HDD Spins up and down again at power on

[dicky96]

Hi guys. I hope this is the correct forum section

One of my 2TB internal Hard Drives has given up the ghost. It is a Seagate Desktop HDD ST2000DM001

It was working fine, it has not been dropped or subject to shock. Basically i was copying a load of files from another drive when it suddenly just hung up. The PC was still running but the progress bar did not move for a long time. I cancelled the copy operation and restarted the PC

I checked some of the copied files were OK (video files, they played fine) and then started to copy about another 20Gb of files. They copied OK though at one point the progress seemed to stop, then started again.

I checked those newly copied files by playing one of them. After a few minutes the video just froze (in VLC) and I had to shut the the PC down by holding the power button in because I could not bring the task manager to the front of VLC even though the windows itself had not crashed. After that the PC took a longer than normal time to load Windows 10 and the HDD was not found.

I tried running Testdisk and it sees the drive but as 130GB or something like that, not 2TB. The BIOS does not detect the drive at all.

I could not hear the drive spinning (though it possibly had already spun up and down because I didin't know about that yet) so I removed the drive controller pcb and the little contacts between the drive and the PCB were quite corroded so I cleaned them

After that I reconnected. The drive spins up sounding normal, I hear a few of clicks/clunks (not loud I have to hold the drive to my ear) then it spins back down again. This happens even if I just connect SATA power and not the data cable. It does not spin up again until I power off and on.

Any suggestions how to get that back?

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Sounds more like classic HDD failure, initially. But I wonder about board connections with that spin-down BS...

[redwire]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Recheck your work cleaning the head connections, you seem to have made it worse? The copper gets oxidized and maybe you don't have the spring pressure. You have to clean both ends.
The drive spins up and reads its firmware off the platter, so if that isn't happening- I think it gives up and then shuts off the motor.
That Seagate HDD (line) is notoriously a lemon, across the internet many complaints.

[CapLeaker]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

remove the controller board again again and recheck your work

[SMDFlea]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Connect the drive up to a board with sata 2 and see if it spins up,disable s.m.a.r.t ,and set ide/sata to compatibility.The drive has bad sectors and/or a partition problem.

[momaka]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

One of my 2TB internal Hard Drives has given up the ghost. It is a Seagate Desktop HDD ST2000DM001
...
The drive spins up sounding normal, I hear a few of clicks/clunks (not loud I have to hold the drive to my ear) then it spins back down again. This happens even if I just connect SATA power and not the data cable. It does not spin up again until I power off and on.

Any suggestions how to get that back?

Sorry! It's dead, Jim.

I got two of these 2TB ST2000DM001 from a box at work that was going to get scrapped. Initially, I was very excited, because I have found some good working HDDs in the past in that box (only about 1/5 of the drives, though.) Anyways, the first ST2000DM001 HDD I found shows no issues in SMART, but is laggy and sometimes clicks in a strange way when HDD is spinning up and calibrating. Probably will fail. I don't remember if HDTune could complete a surface test on that one or not

The other ST2000DM001: clicks and spins down the same was yours (though on mine, the clicks are rather loud. I think it's just either bad head [wear] or bad media that causes these to die so quickly.

[Chaos-Acid]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

I had this issue before on a macbook that a friend asked me to look at - the hard drive was only detectable sometimes, i managed to format the entire drive again and then use a data recovery application to get about 90% of his data back,

Hope that helps?

[Stefan Payne]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Seagate - aren't they known for their failure rates?

[CapLeaker]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Don't get me wrong, but I just had a bunch of WD Red's fail that were only 18 months old. Arrgh!

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Don't get me wrong, but I just had a bunch of WD Red's fail that were only 18 months old. Arrgh!

Looks like the tables may have turned. Seagate with their high-end HDDs, possibly better than Western Digital now!

They extremely likely will be, if Western Digital can't get their corrosion problem sorted out!

I have a recent Black HDD sitting around and it looks like corrosion happening already!

[momaka]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Seagate - aren't they known for their failure rates?

Yes.
Anything from them made in the last 10 years I would consider unreliable.

Don't get me wrong, but I just had a bunch of WD Red's fail that were only 18 months old. Arrgh!

2+ TB HDDs??
Not a surprise. Modern drives are pushing data density way too far.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Modern drives are pushing data density way too far.

Even when you're talking about spinners, that reminds me of the reason I was frowning at QLC SSDs! What's next? Are they going to manufacture PLC (pent-layer-cell) SSDs without getting the kinks worked out?

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

if Western Digital can't get their corrosion problem sorted out!

its not only the corrosion problem. recently, all the wd drives seem to have the annoying head parking problem. even the enterprise level wd hard drives also park their heads. its not as aggressive as the blue/green drives but still annoying to have. not sure whats up with that. even seagate is in on the head parking bandwagon.

i think i give up on any new high capacity hard drive now. the tech seems to have reached saturation point and can no longer be squeezed further without taking liberties with your priceless data. looking forward, the founder of the internet seems to be looking into dna based data storage where data/information is stored in/on dna molecules. looks very interesting with regards to how much data can be squeezed in there!

[CapLeaker]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Yes.
Anything from them made in the last 10 years I would consider unreliable.


2+ TB HDDs??
Not a surprise. Modern drives are pushing data density way too far.

4TB WD Reds

[larrymoencurly]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

I just had that happen a few weeks ago because I used a SATA-IDE adapter that measured at least 1.2 ohms per wire, with some wires measuring 6 ohms.

[momaka]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

its not only the corrosion problem. recently, all the wd drives seem to have the annoying head parking problem.

Neither of these are major problems, though.

Like I said, the main problem is that there is too much data per cm^2... or in^2... or whichever way you want to measure it. Data tracks are much narrower now on the HDD, and as such, the landing zones for the heads have very little room for error. This is probably not an issue when the HDD is new and the magnetic coating still fresh. But as any magnetic media, age will only make it worse over time. And with today's high density HDDs, it just doesn't take much degradation before the HDD can no longer read a sector, track, or even entire area(s) on the platter(s). Sure they have made improvements in the firmware the way the head tracks and also today's HDDs probably have much finer mechanical tolerances compared to older HDDs. But I think we are reaching a point where those improvements can get us so far, and now manufacturers are just increasing HDD space at the expense of reliability and storage lifetime.

looking forward, the founder of the internet seems to be looking into dna based data storage where data/information is stored in/on dna molecules. looks very interesting with regards to how much data can be squeezed in there!

Maybe.

I think a longer-term solution would be to stop producing/storing so much unnecessary data. But that's probably not going to happen. :\

4TB WD Reds

Yeah, that's what I expected.

When I see someone tell me they had a 2+ TB HDD work for more than 5 years, that's they day I'll switch to modern HDDs for long-term storage.

Until then, my important data is to still remain on 7200.7 Seagates and similarly old drives that have proven to be reliable.

[CapLeaker]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

At the moment we've got 14 WD regular Reds spinning. 4x2TB, 4x3TB and 8x4TB.
The 4TB EFRX has 2 different versions. Out of them 8 drives 2 went bad and those were both the early version. These run also 4 degrees C or so hotter than the second version of the EFRX. So far so good... had no more failures (knock on wood).

[Per Hansson]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

When I see someone tell me they had a 2+ TB HDD work for more than 5 years, that's they day I'll switch to modern HDDs for long-term storage.

Until then, my important data is to still remain on 7200.7 Seagates and similarly old drives that have proven to be reliable.

Well, I have 4TB WD Se hard drives in a RAID5 array since the summer of 2014.
They come with 5 year warranty that is now expired.
I am sure that you can find more experiences like that.
I don't think all multi terabyte drive fails in months, like you would assume reading this forum

[SMDFlea]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

"I don't think all multi terabyte drive fails in months, like you would assume reading this forum"

It depends if you`re mixing SMR and CMR drives

[CapLeaker]

Re: HDD Spins up and down again at power on

Back a few years ago I bought a WD green 2TB EARS drive. 13 months later, bad sectors without an end. Actually 2 weeks after the warranty ran out.