A Colossal HDD Failure

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Think it was a WD205BA or something like that. I got this drive from a dump pile many years ago, so I do not know its history -- it may have been abused in a prior life, so while it may have been solid then, don't know if it's solid now.

Oh hell there's nothing really useful on this hdd. But I thought most "modern" hdds that had voice coil head actuators (pretty much all hard drives that have under 30ms access time) could not be low level formatted as there's no way to recreate the servo data. But indeed those ancient stepper motor drives, LLF is a good thing to try?

Just 50K POH? That's it?

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

But I thought most "modern" hdds that had voice coil head actuators (pretty much all hard drives that have under 30ms access time) could not be low level formatted as there's no way to recreate the servo data.

Well, it's a low-level format on the "data" level for modern HDDs - that is, all *data* tracks on the HDD are filled with zeros. But the tracks that contain firmware-specific info or anything relating to track position don't get LLF-ed. Then again, those tracks don't contain user data, so there is no need to LLF those.

But yes, you CAN LLF a modern HDD... and sometimes it does clear out old bad sectors, if those happened to occur from interface or other external error (or power outage?)

Just 50K POH? That's it?

On *average*, yes.

I have a few of those old WD drives that are only in their 20-30k POH, and also a few in the 60-80k range. I think my highest is on a Hitachi 120 GB IDE HDD that has close to 110k POH now.

On that note, most of those hours aren't from my use - all of these HDDs were bought/acquired used with most of the POH already on there. As for me, I don't really add that much POH to my HDDs. I'm more of a heavy "power-cycler" - that is, if a computer is not being used, I keep it OFF and turn it On only as needed. Thus, often times I'll switch off or put the PC in Standby (Sleep) if I'll be away for more than 30 minutes... though it does depend on the season - in the Winter, I do sometimes leave my PC on for longer, even if I won't be using it for an hour or two. But in the summer when it's hot and A/C is running, I keep no computer On for any reason if it's not needed.

With that being said, my main and gaming PCs get the most power cycles - about 1 per day, typically (and sometimes more and sometimes less.) So that's ~360 power cycles / year. And in terms of hours, it can vary anywhere from 0 to 6 hours... so about 2-4 on average / day. As such, my POH to PCC (power cycle count) ratio tends to be about 3:1 - i.e. for every 3 hours of operation, I put about 1 power cycle.

I used to be much worse in high school, though, where I'd power-cycle/standby my PC multiple times a day due to having a loud PC and not wanting the extra noise in the room. So back then, my main PC had only about 4500 POH in the course of 3 years, but over 3000 power cycles.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

haha! here's a wd cav blue 500gb ide drive i bought used off junkbay with 56k+ poh. it also has over 50k start stop and load unload cycle counts.

i like those line of drives! they are tough old boats! tho one died on me recently a couple of years ago and totally bricked itself. undetectable by bios and wont spin up. just makes a few clicking noises on power on and then no further noise or activity from it. ah well... no drive or drive line is ever 100% perfect. all hard drives fail... eventually... but other than that, those drives have been pretty reliable for me so far. i have hoarded like 5 or 6 of those drives. hahaha! im such a hoarder too rofl!

I think my highest is on a Hitachi 120 GB IDE HDD that has close to 110k POH now.

OMG! thats like 12 and a half years in total of use and being powered on! thats like a centurion in human years! lol!

i'd bet that hard drive is going to be the last surviving hard drive of humanity some day. lol! probably, thousands of years later, when an alien race discovers earth and the ruins of human civilization, they will find that hard drive. the only surviving record of what humanity is like...

yikes! that makes me now think carefully of what i put on my hard drives. what if i put pr0n on the last surviving hard drive of humanity and the aliens find my pr0n collection?! they will get the impression that humans just luv being nakkied and they just luv having sex/mating with each other the whole day? so they surmise that overbreeding killed off humanity?! wow thats definitely a good deterrant now to make me make better use of my time instead of dloadin and watching obscene films all day. hahahaha!

maybe i should put science and animal documentaries on the last surviving hard drive instead, so the aliens get a better impression of humanity. that we were intellectuals, scientists, great knowledge seekers and great preservers of the natural world...

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

haha! here's a wd cav blue 500gb ide drive i bought used off junkbay with 56k+ poh. it also has over 50k start stop and load unload cycle counts.

I see only 149 "hard" power cycle counts. The 50k start/stop and load cycle counts may just be head parking jobs, depending on how the HDD is made to report these. That's still a lot... though nowhere near as bad as WD Green drives - now those drives really like to waste time parking heads more than doing anything else.

tho one died on me recently a couple of years ago and totally bricked itself. undetectable by bios and wont spin up. just makes a few clicking noises on power on and then no further noise or activity from it.

That actually may be repairable, as it sounds like the spindle motor is not spinning. This could be either due to stuck head on the platter or perhaps motor driver is bad.

To check for stuck heads, sometimes this is easy to do on Seagate and WD drives by holding the drive in your hand with the spindle motor right above the middle of your palm. Then spin the HDD back and forth. The intertia will make the platters not spin as much as the HDD, so the platters will rotate a little back and forth inside. As such, since WD and Seagate drives don't use a parking ramp but rather park heads on a designated track on the platters, you should be able to hear a faint "wheezing" while spinning the HDD in your hand back and forth. (Note: may listen very carefully in a quite room, since newer drives tend to be pretty quiet with that test.) If you can't hear the heads sliding on the parking track, they may be stuck somewhere else on the platter, hence the HDD not spinning.

*OR*

Since the HDD is not detecting at all, check for blown fuse links and other power components to the controller and motor driver circuits.

OMG! thats like 12 and a half years in total of use and being powered on! thats like a centurion in human years! lol!

Yeah, I know.
I bought it used refurbished, so it was probably working 24/7/365 before I that. I currently have it as a main drive in this PC. It gets very occasional use now, being located in my grandparent's old family house in the countryside - maybe a few 10's of hours a year tops.

i'd bet that hard drive is going to be the last surviving hard drive of humanity some day. lol! probably, thousands of years later, when an alien race discovers earth and the ruins of human civilization, they will find that hard drive. the only surviving record of what humanity is like...

Well, given what I said about it above... yeah, it most likely will be one of hte last HDDs to survive humanity. Moreover, the foundations of that house were built over 100 years ago, and the half-basement has 6-foot-thick rock-and-clay walls. Calling it a bunker is equally appropriate. If I place the PC down there, it would surely be a relic to be discovered many generations after I have passed... provided moisture doesn't destroy the PCB on it (which it probably will, despite this being an old drive from before the lead-free era and using good quality leaded solder.)

yikes! that makes me now think carefully of what i put on my hard drives. what if i put pr0n on the last surviving hard drive of humanity and the aliens find my pr0n collection?! they will get the impression that humans just luv being nakkied and they just luv having sex/mating with each other the whole day?

Sounds about right, actually.

so they surmise that overbreeding killed off humanity?!

Sounds about right x2

maybe i should put science and animal documentaries on the last surviving hard drive instead, so the aliens get a better impression of humanity.

Oh, you mean this, right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xat1GVnl8-k


Sorry, I realize this is not VIP... but it's on YouTube, after all. So it can't be that bad, can it?

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Ugh looks like the WD205BA just choked on me... cant write new data ...

Still can read existing data however.

Well it said it was bad, it really is!

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

FSCK this...wtf.

badblocks -n reports 0 FAILURES!!! Come on, write the bad block locations to the ext4fs bad block list!!!

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

FSCK this...wtf.

badblocks -n reports 0 FAILURES!!! Come on, write the bad block locations to the ext4fs bad block list!!!

The best way to expose bad blocks on an HDD is to either run SpinRite on it at Level 5, DBAN it on the DoD Short wipe, or to run a destructive badblocks test against the drive.

Destructive BadBlock test (1gig ram in machine)
 badblocks -b 4096 -c 98304 -p 0 -w -s /dev/hda

It is not good practice to attempt to test a drive for bad blocks by performing a read-only test. A read only test, however, will expose damaged sectors that cannot be read. These will generally show up in the Current Pending Sectors Count, or CPSC SMART parameter. If a drive has a non-zero CPSC SMART parameter, that likely means that data has been damaged as a result of the drive's failure mode, and it should be backed up immediately (preferably by using ddrescue to maximize the amount of salvageable data), wiped, and disposed of.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Look at the fact that I specified -n : a non destructive write... This reads data off the disk, writes test pattern, and then writes the old data back - nondestructive (and is very slow!). Without -n would have meant read-only, but it definitely wrote..

Note that I already know there are a lot of sectors that had problems writing in the past and was hoping to get them ignored by software (NOT HARDWARE) by adding them to the software based bad sector map. It completely ran out of spare sectors already.

And no, I'm not disposing of this drive yet, I'm milking it until the motor dies or head scrapes the rust off...

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

FFFFKK.

The drive is very intermittent. Worked perfectly fine overnight, was able to update Linux and build a new kernel, then today after moving it to another machine, it blew chunks trying to write again. Seems it has no problems reading still.

Oddly enough the machine that had no problems last night was the "home fixed special" - an amalgamation of the flaky EP43, the SP300 that fried to a crisp (and fixed with "blue light specials"), and the hot hot hot Core2Duo...nevertheless it worked fine until I transferred the drive back to the P4 with a PSU that hadn't ever given me problems before minus the MB ATX12V connector overheating and jury rig repaired...

Mystery continues though could very well be a PSU issue still...

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

FSCK this...wtf.

badblocks -n reports 0 FAILURES!!! Come on, write the bad block locations to the ext4fs bad block list!!!

Likely a drive board problem. Check for oxidation!

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

And no, I'm not disposing of this drive yet, I'm milking it until the motor dies or head scrapes the rust off...

LOL! I'm the same with my HDDs - keep using them until they're completely dead. Have more than a few here that have all kinds of various issues, but still work somewhat. So I just relegated them to systems / data storage that I don't care as much about.

And as shown in post #53, even when I get an HDD that's beyond dead (for PC use), I can still find a use for it. In the case of the grinder I made above - I've used it more than a few times now and it's been very useful actually. I've sharpened several dull drill bits with it and also on a few PC heatsink mods. In fact, it works so well I have to be careful with aluminum - push it a little too much and it can grab it right off your hands. I was sanding a few small details and decided I don't need pliers to hold the piece to sand it. Wrong move, though - for one of the pieces, the thing grabbed it from my hands and flung it across the room, struck the wall, and made a loud *ding* sound. You'd think an HDD motor doesn't have as much power, but these multi-platter HDDs actually do. Moreover, they also have quite a bit of spinning mass. So it woks pretty well for sanding small to medium details.

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Those are pretty beefy three-phase motors, so they'll have plenty of torque to spare.

[kevin!]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I update, this Seagate 1BD142 is proving to be very reliable, the last time I photographed it had 61,000.
Also, as an extra piece of information, the monitor that the PC has has almost 50,000h, and I have never changed the CCFL lamps.

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure



My 2nd data drive was damaged by a hard power cut yesterday morning (132kV subfeed tripped) and a sector on it has been damaged. Either it's gonna read this sector or I'm gonna force the drive to reallocate it with hdparm.

[shovenose]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I'm running a huge assortment of drives in my Plex server. From brand new drives to used old stuff, some desktop drives and laptop drives not intended for multi-drive environments... A mix of WD/HGST/Hitachi, Seagate/Samsung, Toshiba...

Highest hours is a 3TB WD Red with 65K hours and counting.

Also have a WD VelociRaptor 250GB in another system with similar hours.

In the current iteration of my Plex server I've only had one drive fail... a WD20EURS... an old WD "GreenPower" it was working fine then suddenly started sprouting a ton of bad sectors. That was a few weeks ago. Replaced that with a Seagate ST8000DM004... eww, an SMR drive. Oh well, mediocre write speeds beats bad sectors.

Everything else I own is SSD. One of the drives is a Crucial MX500 with 80TB TBW. Some SSDs as old as 2013 that don't report TBW. Many newer SSDs as well.

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure



Update on the damaged data drive: Forced reallocation with hdparm --write-sector, which seems to have caused the drive to silently reallocate it, and am now verifying the integrity of the disk with badblocks -svw, which is coming back healthy so far. If this passes, I'll hit it with a SMART offline extended. If that passes, then I'll recreate the LUKS container, underlying filesystem, and restore from backups.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

dammit one of my 2T disks has 1000 bad sectors on it now... sigh. Probably need to replace it soon...

It's part of a RAID. And if I have to replace it, I can't get a shingle... mustn't get a shingle... ugghh

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Update on the damaged data drive: Forced reallocation with hdparm --write-sector, which seems to have caused the drive to silently reallocate it, and am now verifying the integrity of the disk with badblocks -svw, which is coming back healthy so far. If this passes, I'll hit it with a SMART offline extended. If that passes, then I'll recreate the LUKS container, underlying filesystem, and restore from backups.

That's a lot of work for a single CPSC.
I would just ignore it... unless the HDD starts racking up more quickly. I've had drives outlast their useful life with a bunch of pending and bad sectors - they just never racked up enough (or quickly enough) that I cared to change them. On the other hand, if the drive starts making weird noises without SMART indicating anything, that's when I actually worry. Had WD drives go out that way.

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

That's a lot of work for a single CPSC.
I would just ignore it... unless the HDD starts racking up more quickly. I've had drives outlast their useful life with a bunch of pending and bad sectors - they just never racked up enough (or quickly enough) that I cared to change them. On the other hand, if the drive starts making weird noises without SMART indicating anything, that's when I actually worry. Had WD drives go out that way.

I wanted to force the drive to reallocate that sector, thus pulling it out of service. Then I basically did a surface test on the disk to make sure nothing else popped up.
Also, the disk passed all testing, so I've restored it to service.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I think the 20GB disk mentioned earlier has just been declared as unfit for use...
An 80GB disk replaces it...

And as for the 2TB disk...

 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct  0x0033  054  054  005  Pre-fail Always    -    999
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032  053  053  000  Old_age  Always    -    1022
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0022  100  100  000  Old_age  Always    -    0

Not looking good...