowning out my brain cells too much. )

Silly jokes aside, this thing is actually not that useless. The motor in this particular HDD is fairly strong, because it hardly slows down when grinding smaller objects, like sharpening drill bits or grinding away wood and plastic. I’m guessing this probably has something to do with the fact that it’s a 4-platter HDD, so it probably has a slightly more powerful motor than, say, a 1 or 2 -platter drive.

Now, I’d love to claim this idea as original… but it’s not. I saw someone do this to an HDD more than a decade ago (it was a YouTube video, if I remember correctly - back when YT was still a new thing.) So the idea to try this has been sitting in my head all these years, and I finally decided to execute it.

That being said, to make one of these, first make sure the HDD you use doesn’t mind the headstack assembly being gone. Some HDDs will not spin up or will spin up and spin down when they can’t read anything from the heads. Mine actually does that (spins down after a while), but it stays spinning for around a minute or two, which usually gives me enough time to grind whatever it is that I need. And secondly, I think it helps that I happened to pick a 4-platter HDD, as probably the motor and motor driver IC are a little stronger in order to cope with the extra spinning mass, as mentioned earlier. So I think this is probably what gives my HDD grinder a bit more torque. I’ve tried slowing down a few other HDDs by hand before, and they seemed much easier to slow down / stall.

Also, for those who are curious how I attached the sandpaper to the platter: wood glue. It spreads nicely and evenly, so it won't create bumps on the sandpaper sheet. Basically, once I had the sandpaper cut down to the proper shape, I applied the wood glue to it and then put in on the platter (the platter was separate from the spindle, as shown in my previous post.) After that, I flipped the plater with the sandpaper facing to the ground and placed the whole thing on a flat, even surface. Then, I put a heavy object on it (a UPS transformer, in my case) to keep the sandpaper glued flat to the platter. Wait for a day and it was perfect.

Anyways, that’s all I have for this project for now. I might eventually get different types of sandpaper sheets and do the rest of the platters too. That way, if I need finer or coarser grinding, I can just swap the platters to swap sandpaper. And I’m also thinking maybe add a small “table” / shelf in front of the disk, so I have a surface to lean objects against when sanding. IDK, we will see as I get more ideas.

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Nice. Would there be a way to directly wire the motor driver to the spindle motor and power it directly, instead of having other control logic get in the way?

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

^ Good question. I didn't think to check.

If all the motor driver IC needs is just an enable signal, then it may be possible. But I imagine that most likely the motor driver IC probably talks to the main IC over I^2C bus or similar... and if that's the case, then this may not be so simple.

I guess I'll check the next time I have it out.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

YAY I'M GOING TO STORE MY BITCOIN ON THIS 20GB DRIVE WITH THIS SMARTCTL REPORT!

Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME     FLAG   VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE   UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate   0x000b  100  100  060  Pre-fail Always    -    0
 2 Throughput_Performance 0x0005  100  100  050  Pre-fail Offline   -    0
 3 Spin_Up_Time      0x0007  129  129  024  Pre-fail Always    -    347 (Average 335)
 4 Start_Stop_Count    0x0012  100  100  000  Old_age  Always    -    1211
 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct  0x0033  001  001  005  Pre-fail Always  FAILING_NOW 30
 7 Seek_Error_Rate     0x000b  100  100  067  Pre-fail Always    -    0
 8 Seek_Time_Performance  0x0005  100  100  020  Pre-fail Offline   -    0
 9 Power_On_Hours     0x0012  096  096  000  Old_age  Always    -    28780
 10 Spin_Retry_Count    0x0013  100  100  060  Pre-fail Always    -    0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count    0x0032  100  100  000  Old_age  Always    -    850
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032  100  100  000  Old_age  Always    -    8
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0022  100  100  000  Old_age  Always    -    0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable  0x0008  100  100  000  Old_age  Offline   -    0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count  0x000a  200  200  000  Old_age  Always    -    17

*cough*cough*wheeeeze*

(Computer is actually still working fine...for now )

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I see some numbers in UDMA CRC Error Count field. Old PATA drive by any chance? If so, maybe check cable or motherboard... or PCB contacts if it's a newer WD HDD.
Still, there are more bad sectors than UDMA CRC's, so the drive likely is failing. Could also be buffer chip issue (a known problem on some Maxtor and IBM HDDs) - usually showed up when the drive cooling was passive.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

It's an old WD drive, indeed UDMA/PATA. Currently using it as a root disk, definitely not going to store anything critical on it, it's probably on life support right now...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I also found an old 40 MB (MegaByte) Seagate ST-251 5.25" in the scrap pile at work. Someone removed its top a long time ago just to look at the inside and never put it back on.

Reminds me of that 240 MB Conner! I took the cover off once to look at the inside, wiped off any dust that I saw on any part of the platter(s) then screwed the cover back on and it was like nothing happened. It still worked fine!

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

It's an old WD drive, indeed UDMA/PATA. Currently using it as a root disk, definitely not going to store anything critical on it, it's probably on life support right now...

Nah, old WD drives like that were pretty solid. It's not even at 29k POH. Most of the ones I got are over 50k. So you're probably just about breaking it in.
Care to share a model number, though? Not all old WDs were that rock solid. Some of the slightly newer ones indeed developed bad sectors over time. But yours, with those UDMA CRC Errors is telling me there may be something screwy going on with the interface.

If you had a spare HDD to clone the data onto so you could check this one out in more detail... running a LLF (Low Level Format) should tell you if that drive really had bad sectors or not. If drive shows 0 bad sectors after LLF and passes a surface scan, it's probably solid.