A Colossal HDD Failure

[TechGeek]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

My 2x 2TB WD Black drives (WD2003FZEX) have around 27,800 hours on them and a little bit short of 700 start-stop cycles. They take around 10 seconds to get up to speed.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

200mbps fibre line.

200Mbps is only 25 MB/s, like a very-late-1990s to early-2000s HDD.
And compared to where I live in the northeast U.S., it looks like you were conned. I have 1 Gbps down and 1 Gbps up FTTH.

[Curious.George]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

200Mbps is only 25 MB/s, like a very-late-1990s to early-2000s HDD.
And compared to where I live in the northeast U.S., it looks like you were conned. I have 1 Gbps down and 1 Gbps up FTTH.

It looks more like you were conned! What do you use that bandwidth for? You can fill a TB drive in ~130 minutes. THEN what??

[kevin!]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Same - particularly with the Barracuda ATA IV/V and 7200.7 series. Some claim the 7200.9 are also very reliable, but I'm on the edge with that statement. The 7200.10 and later certainly weren't, though.

The 7200.10 series are very reliable, although it also influences its useful life if it carries a quality power supply.
I have had 7200.7, 7200.10, 7200.14 and they have not given me problems, even 7200.11 had the famous BSY bug and never affected it, I updated the firmware and it is about to reach 46,000h, although it has several reallocated sectors, but The HDD has always worked well.
I leave these captures, of several seagates, one with 100,000h to withdraw, it was a 7200.7, then 2 7200.14, one with 61,000h and without any problem, I have Windows 10 pro installed on that hard disk, and it is placed on a fujitsu esprimo p420 computer e85 + I found and it goes great. It has very good health that even supports up to 117 MB / s in download by FTTH 1Gb.
Then there are my 2 maxtors 7200.10 160GB ATA, one with 61,000h and another with 30,000h.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

It looks more like you were conned! What do you use that bandwidth for? You can fill a TB drive in ~130 minutes. THEN what??

Me being conned? WTF?! In many other regions, they pass off 200 Mbit as something state-of-the-art, reminds me of monitor manufacturers still dragging on with 1080p! 1 Gbps FTTH has been around in Springfield, Vermont, at least since later in 2013. Albeit the ONT installed on houses, was likely a year older and been sitting there, with us waiting for them to be enabled...

I saw the fiber and the ONT get installed on the outside of the house in 2012, IIRC, but I still only had ADSL in 2012.

[kevin!]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Me being conned? WTF?! In many other regions, they pass off 200 Mbit as something state-of-the-art, reminds me of monitor manufacturers still dragging on with 1080p! 1 Gbps FTTH has been around in Springfield, Vermont, at least since later in 2013. Albeit the ONT installed on houses, was likely a year older and been sitting there, with us waiting for them to be enabled...

I saw the fiber and the ONT get installed on the outside of the house in 2012, IIRC, but I still only had ADSL in 2012.

How lucky to have 1Gb since 2013, I have been with ADSL until October 2019, and I had a rate of 50 dollars per 20Mb ... Now with the fiber I have a rate of 38 dollars of 1Gb and 300Mb of upload.
Unfortunately, if it is, ISPs sell much lower connections at more expensive prices and sell it as the last generation. And on top of that, many areas can only hire ADSL for 50 dollars (spain) ...
Here in Spain they offer Gb as the latest generation ...

[Curious.George]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Me being conned? WTF?! In many other regions, they pass off 200 Mbit as something state-of-the-art, reminds me of monitor manufacturers still dragging on with 1080p! 1 Gbps FTTH has been around in Springfield, Vermont, at least since later in 2013. Albeit the ONT installed on houses, was likely a year older and been sitting there, with us waiting for them to be enabled...

I saw the fiber and the ONT get installed on the outside of the house in 2012, IIRC, but I still only had ADSL in 2012.

You've completely missed the point.

Are you *using* that bandwidth? Will they sell you 10% of that bandwidth for 10% of the price? Do you even need that 10%?

Would you buy a gross of donuts -- if you could only eat a dozen?

I spent some time with colleagues a year or two ago debating how fat a pipe you need for a "family of four" (e.g., imagine 4 people streaming 4K video while also surfing the web). We concluded that the only way to even begin to make use of the sorts of bandwidths they were touting was if you wanted to spend it on "entertainment". And, even then, you lose a third of the capacity to "time spent asleep".

[CapLeaker]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

My 2x 2TB WD Black drives (WD2003FZEX) have around 27,800 hours on them and a little bit short of 700 start-stop cycles. They take around 10 seconds to get up to speed.

My Hitachi has twice the amount of running hours. No errors!

[BigTroll]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I think i have 75mbps here, I could buy more and after having a 150mbps plan before I do sometimes miss the extra speed when downloading a huge game from steam, however 75 has usually been more than enough for me and its not worth the extra cost for me to upgrade.Comcast really sucks and you always have to renegotiate the agreement at the end of the term or enjoy the price hike.

I like Hitachi drives especially the laptop ones, Toshiba desktop drives are supposedly rebadged Hitachis and I have had zero failures with those also.

[eccerr0r]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

My 2TB disks are getting up there in hours, have many of them around the 60K mark now. Getting close to my personal record of the 120G disks that are around 70K hours and still working. Currently the 2T disks are Hitachi/Toshiba, Seagate, WD Green, and a WD Black (I think). Except for the green, the other disks are in some RAID. The WD black was a refurb and also the disk that has the highest potential for failing first...grr... The green has had its expected head load/unload cycles completely exhausted, luckily it's still working. This power save measure has been disabled.

Though this is NOT necessarily accurate, the main partition of that 2TB Green reports
Lifetime writes: 15 TB
and it's probably the disk I've had most I/O to, mostly because it's a PVR disk. Seems the next most abused disk I have is one of my SSDs that I've done 8TB writes to. I have a feeling that having swap on this disk is part of the reason why it's fairly high though the wear counter has barely ticked yet despite the large number of writes (it should tick soon...)

Oddly enough the number of bytes written differs from the filesystem (8TB) and from SMART (12TB) differ on that SSD. What gives. Probably metadata may not be included? No idea.

Anyway, the disks that I got failures on the surface like the pictured ones was apparently due to orientation or contamination. An old 40M WD disk and some other disk I no longer remember...

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

exactly, i subscribed to a slower connection to save money. 200mbps is fast enough for me. this isnt a dick wagging contest!

when torrenting, im more of a hit and run torrenter. i just spend a few days downloading and re-seeding stuff then im gone. makes it hard to track me down and my activities!

[Curious.George]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

exactly, i subscribed to a slower connection to save money. 200mbps is fast enough for me. this isnt a dick wagging contest!

when torrenting, im more of a hit and run torrenter. i just spend a few days downloading and re-seeding stuff then im gone. makes it hard to track me down and my activities!

Any sort of "large data transfer" can almost always be spread out over time (the exception being HUGE torrents that aren't seeded for long periods of time). So, just choose that "time" to be one when you won't really care to be waiting (e.g., asleep and totally oblivious of how long it might take; your MACHINE has infinite patience!).

Note that you are always at the mercy of the data source's pipe; someone seeding at 100Kbps is going to take just as long to DL a given torrent over 10Gbps and 10Mbps links! :> Ditto pulling material off of an FTP server or web site.

[and who the hell wants to be MS's bitch distributing updates to peers "for free"?]

The downside of fat pipes is that your machine can be targeted, infected and compromised before you even notice the surge in traffic!

I have a (hidden/secret) back door to access my servers. The pipe is deliberately constricted so that it would take *ages* to get anything in or out through that connection. The connection is normally used for administration -- which is usually a very low bandwidth activity (CLI). So, there is no "cost" to this restriction in normal use!

The appliance that stands watch over that entryway is particularly sensitive to attempts to hammer at it, repeatedly -- it KNOWS that I would never behave like that. So, anyone trying to make repeated attempts to gain entry using the wider pipe leading into the house effectively reveals their malevolent intentions BEFORE they have had a chance to even knock on the door!

And the appliance just "dummies-up".

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I remember a virus back in 2003, where you will get infected quickly on 56K!
A firewall was required to prevent the exploit. It was "Blaster". (a.k.a. msblast.exe)

How did I know that I got exploited? The remote procedure call (RPC) service crashes.

[Curious.George]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I remember a virus back in 2003, where you will get infected quickly on 56K!
A firewall was required to prevent the exploit. It was "Blaster". (a.k.a. msblast.exe)

How did I know that I got exploited? The remote procedure call (RPC) service crashes.

Having a slow link doesn't *prevent* infection. Rather, it makes it more obvious when someone is stealing your bandwidth for uses that you haven't approved (e.g., siphoning your data, capturing your keystrokes, running a botnet, etc.)

If you already have an "open" connection to your server, then the connection can be "detected". OTOH, if you deliberately DON'T open a connection to your server until you KNOW the "caller" is someone you should let in, hackers just see you as a "black hole".

E.g., if I have a machine at W.X.Y.Z but you can't tell if my machine is plugged in, turned on, or destroyed in a recent fire, then you're not going to hang around waiting to see if it magically appears. Move on to some other IP address that actually *looks* to be present!

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Having a slow link doesn't *prevent* infection. Rather, it makes it more obvious when someone is stealing your bandwidth for uses that you haven't approved (e.g., siphoning your data, capturing your keystrokes, running a botnet, etc.)

If you already have an "open" connection to your server, then the connection can be "detected". OTOH, if you deliberately DON'T open a connection to your server until you KNOW the "caller" is someone you should let in, hackers just see you as a "black hole".

E.g., if I have a machine at W.X.Y.Z but you can't tell if my machine is plugged in, turned on, or destroyed in a recent fire, then you're not going to hang around waiting to see if it magically appears. Move on to some other IP address that actually *looks* to be present!

That was Microsoft's fault, for making an artificial requirement that port 135 be open, IIRC. Also the same for port 445, IIRC. At least for XP, if not also later, possibly 2000 as well. Possibly all NT-based Windows versions since NT 5, if not NT4 as well!

IIRC, no such animal for Windows 95-based OSes.

[Curious.George]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

That was Microsoft's fault, for making an artificial requirement that port 135 be open, IIRC. Also the same for port 445, IIRC. At least for XP, if not also later, possibly 2000 as well. Possibly all NT-based Windows versions since NT 5, if not NT4 as well!

IIRC, no such animal for Windows 95-based OSes.

Don't put ANY machine directly on a public network. You should always have SOME sort of appliance between you and the Real World. Once you have an appliance in place, you can "bend the rules" and leave all ports CLOSED -- yet still NOTICE when an attempt is made to access one.

Ever make a phone call, let it ring twice, then hang up? Then, call back and know that your call will be answered? Because you've transferred "information" to the called party in that first, aborted call even though they never answered; they now know that another call coming in on the heels of the first will likely be *you*.

Any other caller, on the other hand, doesn't even know if the phone "made an audible ringing sound" -- there might not be a phone connected to that line! So, a caller can let it ring 100 times and get no information from that effort.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

Don't put ANY machine directly on a public network. You should always have SOME sort of appliance between you and the Real World. Once you have an appliance in place, you can "bend the rules" and leave all ports CLOSED -- yet still NOTICE when an attempt is made to access one.

Ever make a phone call, let it ring twice, then hang up? Then, call back and know that your call will be answered? Because you've transferred "information" to the called party in that first, aborted call even though they never answered; they now know that another call coming in on the heels of the first will likely be *you*.

Any other caller, on the other hand, doesn't even know if the phone "made an audible ringing sound" -- there might not be a phone connected to that line! So, a caller can let it ring 100 times and get no information from that effort.

With 56K and earlier, this was difficult, compared to broadband with an Ethernet interface. The usual dial-up configuration, didn't use an Ethernet interface at the client end.

The usual, was to use solely a software firewall.

Back in November, 2003, IIRC, I think I forgot to install the firewall software and presto, I got attacked!

[Curious.George]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

With 56K and earlier, this was difficult, compared to broadband with an Ethernet interface. The usual dial-up configuration, didn't use an Ethernet interface at the client end.

I had a little box that had a PLIP i/f on one end and serial to a modem on the other. (PLIP gave me a wider pipe to my host so I could also "do stuff" on the little box without impacting bandwidth between it and my host)

The usual, was to use solely a software firewall.

Back in November, 2003, IIRC, I think I forgot to install the firewall software and presto, I got attacked!

Yup. Like AIDS -- it only takes *one* unprotected experience...

[momaka]

Re: A Colossal HDD Failure

I'm back with another colossal HDD failure.
Same brand and model (Seagate 7200.11, model ST31500341AS.)


This hard drive came from the same bin at work where I got the previously (badly) failed one. However, when I powered this one on my test PC, it actually sounded as if it's trying to seek / calibrate, and I could swear I almost heard it do it a few times. But after numerous power ups/downs and tries, while the HDD was running, all of a sudden I heard a loud clunk and the HDD jumped violently. After this, I heard the HDD try to spin back up, followed by that awful grinding noise again.

What are the chances this one developed a head crash? Pretty HIGH! So without further thought I opened it up, and sure enough was greeted with the same mess again:



Want the data back? I'm sorry, but you will have to pluck those magnetic bits off one by one from the head arm magnet and the filter:


I think Seagate should write on the label of these HDDs "Certified Trash".

I got several more 7200.10 and 7200.11 models from that same bin at work (though smaller capacities), and they all have various problems. Mostly bad sectors and slow reads. Not a single one over 50k hours, IIRC.

[TechGeek]

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.