Hard Drive Failure *Cries* - Engineers to the rescue?

[WTP Pepper]

Assuming the motor is OK, buy an identical drive off ebay and swap the controller board.
Do not attempt to change the platters or heads.
Then backup.

 

[picbits]

I have just had my second Samsung hard drive fail on me after about 2 months - the first was a 3.5" in my main PC and this one was a 2.5" in my laptop :-( Not doing Samsung again!!! Both times they stopped spinning without warning, the lappy example gets quite warm so this is clearly a seized spindle or similar... Now I can't find the bloody receipt arghhhh!!!!

If you've bought the drives in the last few months then they are more than likely Seagate drives pretending to be Samsung.

Samsung drives used to have a great reputation but then Seagate took them over, and rebranded some of their own as "Samsung" - obviously not confident in their own reputation. I've seen posts where people have bought a quantity of them and had over 50% failure rates in the first week.

Seagate have also slashed the warranty on most of their drives to only 1 years.

I won't go near Seagate / Samsung drives any more.

 

[unclejed613]

back around 1986 i read an article about how IBM, very upset about the problem of drive heads diving into the disk surface, took a barge full of Seagate 5-and-10meg hard drives (which they had literally tons of, from warranty returns), and dumped them in the bay right in front of Seagate's corporate offices as a publicity stunt. so Seagate having a problem with a bad rep for reliability is nothing new.

 

[picbits]

Veering wildly off topic but back in the mid 90's I used to run a service center for a large computer retailler. We had major problems with a specific printer manufacturer who were a nightmare to send stuff back to but also used to return our returns with "no fault found" and it would still not work.

It got to the point where we asked their rep to come in while we RMA'd a pallet of printers. She went through each with us and agreed that they weren't working. We took serial numbers and descriptions of the faults etc. Around a month later we had the pallet of printers returned from the manufacturer just as she turned back up at the store.

Now sods law would state that she's had a word with the returns center or that for once they had done their job and repaired or actually found the fault with the printers but our luck was in.

She took the first one out of the box and it promptly fell to pieces in her hand as they hadn't put any screws back in. It was marked as fully tested and no fault found .....

That was a good day for us

 

[alec_t]

I wouldn't put my faith in CDs as backup media. I've had a few CDs (different brands, can't recall which) become unreadable after only 3 or 4 years .

 

[Timescope]

Modern storage media are becoming more and more unreliable. I just spent hours recovering data from a corrupted 8GB micro sd card, a 160GB hard drive crashed in a photo finishing machine and I have as yet no idea where to recover the data on a crashed 500GB external hard drive to. Maybe one day, a way will be found to store data as programmable physical connections instead of tiny charges or magnetic fields : scientists have just found a way to store 1MB of data in DNA physicsworld.com 2013/jan/23/ digital-files-stored-and-retrieved-using-dna-memory.

Timescope

 

[MrAl]

Hi,

alec:
I've never had a CD or DVD fail unless the burn didnt work, but i have had rewritable CD's and rewritable DVD's fail after only one or two writes! That was nasty as those were more expensive. I dont buy that junk any more now.
It could have something to do with the drive too. Is the laser diode old perhaps, does it burn right in the first place. I say this because there have been extensive studies done on CD's that show that they have very long life when stored properly. Oh yeah, they have to be stored properly too, up on edge i think not flat like old LP records.

Timescope:
Built a small mini CNC station, where you use an aluminum disk as the platter. Have the CNC station (just an automatic drill press) bore tiny holes in the surface of the aluminum disk. Bore a deep hole where there is a 'zero', and a shallow hole where there is a 'one'. Store the disk in oil.
Should last for a while

Regardless of the media type the only sure way seems to be to make many copies of the original data. Two copies isnt too bad, three copies better, four copies better yet, etc., etc.
Another technique is to 'layer' the backups. Make one backup then next backup goes to a different media. That way if one media fails you have the other backup which is slightly out of date but not as bad as nothing at all.

But unless you have tons and tons of data to store you should be able to find a way to do it with today's available media.

 

[kubeek]

When I recently bought a new 2TB drive, I reconfigured my two old 500GB disks into RAID1 and backed up all my imortant data, then some family photos etc, and disconnected power supply and sata cables. This way I think I should have a reasonable chance that the data will stay at least on one of them. I also use sugarSync to sync the work and school projects I work on right now to cloud and then to notebook. Maybe I´m getting paranoid, but after trying to recover data from 4 different friend's drives I at least know why

 

[Timescope]

.... use an aluminum disk as the platter. Have the CNC station (just an automatic drill press) bore tiny holes in the surface of the aluminum disk. Bore a deep hole where there is a 'zero', and a shallow hole where there is a 'one'. Store the disk in oil.
Should last for a while

Good idea MrAl, a metal digital gramophone record Seriously, think how long vinyl records last. BBC recently played a recording that was at least 100 years old, what do we have now that can survive that long? HDDs die if not used for an extended period of time as I discovered recently when I tried to install Windows 2000 on an old 4.3GB drive, that was working a few months ago, to test some software.
I back up my data on DVDs and external USB connected HDDs which saved me in 2009 when my 80GB HDD died at the hands of a virus.

Timescope

 

[unclejed613]

Built a small mini CNC station, where you use an aluminum disk as the platter. Have the CNC station (just an automatic drill press) bore tiny holes in the surface of the aluminum disk. Bore a deep hole where there is a 'zero', and a shallow hole where there is a 'one'. Store the disk in oil.
Should last for a while

i'll bet the write speed on that is awful...... sounds like you might measure it in megabytes per year....

 

[Timescope]

It would work well with my internet line that drops to a few hundred bytes per second during the day (bytes as in 8 bits) ....

Timescope

 

[()blivion]

Plant your hard drive at the scene of a hardcore crime. I'm sure CSI will recover all your data.

 

[alec_t]

I've never had a CD or DVD fail unless the burn didnt work

And there's the rub. I always set CD-writers to verify the written data immediately, but after a while the data can obviously become corrupted.

Oh yeah, they have to be stored properly too, up on edge i think

I've never heard of that. Can't think of any physical reason why storage orientation would be important, other than avoiding warping of the CD under the weight of others not vertically aligned.
I suspect CD failure is more likely to be due to corrosion, caused by either surface contamination or atmospheric pollution. So perhaps we should be stringently cleaning our CDs before writing then storing them in a vacuum? A new money-spinner for NASA etc; archiving CDs outside the International Space Station .

 

[unclejed613]

ww.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=641&pgno=0 shows the results of a test where CDs dating back to 1999 were tested and many disks had 1 or more corrupted file, or were unreadable.

i think the "storage on the side" thing comes from the days of vinyl records. CDs are made of much stiffer and stronger stuff, and shouldn't be affected by how they're positioned in storage. the recorded surface of a CD is actually the side where the label goes, so using labels with sticky goo adhesive, may not be such a good idea, nobody seems to have looked at the chemical proprties of adhesives vs the thin aluminum layer just under the top surface of the disk...

 

[ronv]

Built a small mini CNC station, where you use an aluminum disk as the platter. Have the CNC station (just an automatic drill press) bore tiny holes in the surface of the aluminum disk. Bore a deep hole where there is a 'zero', and a shallow hole where there is a 'one'. Store the disk in oil.
Should last for a while

That struck a memory! Back in the early 80's (I think it was) Storage TeK started an optical disk program. Think is was write once and about a 12 inch disk. It had it's challenges so one day we went in the shop and punched some different length holes around a standard 12 inch disk and gave it to the VP with a plaque that said 1st optical disk.
It hung on his wall for a long time.

 

[Mike odom]

Plant your hard drive at the scene of a hardcore crime. I'm sure CSI will recover all your data.

Best idea ever...

 

[Mike odom]

Hi,

alec:
I've never had a CD or DVD fail unless the burn didnt work

Timescope:
Built a small mini CNC station, where you use an aluminum disk as the platter. Have the CNC station (just an automatic drill press) bore tiny holes in the surface of the aluminum disk. Bore a deep hole where there is a 'zero', and a shallow hole where there is a 'one'. Store the disk in oil.
Should last for a while

Optical data is only archivalble for 100 years, but the aluminum disk will last until, well, global warming gets us up to the melting point of aluminum... 50 years?

The main problem with ALL long time backup media... the compatibility of the retrieval system.... how many of you still have a computer with a 3.5" floppy? 5.25"? How long do you think optical drives will be around? Can Windows 8 still read Windows 95 files? And how long before they quit making it backwards compatible? I went through a day of retrieving backups and resaving files as two iterations down the road the new CAD software wouldn't read my backup files, so I had to read them with the last iteration and save them, then read those files with the new version and save them. I also save in ASCII format, hoping they remain backwards compatible. But this is also why I don't upgrade my CAD software to the latest and greatest, so all my files remain compatible, but have to stick with Windows XP (find a version of the CAD software with the fewest bugs that you can live with, and stick with it!)...

This reminds me of that movie WANTED... stupidest movie ever... remember their trick of reading the mis-weaves into text? ones and zeros... how exactly did they translate those into words... several hundred years ago??? did the textile guild invent ASCII? or some other form of binary text encoding? Did they use 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, 24 bit? Odd or even parity, or no parity... stupid stupid stupid premise...

But data formats have changed... from 12 bit FATs to 16 bit FATS to ????? Not only do you need to keep backups, but you need to keep a compatible retrieval system if you're looking at long term storage and use. I mean, you can store it forever... but can you use it in ??? years???

 

[Mike odom]

Oh yeah, and does anyone here remember 8" floppies... careful before you answer this one, you'll be showing your age!

 

[cowboybob]

How about the stacked rigids that were in what were, essentially, washing machine sized tubs??... They could be hand removed and replaced as needed (didn't need no stinkin' "clean room").

Not to mention the Bernoulli's! Yeah, there was a good idea - let's lake a big'ol floppy and create a rotating "pucker" to REALLY test the magnetic media's adhesion...

 

[Mike odom]

I want to say they were about 12-14"... our submarine fire control had two disk drives, one for each computer, and used this style... didn't need a clean room, but we went through about a 45 minute cleaning procedure to install one... it had 11 disks, so it gave us 20 surfaces as it didn't use the top or bottom of the stack, and would store 2.2M 24bit words, or about 6.6Mbyte. The computers themselves only had 16K of ram (4 8kx12bit core memory modules). We could hit every aim point our Joint Chiefs of Staff ever envisioned with a nuclear bomb. Basically, we targeted the ABMs (that the Soviets weren't supposed to have, by treaty) so that when the big ol' Air Force nukes came in there was nothing to stop them. We could put a 40Kton nuke inside the infield of a baseball stadium at 3000 Nmiles. I watched one film of a missile test where a dummy warhead hit so close it splashed water on the target camera from 2200 Nmiles. Perhaps I've said too much, but it's been over 10 years (my debriefing period), hell, it's been over 30. Imagine what the newer technology can do. All I'll say is that the missile (Trident I) that replaced the one I worked on (Poseidon) had the same accuracy with over twice the range (with one warhead it could go 7100 Nmiles). The increased accuracy is due to the star sighting in flight correction of the inertial navigation system.