Hard disk problems - making a funny noise!

[G33k]

My disk stopped working the other day and now it makes a funny noise :( I can't be arsed to re-type the whole thing, so have a look here (http://www.digital-explosion.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=172#172) if you think you might have a solution...

[Fess_ter]

Dude, you are joking

If you aren't joking, sounds like the HD is dead.
Second, if its not dead, dont expect it to work long after opening it up.

I hear people have taken platters out, strung em up and made wind chimes out of them.

Fess_ter

[Cooler666]

looks like a quantum from what i can make out from the sticker. how old is it? if not too old you can RMA it back to maxtor.

[Fess_ter]

Cooler Dude, did you read the linked post?

He drilled the screws out and opened it up.

He's not going to get an RMA for that.
Nor should he.


Fess_ter

[ninthebin]

my old harddisk did that after I damaged a seal down the side...my thoughts were that it somehow lost its pressure or something and now doesnt spin properly...

mine makes these noises as if the reading arm is digging a hole in one of the platters...either fails to be detected in the POST, and if it makes it to whatever crazy OS I had on it, will frequently give me error reading disk C: messages...

I ended up just getting a new one :|

[macklin01]

Definitely no RMA there! The "dust" looks almost like metal filing to me. Could that have happened when the screws were drilled out?

[Malakai]

Dude that is THE FUNNNIEST thing ive seen all day...

drilling open the HDD to try and FIX it!!!!!

ROFLMAO!

RMA? AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

-Malakai

[Maddman]

Originally posted by G33k
My disk stopped working the other day and now it makes a funny noise :( I can't be arsed to re-type the whole thing, so have a look here (http://www.digital-explosion.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=172#172) if you think you might have a solution...

The solution is to buy a new hard drive. By opening it you voided any warranty it might have had.

[nikhsub1]

Too bad this doesn't quailfy for the darwin award...

[powers2002]

LOL.... And i thought i had problems...
good luck

[G33k]

Just as well I wasn't serious :) It's amazing how many people responded to this article with "OMG YOU F******* IDIOT!!". No, I started by checking the RMA number. When I realised it was out of it's warranty period, I figured I had nothing to lose in opening it up. I couldn't find a screwdriver so out came the drill :)

If you look closely at the second pic in the article I linked to, you'll see there's actually HOLES in the platter!!! Something odd must've happened and the heads crashed. But it crashed when I was on holiday. I came back to a rather loud noise which I traced to the disk. All the dust you can see is actually bits of burnt PLATER :eek::eek::eek:

[ed8150]

could the holes be cause you FRIGGIN DRILLED IT TO GET INSIDE?

[Maddman]

Originally posted by ed8150
could the holes be cause you FRIGGIN DRILLED IT TO GET INSIDE?

No. look at his large picture and you can see that the plater was worn away by the head staying in one position and rubbing on the disk. Serious head crash. What looks like dust is actualy tiny metal shavings from the platter wearing away.

[macklin01]

Originally posted by Maddman


No. look at his large picture and you can see that the plater was worn away by the head staying in one position and rubbing on the disk. Serious head crash. What looks like dust is actualy tiny metal shavings from the platter wearing away.

I thought they might be metal shavings ... so, you think it's from when the heads scraped the platters? It would be interesting if we could somehow match the shavings against the material of the hdd casing and the platters.

And now we're back to a more rational discussion. :) G33k, I figured that your opening it up was more out of curiosity than out of an attempt to fix it. So, those worn spots were from the heads?

So, the issue is: What caused the heads to do that kind of damage? Aren't modern drives "self-parking" in the event of a power failure, for example?

This would be a good thing to understand. I think it's good to try to understand what causes a failure when one happens.

PS: How old of a hdd was this? Model?

[G33k]

Yes, I opened it out of curiosity to see if there was any obvious damage. If the disk had rund for much longer, the platter probably would've got disconnected from the spindle!!!

The drive is a Quantum Fireball Ex (3.5 series).

...and yes, I'm fairly certain that all the dust was from the platter beaing eaten by a busted head. The drilling produced lots of small metal shavings - not dust :)

[Thirus44]

guess its time for a new hd:eek:

[Maddman]

Originally posted by G33k
Yes, I opened it out of curiosity to see if there was any obvious damage. If the disk had rund for much longer, the platter probably would've got disconnected from the spindle!!!

The drive is a Quantum Fireball Ex (3.5 series).

...and yes, I'm fairly certain that all the dust was from the platter beaing eaten by a busted head. The drilling produced lots of small metal shavings - not dust :)

sometimes if the power dropes at just the right time the head will crash aginst the platter while it is still moving fast and massive damage gets done to both the read head and the platter.

[macklin01]

That makes sense, but I thought that hard drives would initiate an auto head park in the event of a power drop ...

[Maddman]

Originally posted by macklin01
That makes sense, but I thought that hard drives would initiate an auto head park in the event of a power drop ...

Depends on how much lead time they have. If the power dropped with no warning then there is no way it can do so. Use to be they auto parked after writing data to the hard drive then copanies and windows started utalizing cach mor and more and now the drives don't really get much of a chance to park because the drive is always reading and writing to the platters. This is something you are risking every time you just turn off your computer without properly shutting down.

[macklin01]

Originally posted by Maddman


Depends on how much lead time they have. If the power dropped with no warning then there is no way it can do so. Use to be they auto parked after writing data to the hard drive then copanies and windows started utalizing cach mor and more and now the drives don't really get much of a chance to park because the drive is always reading and writing to the platters. This is something you are risking every time you just turn off your computer without properly shutting down.
Huh, thanks for the information! This is very interesting. I had figured that by now, there were putting in some capacitors or a small battery along with a line voltage sensor of some sort. When the sensor detects a drop in power, the circuit initiates the park sequence using the stored power in the capacitor or battery. I'm surprised there isn't anything like that incorparated into current drives ... Disappointing... :(

[macklin01]

I found this information at Western Digital:

Here's the source (http://www.westerndigital.com/products/current/drives.asp?Model=WD200BB).

Physical Specifications
[ ... ]
Head Park** Automatic

* Western Digital defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes

** Turning the system power off causes the WD Caviar® to perform an automatic head park operation.

[Malakai]

Originally posted by Maddman


Depends on how much lead time they have. If the power dropped with no warning then there is no way it can do so. Use to be they auto parked after writing data to the hard drive then copanies and windows started utalizing cach mor and more and now the drives don't really get much of a chance to park because the drive is always reading and writing to the platters. This is something you are risking every time you just turn off your computer without properly shutting down.

wow Maddman, i never knew that?!

i really do learn cool stuff all the time here, i gotta remember that!

-Malakai

[macklin01]

Malakai, Maddman

Does the information I found only pertain to intentionally turning off the system power?

Thanks -- Paul

[Malakai]

i believe so, i dont see how the head can park with no power, it would still need a few milliseconds of power to do so, unless there is a tiny battery of some sort in there

-Malakai

[Maddman]

Here is something I picked up in a search on google

No, heads self-park these days. No physical damage will occur except
possibly if the disk is reading or writing at the time. The problem is
caused by operating systems that do not write everything to disk
as soon as possible. Linux, from default installation, flushes the disk
buffers every 30 seconds: until that occurs, all operations are not
guaranteed to complete (and see "man sync"). Windows is similar: it
can leave its swap file in an untidy state, although I've never had
any problems. I once lost a file recently (i.e. seconds before) saved
before a power cut (or "outage" as the Yanks know it); the buffers
had not been flushed.

[macklin01]

Originally posted by Maddman
Here is something I picked up in a search on google

No, heads self-park these days. No physical damage will occur except possibly if the disk is reading or writing at the time.

Thanks for the information. I'm glad to hear that drives are at least improving now .... The cache thing is very interesting! So, even if you save your file, it may not be "safe" for some period of time.

I'm curious -- WD now has a "special edition" drives out there with 8 MB buffers, as opposed to 2 MB buffers. Would you say that these are greater dangers on such drives?

Linux, from default installation, flushes the disk
buffers every 30 seconds:

That's good to hear.

Windows is similar: it can leave its swap file in an untidy state,

Any idea how long it is between buffer flushes?

before a power cut (or "outage" as the Yanks know it);

Indeed! :)


Originally posted by Maddman
i believe so, i dont see how the head can park with no power, it would still need a few milliseconds of power to do so, unless there is a tiny battery of some sort in there[/B]
That's what I was wondering aloud earlier; there would have to be some tiny amount of backup power -- a second or two worth -- for such a feature.

This really is an interesting thread ... thanks! :)

-- Paul

[G33k]

I'd be suprised if they didn't have something which automatically parks the heads in case of an unexpected power down. God only know what happened to my disk - maybe it tried to park the head on the spindle and bent it out of shape LOL!

One thing's for sure, it the drive had been run for much longer, it would have cut right through the platters - severing them from the spindle alltogether :eek: :eek:

[macklin01]

Yes, I think that the auto-park seems to be fairly standard now. (LOL, I still remember when my dad came home in the late 80's with this great program -- park -- which we were supposed to run before shutting down our IBM PC. :) )

I couldn't really find much on your EX drive -- about how old was it? Maybe it was before such features were becoming standard? I don't think that those features were there as recently as 1997 or so, when I bought my first computer ...

-- Paul

[G33k]

lol, I think the disk is probably about 7-8 years old if memoey serves. Could be wrong about that though!

It's an EX64A013 (REV 01)...

[macklin01]

Originally posted by G33k
lol, I think the disk is probably about 7-8 years old if memoey serves. Could be wrong about that though!

It's an EX64A013 (REV 01)...

Woohoo! Well, I'm impressed that it lasted that long for you! Congrats! My first hdd konked out after about 3 years of service ...

Let's see .... searching for that hdd .... 6.4 GB IDE, I've seen it on computers with a 105 MHz processor ... I guess that could place it in the 5-6 year+ range .... :)

[Maddman]

You have to realize the tolerences in a hard disk as well though. A human hair would not fit between the read head and platter when the disk is operating, thats how small the cusion of air that the read head rides on to keep it from hitting the disk. As a drive ages the tolerences can change so some of the things that new drives tolerate the older drive may not.

[ThePerfectCore]

Summary:

CD burners are *definently* worth it.