Magnetic Wobbles Cause Hard Drive Failure

An anonymous reader writes "According to this report by IT PRO, scientists working at the University of California have discovered the main reason of hard drive failure. According to researchers, some materials used in hard drives are better at damping spin precession than others. Spin precession of magnetic material effects its neighbors' polarity and this can spread and cause sections of hard drives to spontaneously change polarity and lose data. This is known as a magnetic avalanche. So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!"

Comments

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure this will also keep Linux from starting!

Re:Sigh

[larry bagina]

yes, but the gpl v3 fixes this limitation.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a feature in OSX.

Re:Sigh

[afaik_ianal]

Afaik_ianal's Law: As the order of posting approaches first, the probability that your post will be moderated one way or the other approaches 1.

Since the FP was more-or-less on topic and not an obvious troll, the inevitable moderation just happened to be in the positive direction.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

ahhh... the PC PC

Re:Sigh

[martin-boundary]

Only if you're making the assumption that Linux is running from a hard disk installation. Plenty of linuxes are actually run from a cd drive, in which case the poster is correct: this is really mainly a Windows issue.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run WinPE from a CD too.

Re:Sigh

[jd]

The tracks can wobble on independent threads under BeOS.

Re:Sigh

[RMingin]

Only for 24 hours at a go. After that, it auto-reboots to keep you from using it as your primary OS.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the iPhone with 3G will cure all.

Re:Sigh

[Tim C]

I'm sorry, but you're *really* clutching at straws there. I personally don't know of anyone who runs Linux from CD. I appreciate that you can, and that some people almost certainly do, but if they're anything but a tiny minority of users I'll eat my PC.

You're also ignoring that every OS X system will be running from a hard drive, so it's as much an OS X issue. And a *BSD one, a Solaris one, and every other OS.

Mindless Windows bashing just is not cool, and only serves to lessen the impact of genuine gripes.

Re:Sigh

[Tim C]

It wasn't more or less on topic, it was a direct response to the closing remark in the summary. Of course hard drive failure may prevent Windows from booting - but it'll prevent any other OS from booting too, so why the unnecessary swipe at Windows?

Re:Sigh

[cp.tar]

In all honesty, while on /. it may seem as an unnecessary swipe at Windows (if there can be such a thing here), the closing sentence only mirrors the fact that Windows are still on a vast majority of computers.

None of us regularly get phonecalls such as "oh, my Linux won't start, OMG, what I'm gonna do?". We do get them related to Windows, though.

So while I'm just guessing (and assuming stupidity and not malice), I'd say the OP typed Windows instead of $OS_OF_CHOICE or whatever.

Besides, it's obvious that the issue affects every and any OS, since it's a hardware issue; so even if the swipe at Windows was intentional, it was supposed to be humorous. Yet the /. mob swarms in on obvious trivialities, thus proving that geeks are just as easily baited as the rest. Yay.

Re:Sigh

[eat here_get gas]

because this is a *nix camp, and if M$ wasn't around to swipe, what would we do?

Re:Sigh

[Peet42]

I run Linux from a USB2 memory stick.

Re:Sigh

[somersault]

Work?

Re:Sigh

[bhiestand]

I've always liked you, but I have to recommend that you be permanently banned from slashdot for suggesting such a thing.

Re:Sigh

[bhiestand]

None of us regularly get phonecalls such as "oh, my Linux won't start, OMG, what I'm gonna do?". We do get them related to Windows, though. Although technically competent people may run windows, very few technically incompetent people run linux. The majority of linux users are, of course, geeks/nerds and therefor much less likely to ever call anyone for assistance. But if you would like to see linux users trying to figure out "why their linux won't boot" you can hang out in any of the IRC channels or forums dedicated to supporting the various linux distros...

Not to nitpick or anything :).

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why! Because Microsoft can't code worth a shit?

Re:Sigh

[LiquidCoooled]

How is that any different to full windows?

Re:Sigh

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I think he was joking. Anyway, I run my Linux off of a Solid State Drive... LOL

Re:Sigh

[BigDogCH]

Just a side note............while most of my calls are still from Windows users, I am starting to get more Linux calls (3 this year, up from 0 ever). Two had burned Ubuntu disks from who-knows-where, while one had a retail version Suse which he paid $45 for. All 3 wanted help installing it. The majority are clearly geeks/nerds, however I just wanted to point out that this might be changing.

Also, last July, I went to a non-nerd relatives house, to help "setup his new digital camera". I was surprised to find he had Ubuntu running on his machine. He said that a friend told him to try it, and he liked it (though he was a bit frustrated by some things, he admitted he only tried it because he was a bit frustrated with Windows). I would suggest that he is a "above average" user, but he isn't a nerd/geek. He is a retired crane operator, and a good craftsman (so he has patience, and is not afraid to read/learn).

Re:Sigh

[that IT girl]

It. Was. A. Joke.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

You can actually get a full 24 hours out of WinPE.

Re:Sigh

[FlatLine84]

That's a nice blanket statement.... Most of the Linux guru's around here, only know linux, they can't fumble their way even through OSx, let alone troubleshoot some hardware issues.

Re:Sigh

[pseudorand]

Actually, this is primarily a Linux issue. Windows is fully capable of failure sans any hard drive corruption.

Re:Sigh

[bhiestand]

Hey, slashdot is all about the side notes! That's actually really interesting to hear, though, and rather heartening. I've never met anyone who wasn't fairly tech-oriented who ran linux at home, with the exception of the occasional spouses/mothers/relatives of techies who set it up and support it for them. While I've had many disappointments while using linux, I can't think of a single one that was the fault of linux and associated packages themselves. Hopefully we'll get more people like this trying linux and more linux support from hardware manufacturers.

Re:Sigh

[Pendersempai]

If anything, it's a defense of windows -- i.e. "next time you experience a certain issue, realize that the fault is with your hardware and NOTwith windows."

Re:Sigh

[uglydog]

Really? You don't know anyone that runs Linux from a CD? Do you know any system admins? Or even any IT "drones"? It's a pretty useful tool to keep around. Also, you can surf for porn without leaving any evidence. Look into Damn Small Linux.

Re:Sigh

[ultranova]

Pretty sure this will also keep Linux from starting!

Actually, no. Linux IDE driver includes a special infinite loop to create gyroscopic forces which counter magnetic wobbling. Such infinite loops are used in many parts of the kernel, and are the secret behind its stability. The OpenBSD has an even more effective spiral-like stabilizer, the so-called "Death Spiral" subsystem (see Netcraft for details).

Re:Sigh

[drinkypoo]

I'm sorry, but you're *really* clutching at straws there. I personally don't know of anyone who runs Linux from CD. I appreciate that you can, and that some people almost certainly do, but if they're anything but a tiny minority of users I'll eat my PC.

It's a pretty good idea for handling your parents though (you in the back, put the joke down, you're only going to hurt yourself.) That is to say, their computing needs. A data volume, for storing data and settings. Maybe some flash storage too, for web cache and some other things, but mostly to keep the hard drive from spinning up 99% of the time. The system is not shut down, but suspended - this necessitates a system upon which suspend actually works, but they do exist! They boot slowly, but if you suspend them, it doesn't matter. The systems have two optical drives - one basic DVD-ROM to boot the system and one higher-end drive for accessing media, burning, etc etc.

It can also be a LTSP server, and any subsequent computers in the house can be dumb. Or just a remote boot server, and the other computers can simply be remote booters (but still have storage devices, I hope.)

The appeal of using a CD, of course, is that an update consists of sending them a new disc. Using Linux (or BSD, really) means that you have the absolute best remote management possibilities. And if the system craps out, it can be booted from another computer. Just build on an existing LiveCD, probably on a DVD (but not necessarily) and store their settings on a USB key. This combo will be bootable on a HUGE range of systems, so if their hardware dies they can find an alternative. You can use an external hard disk, too, so they can even carry their data to the temporary system - which could be a $300 cheapie from wally world.

This is sounding more and more appealing as I go on :)

Re:Sigh

[Guignol]

Just how many people did read that as pure windows bashing the way you imply it was ?
I read it as (because obviously this isn't a windows issue) as:
next time windows fails (c'mon, you know it will, *wink* *wink*) consider it might actualy not be windows fault but a genuine and documented magnetic 'wobble'. I took at as something funny which isn't really windows bashing.
Apparently you read it the other way around: next time your hard drive fails, if you run windows it will also fail (because it is windows) and you will know the true cause behind general protection fault.
If the summary bothered you because you would think linux or any other OS fails just as much as windows (for whichever reason) then you would have a point.
But you seem to complain because for this particular fault just any OS would be in trouble. this is ridiculously obvious and not even worth taking into account, what troubles me is that so far everyone seems to take the same path (???)
Oh well :)
Cheers...

scapegoats

[jimbug]

So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why! Sure, blame the magnets..

Re:scapegoats

[n1ckml007]

You can count on /. for polarizing articles like these.

I've had this problem before...

[commlinx]

But I'd put the wobbly boots down to being pissed.

Re:I've had this problem before...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a feeling you mean drunk, but in the US that means upset. And as either could apply...

Re:I've had this problem before...

[o'reor]

Oblig. Terry Pratchett quoite :

Don't eat the green wobbly boots !

How timely...

[MonorailCat]

Windows has lunched critical startup files on me twice in the last two weeks, pretty sad for a 1.8yr old device.

Re:How timely...

[gardyloo]

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Re:How timely...

[SnowZero]

Especially when it costs $400.

Re:How timely...

[Belacgod]

You eat your PC?

Re:How timely...

[martin_henry]

Yay! I love metric time! :)

Re:How timely...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get myself whether this will improve Windows though. As you mention, Windows itself tends to eat files just for the fun of it. I've lost more drives in addition to sporadic data from Windows then ALL the hard drives that have died on me on all my machines in the past 10 years.

My favorite was using Windows Update "Hardware, Optional." I had a Western Digital PCI card because my motherboard BIOS didn't support large drives (>137gb or whatever) and that was the only way to do it (nowadays, clipped drives are actually read properly). Anyways, the card worked fine, I accessed the files regularly; 4 200gb drives hooked up to that card. On checking for security fixes one day as I reguarly do since I was running IE6 and XP, I noticed the (0) ahd changed to a (1). Saw there was a driver update. Hmmm....

Yes, I was suscipious. Yes, I know if it ain't broke, don't fix it, i.e. don't update your BIOS if everything works fine sort of philosophy. But it was OFFICIAL man. You also have to remember, this is after MS giving all that PR about WHQL or official approved drivers and software. And this was being pushed on MS's own site as an approved update. It was like Microsoft was saying, "Just do it. Your machine'll run better." It was, after all, a cleared driver coming from the main company itself. I even hated using Windows (although not as much as I hate it nowadays) and read /. and agree with the anti-MS sentiment and used to be a Mac user.

I installed the driver. It required a reboot. I rebooted. And XP promptly went about "fixing" allocation errors etc. on all the drives...Drive Check or whatever it's now called on startup popped up to fix "corrupt" files and "allocation errors." Hmmm...I was suspicious again, was going to pull the power plug (4 drives after all, going through each one after the other), then decided, "Nah, approved update."

I never felt stupider in front of a computer. Take the shock of losing hardware or data, and multiply by 100. I was, quite literally, ashamed, and on the edge of just giving up on computers entirely despite using them for over a decade. The update for some reason made the drives unreadable from their then current state, so drive check was set on them, which FARKED the master tables totally. The data itself is there, but without the tables, nothing corresponds. I still have the drives in the corner--partial files, file name mismatches, it's horrific. The filenames no longer corresponds with the correct files, i.e. file1 now points to part of data from file3 which was 4gb but now 1.3gb.

Shame turned to sheer and complete smoldering anger. The result? It accelerated me setting up a big NAS setup by over a year. I will not upgrade to Vista. I will not buy another XP box or MS upgrade or MS software at all. I now use Ubuntu or OpenBSD on all my new machines. I am migrating my old Win98 machines to Linux boxes. I will have a few XP machines for like web viewing and crap and since I just haven't really gotten around to figuring out what I want to do with them, but I dread the data on them such that I now backup even non-critical files, because the hassle of simply just redownloading or restoring them or reinstalling or recovering or re-encoding a large CD collection or the sheer inconvenience of it all just outweighs the cost of getting 2 drives instead of 1. (I backed up critical stuff regularly before this experience.) And any business machines, which I usually have 1 or 2 in the set that has XP on it simply because I felt it needed to be there, is strictly not now. I'd rather buy 2 500gb and mirror data periodically then send 1 penny on Windows or MS software (and I haven't bought their hardware either despite liking MS keyboards and webcams...I half think that the keyboard is going to explode or the webcam suddenly going to have a stepper motor or something hidden in it that's going to switch on and follow me into the shower or something--I'm that paranoid, half-assed jokingly cynical about any MS product).

Re:How timely...

[kobaz]

You needed an update to do that? That happened all by itself for me. A friend of mine popped one my hard drives into his XP box and booted. Check Disk came up and "fixed" mostly everything. Fixed as in... 200 gigs of data was now 80 gigs of data. No filename mismatches, no weird corrupt stuff, just files GONE. I ran a ton of recovery tools and it didn't find any dangling files anywhere. This drive was maxed out completely when I last shut down. And I had shut down multiple times and everything was fine and dandy.

It wasn't completely terrible though since the data on there was from the quakecon direct connect and we had one more day left. But still, if that was real data... god damn.

Re:How timely...

[EXrider]

I've been burned 3 times (yeah, I know, should've learned my damn lesson after the first mishap) by evil device driver updates provided through Windows Update. I thought the same thing as you...

if it ain't broke, don't fix it, i.e. don't update your BIOS if everything works fine sort of philosophy. But it was OFFICIAL man. You also have to remember, this is after MS giving all that PR about WHQL or official approved drivers and software.

Yeah, they're supposedly Windows Logo Qualified WHQL WTF$$%!@*#& drivers

First time it was an LT Win Modem update on my parent's Win98 machine. Wasted 2 days trying to resurrect that POS modem before I finally gave up and slapped a $40 USR hardware modem in it's place.

Second time was a Win2003 Web Server at my work, this "update" irreversibly trashed the NIC drivers. Even though device manager didn't indicate a problem with the NIC, it refused to pass traffic. Rolling back to the previous driver via Microsoft's mechanism did NOT fix the problem. Fortunately, this one was easily reversed by reverting to the pre-update broken mirror drive.

Last time was my girlfriend's Win98 machine, which had an Intel i810 board with all integrated Intel components, so I figured it HAD to be safe, this wasn't a machine full of crazy weird-ass hardware. Yeah, well that "update" hosed the NIC drivers. Fortunately this one was simply resolved with a re-install of the driver from Intel's site.

Lesson learned, DON'T install driver "updates" via Windows Update!

I've always wondered, does anyone actually enable the driver updates on their WSUS servers? I can't imagine how much space that would take, with all those insanely large HP, Canon, etc. print drivers! Downloading EVERY device driver "update" in Microsoft's catalog!? Ugh!

Re:How timely...

[dm0527]

Aside from initial installation, never, NEVER let Windows Update do ANYTHING with your hardware. It's pure evil. I have NEVER had a good experience letting windows update do anything by itself, but I flat out refuse to let it update drivers. Reasoning is exactly the same problem you had - I had it trash the drivers for and hard drive running off a card meant to let the OS see all of a large drive. Since then, never. If you're running a M$ OS, do yourself a favor: get the machine to a complete installation state (updates, drivers installed, basics, etc.) and then make an image of the drive using Drive Image or something like that. Then use the box and NEVER keep your data the same hard drive. Then you can wipe the drive and re-image it anytime you want without worrying about your data.

Re:How timely...

[Anonymous Coward]

NEWSFLASH: Guy who knows what a NAS is shocked & angry that his 800GB of data, stored on single HDDs without backup, was somehow lost irretrievably.

Clearly this is MS's fault. Thank god you are not falling into the trap of blaming yourself for this tragedy.

By the way, did you know Windows is the only OS ever to corrupt data? Certainly hasn't happened with stable Linux releases, like 2.4.15! These are properly and painstakingly checked by loving humans - unlike the cackling data-ghouls of evil Microsoft, who love to feast on your files.

Re:How timely...

[Cervantes]

So, you had a single bad update that was distributed by Microsoft (you do know that it would have been Western Digital that wrote the driver, and then gave it to MS, right?), and therefore have sworn off all Microsoft (but, oddly, not WD) products in the future. That sounds like a perfectly fair and balanced approach to the situation. Damn them for distributing a driver the manufacturer said was OK!

[less serious]
I'm with you buddy. I know when something goes wrong on my car, the best course of action is to immediately and forever boycott that car manufacturer. While this has increasingly limited my selection over the years, I'm finding some wonderful little gems from Eastern Europe. The only problem has been finding raw cabbage to run them on.
[/less serious]

Re:How timely...

[annenk38]

This was well-known, but rare issue following SP1 release. The complete description is here. Quote from the article:

Warning Data corruption may occur if either of the following conditions is true:
You use this registry value to enable 48-bit LBA support in the original release version of Windows XP Home Edition or of Windows XP Professional.
You install an earlier version of Windows on a disk partition that was previously created by a 48-bit aware operating system, such as Windows XP SP1. And that disk partition is equal to or larger than the current addressable limit of 137 GB.

Re:How timely...

[springbox]

I'd never trust a driver from Windows Update. The last time I tried that it completely broke the functionality of some hardware I was using (forget which) until I reinstalled the drivers from the manufacturer.

Re:How timely...

[Chuffpole]

I had to click "Read the rest of this comment... " and got the extra half of the last word! FFS, can't /. work out a more intelligent way to work out whether "Read the rest of this comment... " is worth doing?

(my "Comment Byte Limit" is set to 1024k, the max available).

All that extra bandwidth eaten up for half a word!!

And how come I could sign up again with a new ID and get karma of 0, yet I've been stuck on -1 for years now?!! Is this the best you 'intelligent' geeks can do? Can't we -1 sufferers be upgraded to 0 again after a certain time?

Don't tell me it's easy to get karma, I can't be bothered to revisit several times a day and pounce on new stories. I see the same old sigs time and time again and wonder why these people can't get a life.

Rant over. Not expecting any replies, but I feel better.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

So why does this only effect Windows?

Re:Question

[untaken_name]

It doesn't effect Windows at all, actually. It might, however, affect Windows.

Re:Question

[Speare]

affect

When 'effect' is used as a verb, it means 'to create.' The article writeup has the same primary-school error. It's not that hard, people.

Re:Question

[thanatos_x]

Because this is Slashdot. Everyone knows open source transcended hardware ages ago. Also it cannot affect OS X systems, as Apple is never to blame for anything going wrong with their computers. That leaves Windows as the only logical choice. You like logic, don't you?

Re:Question

[larry bagina]

it affects every hard drive. However, 90% of the time that means windows. If you use mirrored drives (like ZFS), one hard drive shitting out on you won't cause problems.

Re:Question

[VGPowerlord]

I would have used RAID 1 or RAID 5 as an example, rather than a specific file system. RAID can be done in hardware after all, and is traditionally faster that way.

Re:Question

[GSloop]

Damn - now someone tells me! :)

Thanks, that is the most concise and helpful definition I've heard.

Cheers,
Greg

Re:Question

[DeepHurtn!]

Actually, perhaps a case can be made that you and all the other grammar-Nazis are wrong! Harddrive failures effect Windows, since I betcha lots of those failures lead to purchases of new machines, which almost inevitably come with a Windows license -- cha-ching! A new Windows license, out of thin air! Effected by an HD failure!

(Seriously, though, I'm currently frustrated by this very thing, since my notebook's HD is dead as a doorknob -- it only works at all with a livecd. I'm choked about the situation because I really don't want to buy a new notebook with a Windows license, but it looks like the best deal I can get right now doesn't have the option for anything else. I'll be kinda sad if I end up "owning" a copy of Vista.)

Re:Question

[nocomment]

Replace the HD or hand in your geek card please.

Re:Question

[Belacgod]

It can also mean "Cause," depending which one better fits the object of the verb.

Re:Question

[DeepHurtn!]

Hah -- fair enough! But y'see, I have a friend who works for IBM, and has a family-and-friends deal on a line of IBM notebooks, and *that one* can play Civ4, which I hear can run on Cedega, and my current one *can't*, and...and...

Yeah, I'm just whining. But I would really rather prefer a notebook without Vista, and it doesn't look like I have any choice if I buy via my friend.

/walks off in shame

Re:Question

[innerweb]

Is there an open source hardware raid solution I can buy? And, can I hack it in PHP, Perl or Python (have to get my ppp in)

InnerWeb

For impaired readers, the above is a crude attempt at humor.

Re:Question

[fractoid]

Geek does not necessarily equal hardware tinkerer. Linguistic wordplay gets the GP a (+1, Amusing/correct/geekly) from me. ;)

Re:Question

[Smauler]

It's ignoring the other definitions though. Simple rule - if it's a noun, it's effect, if it's a verb, it's affect. The use of effect as a verb is pretty uncommon (deliberately) now.

Re:Question

[Zironic]

Doesn't "Cause" and "Create" mean the same thing really? Every time you cause something you are creating something :=)

Re:Question

[Power_Pentode]

You can get a discount on IBM-branded notebooks? Go to Lenovo.com, click on products, and drill down to the T60p under "ThinkPad T Series mobile workstations".

It officially supports Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, which is arguably less evil than MS Vista. And of course it only comes with "DOS entitlement" so you have to install Linux yourself.

But, still, it isn't Vista.

Re:Question

[untaken_name]

Excuse me, sir. I am NOT a Grammar-Nazi. I, sir, am a Grammar-Islamo-Fascist*. Please keep up with the times, as Nazis are so over.



*I know.

Re:Question

[CarpetShark]

So why does this only effect Windows?

Well, since MS like to have the general public think that theirs is the only OS (and office products etc.) available, it's quite natural that some people would make that assumption.

Re:Question

[TheRaven64]

RAID-1 and 5 only protect you from total drive failure. They do not usually protect you from individual sector failure, which this seems to cause, since the controller has no way of telling which drive contains the erroneous data, unless the drive reports the sector as failing (this sounds like it will just return the wrong data). With RAID-5, you will actually lose more data than with a single drive as a result of each error of this kind. In contrast, ZFS includes a hash with each block written to each disk, so it is possible to determine which drive is returning nonsense.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

GrammarNazi +1

Re:Question

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"When 'effect' is used as a verb, it means 'to create.' The article writeup has the same primary-school error. It's not that hard, people."

Ah, so that's why Windows is vulnerable to this problem. I tell ya, we've got moderators shooting only the best stuff up to +5.

Re:Question

[pilgrim23]

Reminds me though of "objective" and "subjective". Clear meanings right? Well read any piece of 18th century English Lit; there the meanings are exactly oposite of their current value. As a language, English is stable the way Windows is stable...

Re:Question

[FireFury03]

unless the drive reports the sector as failing (this sounds like it will just return the wrong data).

Can't see why it would return the wrong data - if the sector has been trashed the checksums should all be wrong and the drive would therefore report an uncorrectable error (hard drives store a large amount of ECC data - most of the time it can be used to correct corruption but in the case of a catestrophic failure like this it should be able to detect the failure in most cases. Most drives will report the total number of correctable and uncorrectable errors through SMART - the number of correctable errors is usually some scarilly big number.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

They do not usually protect you from individual sector failure, which this seems to cause, since the controller has no way of telling which drive contains the erroneous data, unless the drive reports the sector as failing (this sounds like it will just return the wrong data).

Drives have ECC at the sector level so that they can tell when stored data has been corrupted.

Steorn's real reasons...

[Anonymous Coward]

...why Orbo didn't work!

First questions to mind:

[UncleTogie]

Which materials/processes dampen the "avalanche" best? Which hard drive manufacturers use those materials/processes?

Re:First questions to mind:

[dsanfte]

It's definitely not whichever vendor makes the "ramdrive" kind. I'm never buying one again.

Re:First questions to mind:

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitachi/IBM are the least likely to show up in the repair shop.

Western Digital is the most common failed Hard Drive brand I see.

Re:First questions to mind:

[eat here_get gas]

As a computer-tech, I have to say that WD isn't THAT bad...my pile of over-heated Maxtor's is significantly larger than the piles of other brands

Re:First questions to mind:

[TheThiefMaster]

IIRC it was a specific few models of maxtor that liked to die, particularly 80-160GB drives.

I have an older 20GB and several newer 250GB and 300GB maxtors and none have died (except one that the delivery man dropped and was replaced free). Before I got these I had a couple of 80GB and a couple of 160GB drives, and those have ALL died now.

Is this the same as what you've seen?

Re:First questions to mind:

[eat here_get gas]

exactly! there were a couple of 40's, but the majority were 80GB's...I believe they have faulty heat dissipation, I know the ones I'm running now raised my case temps by almost 20F..had to install 2 80mm fans just for the HDD's.

Re:First questions to mind:

[MazzThePianoman]

Cooling those drives a lot might not be the best for them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6376021.stm

Re:First questions to mind:

[mpe]

exactly! there were a couple of 40's, but the majority were 80GB's...I believe they have faulty heat dissipation, I know the ones I'm running now raised my case temps by almost 20F..had to install 2 80mm fans just for the HDD's.

There are all sorts of possible reasons, including component failure on the board and the formulation of the magnetic coating. No doubt, as with anything else, these get varied for all sorts of reasons.

Re:First questions to mind:

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an older 20GB and several newer 250GB and 300GB maxtors and none have died

Your time will come, at least on the 250's and 300GB (especially if they're Grizzly drives). Just ask Seagate/Maxtor about the leaking oil... again.

I haven't bought a Maxtor drive ever, unless you count a 200MB Quantum drive that failed 9 days after Maxtor officially took over, and only 2 days after the 1yr warranty expired. Maxtor declined to replace it, so I never went back.

Coincidentally (and anecdotally), I've had 4x 80GB Western Digital WD800JB drives running 24x7 in a RAID5 array since January 2002, and haven't lost a drive yet. Yeah, it's a small array now, but was quite an accomplishment by circa-2002 standards. (Note to self: they're out of warranty already.... time to upgrade the array!!!)

Never fails

[Anonymous Coward]

My drive is hard enough to never fail - no matter how magnetic or demagnetic she is.

Re:Never fails

[larry bagina]

Rosie O'Donnell much?

Re:Never fails

[Anonymous Coward]

Rosie O'Donnell much? Dude, you just made my drive fail.

Re:Never fails

[sokoban]

0/10 Fail.

As my high school music teacher always said...

[RealGrouchy]

"So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!" It's a bad carpenter who blames his tools.

- RG>

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[Anonymous Coward]

What would a high school music teacher know about carpentry - or tools for that matter...

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[RealGrouchy]

What would a high school music teacher know about carpentry - or tools for that matter... More than an AC knows about metaphors, it would seem.

- RG>

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you positive his tools don't suck? Wasn't Jesus a carpenter? Ron Jeremy.

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[Capt James McCarthy]

"It's a bad carpenter who blames his tools."

Funny, that's what my wife tells me.

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[throup]

It's a bad carpenter who blames his tools. Although, generally, a good carpenter with bad tools would probably blame them too.

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[FudRucker]

i know a cheapskate carpenter that is always looking for a bargain. recently he bought a miter saw in a pawnshop that looked brand new but had one fatal flaw it would not accurately cut 45 & 22.5 angles good and when adjusting the saw it had a gear grinding sort of feel in the handle, (i think it fell out of the back of a truck)...

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[Twinbee]

Thanks for that. I've always thought that saying silly, and often untrue in so many situations when people say it.

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[greed]

I've always felt that's because a good carpenter buys the right tools.

Re:As my high school music teacher always said...

[Hoi Polloi]

Speaking of carpentry sayings and windows, "Reboot twice, login once"

Insidious!

[jollyreaper]

Magnetic wobbles weeble but never fall down!

Which University of California?!

[tutwabee]

It's lovely how both Slashdot post and the original article state that scientists at the "University of California" discovered this. This could mean the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, or others. The website link is to the University of California, Santa Cruz website so I assume that's where the scientists were located.

Re:Which University of California?!

[VGPowerlord]

I heard that they discovered how to "fix" vampires at UC Sunnydale.

Re:Which University of California?!

[background image]

I heard that they discovered how to "fix" vampires at UC Sunnydale.

Well I, for one, welcome our new, neutered vampire overlords...

Re:Which University of California?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Santa Cruz, eh. Damn hippies are high again. Really, which was wobbling, the dudes or the discs?

Re:Which University of California?!

[kf6auf]

Here is a link to the UC Santa Cruz press release and the professor is indeed there (I'm sure you can find him). A little spiel from me: I took a class on nanomagnetism this past term and definitely learned about this effect for individual spins and for domains and it has been known for quite some time. Without reading the PRL article because I'm off campus and don't have a personal subscription ($$$ and, hey, this is /.), my guess is that the model explains the why a lot better than existing ones, and how we get from individual precessing spins to the average spin of the entire domain without brute-force computing it, which is nearly impossible. That being said, different ferromagnetic materials are very different in their interactions between spins and orbits between nearby spins and orbits and so I'm not sure without looking into it how many different ferromagnetic materials this applies too.

Re:Which University of California?!

[Twisted64]

..."University of California" discovered this. This could mean the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, or others.

I don't get it. If the website links to the University of California, and the article states that the University of California discovered it, they are in perfect harmony. These other places you mention, they don't match the pattern at all, to me. United Californians Love Arnold and Uncertain Cabbies Stray Downtown are both fine charities, but why bring them up?

Grammar Nazi x2

[Anonymous Coward]

Spin precession of magnetic material effects its neighbors' polarity

That would be "affects" its neighbours' polarity with an option on calling neighbours' erroneous too - depending on the precise physical phenomena that they are trying to describe.

Can this be mitigated

[iminplaya]

with magnetic weebles?

SOME types of failures...

[DTemp]

So this claims that most hard drive *failure* is caused by this. Now, I'm sure this causes isolated data loss here and there, and maybe I've had a different experience than the average person, but most of my hard drive failures in the past had loud screeching or clicking noises. I dont think this was caused by magnetic spin!

Re:SOME types of failures...

[IndigoParadox]

It seems possible that this magnetic affectation could be a cause of spontaneous damage the hard drive servo information.

This would cause one of the clicking-type malfunctions which you described, as that "clicking" you hear is the noise the head assembly makes when the drive is rapidly moving it back and forth across the platter attempting to get a fix.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[Fweeky]

No, that's the disk throwing a tantrum because it can't find the data it wants.

You can demonstrate this yourself; open up a running hard disk and remove the platter - in pretty much all cases a rather physically violent ending will occur. That's because the disk is *upset*; you took away its data!

It's hoped that, once we have disks who's lifetimes can be measured in decades instead of a handful of years, the devices will be mature enough to take such failures in their stride.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[RallyNick]

Hard drives that are used 24/7 fail because their mechanical (moving) parts are built from the cheapest materials that would last for the warranty period. Most of my Western Digital drives develop a noticeable "whine" within a year or two and typically fail soon after that. The "whine" sounds somewhat like an F1 engine running at max rpm, just not as loud (you can hear it if you get your ear close to the drive), and it definitely sounds like there's metal-on-metal friction in the bearings (not good). Better bearings are slightly harder to manufacture and thus no longer used in consumer products. Afterall we're supposed to get products that break and need to be replaced often to keep the manufacturers in bussiness.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[Hatta]

I find that hard drives that are used 24/7 last longer than ones that get shut down all the time. Power cycling is hard on the electronics, and the moving parts have to overcome static friction to get moving again so they bounce around a little. Better to have everything moving nice and smoothly all the time.

I actually can't remember the last time a WD hard drive failed on me.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[EXrider]

Yeah... a certain lot of IBM Deathstar(TM) 40GB and 80GB drives were famous 'round here for the dreaded "click of death".

And what's up with SMART technology rarely ever predicting their imminent failure. As I glance over at the box of ~40 failed drives that need to be destroyed, 2 of them predicted their failure with the SMART info. The rest, spontaneously died as Win2K silently logged disk errors in the System log instead of... maybe POPPING UP A FREAKIN' DIALOG TELLING THE USER THAT A DRIVE WAS REPEATEDLY MALFUNCTIONING!

Re:SOME types of failures...

[Hoi Polloi]

So no power efficiency modes (i.e hibernate) for you then?

Re:SOME types of failures...

[Gat0r30y]

I do failure analysis in the hard drive industry and as far as I know you are exactly correct. While this is apparently a problem for toshiba it certainly is not the biggest cause of failure where I work. Loud screeching or clicking is a crash... and after that, well its pretty much all over. Error correction should handle the described sort of data loss, at least up to a few bits.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[FireFury03]

So no power efficiency modes (i.e hibernate) for you then?

These days it seems to be considered that spinning down 2.5 inch drives isn't good for power saving - most of them are pretty good at using minimal power while spinning but idle and spinning them up does use a lot of power and causes wear. I'm not sure if this applies to 3.5" drives though.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[david_thornley]

Tell me about it. Not that long ago I took a computer to a service center and told the tech I thought the fan was failing. The tech told me that model didn't have a fan.

Oops.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[toddestan]

I've found the opposite - running the drives for 6-10 hours a day I use them they last a whole lot longer than if I run them 24/7. I'm sure that powering them up causes additional wear, but so does letting the drives run an extra 10-18 hours a day. I also have never had a drive on system that is regularly powered down just quit on me. A drive that has trouble when spinning up is a good sign of impending doom and that it is time to replace the drive. However, there is no way to tell if a drive is getting weak if it's spinning 24/7, until you finally power it down only to not have it come back up again.

As always, your mileage may vary.

Re:SOME types of failures...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

I call BS. FDB (fluid bearing) drives are now the norm, and they are substantially BETTER than the older ball-bearing drives.

My new WD5000AAKS isn't just higher capacity and faster than the 3-year-old WD drive it replaced, it's also astoundingly quieter, and it runs cooler to boot.

You should not hear anything but "whoosh" at idle from a decent modern drive (well, maybe a bit of low-frequency vibration).

It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Wandering Wombat]

... but does it affect it's neighbors?

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Refenestrator]

You mean "its" there, not "it's." Certain possessives don't have apostrophes in ou'r language.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[GrahamCox]

Does it affect it is neighbours? What are you talking about? Oh, you meant its.

If you're going to comment on someone's grammar or spelling, make sure your own is correct.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[TapeCutter]

Thankyou, I take great delight in watching grammar Nazi's shoot themselves in the foot.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[yoyhed]

What's a "shoot themselves in the foot"? Is that something the grammar Nazis own?

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[mrjb]

Maybe it affects its neighbo(u)rs.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Adam effected his neighbors...

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[funkdancer]

Touché! It's almost a recursive loop of people pointing out grammatical mistakes in the parents' posts whilst at the same time not ensuring that their own posts are free of said misconduct. Pretty sad, really. (I'm getting a bit paranoid as I write this).

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Tony Hoyle]

It's valid if you treat the apostrophe with its traditional meaning here as 'belonging to'. it's does not always mean 'it is', just sometimes.

Maybe the rules in american are different but in english it's valid to do that.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[ThomsonsPier]

No, it isn't, nor has it ever been.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the rules in american are different but in english it's valid to do that.

No, it isn't.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[LordSnooty]

Full stop after a bracket??? Ok - period after closing parenthesis?

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[TapeCutter]

"Pretty sad, really. (I'm getting a bit paranoid as I write this)."

Don't get me wrong, my post was supposed to indicate that when reading/writing /. posts I don't give a shit about technicalities such as speeeeling as long as the meaning is reasonably clear. I know, I know, "everything is an art we should strive to improve" but I find the endless nit-picking of common errors tiresome, especially on a public forum where english is a second language to a good portion of the people who post.

Disclaimer: 40yrs ago I started high school in the "dumb class" for english rather than the French classes I wanted to participate in. Strange thing, but two years later the same "dumb class" english teacher thought a friend and I had cheated on a nation-wide test showing we were both in the top 5% for literacy skills. Oh, I was also banned from touch typing and cooking classes because I had a dick (dickless people were banned from woodwork and technical drawing classes).

In case you are wondering, ~35wpm with 3-4 fingers (and a science degree) is all I have ever needed in my 20yrs as a software developer, the guy who sits next to me uses two fingers (loudly like it's an old punch type) and has spent 30yrs programming. Formal languages have a whole lot less rules and quirks than natural language, yet I still haven't met a programmer who's source compiles "first time - every time". And if I did meet such a programmer I would instinctively suspect his code was meaningless. /rant

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Anonymous Coward]

It effected a change in polarity, therefore it affected it's neighbors.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Anonymous Coward]

whose source...not who is...sorry, had to.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[funkdancer]

Hehe, no need to worry. I meant, it's pretty sad when so many people in a row can't post a proper flame of someone's grammar without messing up their own! :)

I'm fully with you on the general disintegration of the language; English is not my first (Norwegian is), but I strive to improve it as I go along (been learning it for 26 years now; I am 34). My top peeves are the likes of their/there, it's/its, maybe also the confusion of "lol" as a punctuation character rather than an actual expression of finding something really funny.

I was lucky enough to do a touch typing course in year 8 at school, and as a programmer it's been a real boon to my typing habits. I guess that just the mere act of looking at the screen as the characters come out might be one of the biggest benefits to getting things right.

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[TapeCutter]

"maybe also the confusion of "lol" as a punctuation character rather than an actual expression of finding something really funny"

lol. (The second kind)

Re:It "effects" it's neighbors...

[Wandering Wombat]

The ironing is delicious.

Does it only affect windows? :)

[Frag-A-Muffin]

"So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!"

Well, it just happened to my desktop machine. Windows just stopped booting. Some weird kernel messages or something like that. Odd thing is, it didn't affect my Linux partition!? What are the odds of that? Are you sure this isn't some report sponsored by Microsoft to make it look like it's not their fault?! :)

Re:Does it only affect windows? :)

[Lennie]

I think so too. To many times I've been able to fix Windows with a Linux bootdisk when Windows wasn't able to fix it self with Microsoft or Windows tools. So I really doubt it was hardware.

Buy lots of ram

[Bullfish]

It's cheap and it will minimize thrashing on your hard drive. Perhaps it will make it last a little longer.

Actually, for the speed it operates at and amount of use, the hard drive is probably one of the most reliable things in a computer.

Re:Buy lots of ram

[FamineMonk]

I was going to make a post about how nothing else in my computer fails as often as hard drives, but then I remembered that hard drives spin really really fast and pretty much everything else has no moving parts.
So I think you might have a valid point.

Re:Buy lots of ram

[ls671]

True, I would say a machine packed with RAM will wear the drives about 10 times slower than a machine tight on memory. By "tight on memory" I do NOT mean a machine swapping like crazy. A lot of machines tight on memory aren't using their swap-space at all.

The basic principle is that all spare RAM is used as IO buffers and caches thus lowering the number of physical accesses to the drives needed, lowering drive wear and speeding up the machine. You can never have enough RAM, unless you have more RAM than drive space ;-)

Re:Buy lots of ram

[pipingguy]

Isn't there a law of diminishing returns regarding RAM, something about more than 4 GB being a waste of money? I forget where I heard about this and it almost certainly is related to Windows machines only.

Re:Buy lots of ram

[LoztInSpace]

I think you mean 640K. (Sorry if I missed a sarcasm tag there).

Re:Buy lots of ram

[Zironic]

Windows XP can only give any one program access to 2gb and can only use 4gb total making it a bit limited. Shouldn't be any problems on Vista other then I can't figure out how you could ever use more then about 3gb of RAM with consumer use, I rarely break 1.5gb and then I got several games and movies on at once xD.

Re:Buy lots of ram

[Anonymous Coward]

or the cpu.

Re:Buy lots of ram

[Tony Hoyle]

Vista is designed to use the hard drive all the time - MS have some marketing name for it but basically it scans the hard drive constantly for files both indexing them and working out whether you might want to load them in the future and squeezing them into the remaining RAM (paradoxically causing the machine to swap more frequently, sigh..)

Sucks for laptops, but you can switch it off.. there's two or three services you have to disable to remove the thrashing completely.

Re:Buy lots of ram

[cowbutt]

SuperFetch. Possibly even somewhat useful, if your usage of your computer follows a fairly similar schedule each day (e.g. start Thunderbird, Firefox and IM at 9am, start Solitaire at 12pm, start Word at 1pm).

Re:Buy lots of ram

[Udderdude]

A ramdisk like the i-RAM could help out as well.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1/gigabyte-iram /index.x?pg=1

See!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The 'a' got changed to an 'e' by flipping bit 0x04.

Hmmm...

[Edward Teach]

So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!

Pretty sure that's not the main reason. :-(

Nothing insightful to say.

[geekboy642]

Groovy. Maybe we'll get some more reliable drives based on this discovery. Sadly, every drive I've ever had fail was due to heat. When I was 12, I learned why most people use properly ventilated cases and refrain from leaving a server running in an attic closet. According to the logs, those drives hit upwards of 85C before failing. Fairly impressive, I guess.

Interesting but WRONG conclusion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading TFA, it sounds like they have found a mechanism for data being randomly lost, NOT bad sectors developing on a disk.

I would not call this a mechanism for "hard disk failure."

Re:Interesting but WRONG conclusion.

[Max Littlemore]

I would not call this a mechanism for "hard disk failure."

I sure as hell wouldn't call it a "hard disk success"

Re:Interesting but WRONG conclusion.

[Sponge Bath]

I sure as hell wouldn't call it a "hard disk success"

A marketing drone would: "Now with free RNG feature!"

Typical Nazis!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Blaming it on the Poles changing.

So do lots of other things

[Whuffo]

When I think of hard drive failure, it's almost always due to a drive hardware failure. Bad motors, bad chips on the controller board. Another popular failure is due to flaky firmware on the drive controller causing the tracking information on the platter to become overwritten.

Magnetic wobbles? Let me see a show of hands - how many have had their data spontaneously change due to this phenomenon. Yeah, I thought so...

Re:So do lots of other things

[Tribbin]

Some years ago I wanted to place a bigger cooler in my system. The drive-bays were in the way. I though using a grinding machine was a good way to remove some metal.

I did not take the 3 minutes to take the back off and take the drives out.

I'm not sure if it were magnetic whobbles that destroyed my drive though.

Re:So do lots of other things

[timeOday]

Agreed 100% - mere data corruption cause hard drives to start clicking or taking 4 seconds for every seek, does it?

Re:So do lots of other things

[Loconut1389]

Indeed- most of the failures I've seen are of the 'click of death' sort or the head-crash sort.

Re:So do lots of other things

[noidentity]

Besides, "hard drive failure" to me means hardware damage, not data loss. Too often people say their "hard drive crashed" when in fact their hard drive mechanism is in perfect condition, and has preserved all data exactly, just their OS corrupted the data through intentional writes. And who cares about things that flip some bits? The drive's error correction will fix them in due time, resulting in no loss of user data. The things that worry me are the heads crashing into disks or motor bearing failure. Those aren't generally recoverable without lots of cost.

Re:So do lots of other things

[Anonymous Coward]

actually it would definately been the electric motor in the grinder that fucked it. brush motors generate large fluctuating magnetic fields as they spin.

Re:So do lots of other things

[pipingguy]

Maybe we need a Mobius Strip-based hard drive technology powered by Hidden Dark Energy. Could happen!

Re:So do lots of other things

[Lehk228]

the hard drive is very well magnetically shielded and unlikely to be harmed by the motor. vibration OTOH can be quite bad for hard drives. and that is assuming the motor housing is made of plastic just for the lulz.

Re:So do lots of other things

[DerekLyons]

I don't see anywhere in TFA that specifies this is the cause of complete hard drive failure. It is, however, a very credible mechanism for the slow increase in bad sectors that is typical of many hard drives. (You young un's may not have heard of this, or seen it, as the hardware/software conspires to hide it from you now-a-days.) I have seen this eventually lead to failure (I.E. unuseability) of a drive.
 
Since (I would assume) a given manufacturer would tend to use the same materials across a broad span of drive models, this could also be a reasonable explanation for why some manufacturers have reps for 'bad drives'.

Re:So do lots of other things

[timmarhy]

you sure they are very well shielded? when my drive spins up, it makes my crappy soundcard tick

Re:So do lots of other things

[Savage-Rabbit]

You young un's may not have heard of this, or seen it, as the hardware/software conspires to hide it from you now-a-days. Like the IBM Desk Star series (I lost two of them back when a 10Gb HD was a big drive) or the notorious Quantum disks that used to ship with low price, no-name computers? At the start of the first year half the mechanical engineers in my first year at Uni bought cheap computers from the same store, all with Quantum drives installed. Almost every one suffered a data loss disaster within days of each other close to the end of the second term, just before exams. The loss was paticularly keenfly felt by these guys since they were working with huge (for the time) Autocad files that they couldn't easily back up at very short intervals, unlike the rest of us whose project reports and other school related data would usually fit on a few floppy disks. CD-R media was impractical for frequent backups, CD recorders and Zip drives were expensive and purpose designed backup devices like tape drives and external hard drives were even more expensive back then.

See.... you aren't the only graybeard here :-)

Re:So do lots of other things

[multipartmixed]

If it makes you feel any better, I just had a Quantum Fireball 1GB drive from that era (1996?) fail on me two weeks ago. It had been in continuous use since 1999 when I bought it second hand.

I was actually working in cheap PC retail back then. Do you remember the disk series that failed? 'cause I sure don't remember anything like that kind of failure rate. I'd have to wonder if the PC vendor didn't have a shipping accident. (I've seen stuff that would make you lose your lunch)

Re:So do lots of other things

[Anonymous Coward]

INAEE (I'm not an electrical engineer) but you are probably picking up noise via the drive power or system connection lines which aren't shielded.

Re:So do lots of other things

[Savage-Rabbit]

If it makes you feel any better, I just had a Quantum Fireball 1GB drive from that era (1996?) fail on me two weeks ago. It had been in continuous use since 1999 when I bought it second hand.

I was actually working in cheap PC retail back then. Do you remember the disk series that failed? 'cause I sure don't remember anything like that kind of failure rate. I'd have to wonder if the PC vendor didn't have a shipping accident. (I've seen stuff that would make you lose your lunch) That could actually be the case. I don't remember any more than the drives were in the 3-4 GB range. Either way, I simply concluded that it was best to stay away from Quantum after this happened. The way the problem manifested it self was that the drive simply stopped spinning. The funny thing was that if you gave it a slight knock with a blunt object you could sometimes get one working long enough to salvage the data. Once you shut the computer down again the drive usually wouldn't start up again so you had to work fast. This outbreak of disk failures ruined quite a few people's semester. I also stopped buying IBM drives after the second Deskstar failed on me. Actually the Deskstar didn't fail catastrophically, it just started developing more and more dead sectors until I got tired of the hassle and threw the thing away. I assumed the drive had simply been damaged when I knocked my mini-tower while over while cleaning so I bought a second one. It was only then that I found out these drives had a design flaw. I replaced it with a Western Digital disk which I have still got in a shelf somewhere, AFAIK it still works.

Re:So do lots of other things

[DerekLyons]

Feh - kids these days and the airs they put on. Had I gone to college, first year mechanical engineers would have been doing their drawings ink-on-paper (or mylar), and any calculations required would have been done on a slipstick or pocket calculator. About the time I would have gotten my Masters, a 10 megabyte drive would have been considered a luxury.
 
Now get off of my lawn! :-) :-)

Re:So do lots of other things

[toddestan]

Would it have been one of those 5.25" Quantum Bigfoot drives? Those things were terrible. On the other hand, the 3.5" Quantums from back in that day seemed to be alright. Though my most interesting drive failure was a Quantum Bigfoot. The thing developed what seemed to be click of death. It did it continously, but only when idle. Tell the drive to do something, and it happily obliged, then immediately started the click of death thing again. I was able to save everything on the drive, then left it hooked up for several weeks just too see what would eventually happen. Despite several weeks of CLICK-CLICK-CLICK, then drive never did completely fail and I eventually got bored and disconnected it.

Re:So do lots of other things

[Lehk228]

that's electrical interference coming out through the power connector.

Misleading title

[Tribbin]

Should be something like:

Magnetic Wobbles Cause Data Loss

Windows won't start??

[suv4x4]

So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!

Because... I didn't install it?

Re:Windows won't start??

[MikeBabcock]

Congrats, you've figured out the key to enjoying your new PC :-)

Re:Windows won't start??

[Anonymous Coward]

Buying a Mac?

(Just kidding!)

As usual the slashdot summary is wrong

[Cafe Alpha]

The article says "one of the major causes of hard disk failure," not "the major causes of hard disk failure."

It seems to me that years ago, slashdot authors did more than dump articles into summaries with reading them first. What happened?

Re:As usual the slashdot summary is wrong

[mshurpik]

>It seems to me that years ago, slashdot authors did more than dump articles into summaries

Your memory is faulty.

Re:As usual the slashdot summary is wrong

[martin_henry]

Your memory is faulty.
good case of the magnetic wobbles...

Re:As usual the slashdot summary is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that years ago, slashdot authors did more than dump articles into summaries with reading them first. What happened?

Adwords

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. Where are the statistics that disk magnetism is the leading cause of failure? I'm sure it causes some failure. Most? I'm not buying that from my personal experience with hundreds of hard drives.

I'm disappointed.

[Khaed]

This has been up at least an hour.

So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!

Where are all the jokes about this? Seriously! A bad hard drive is not the only reason Windows won't start. It's not even in the top ten. I've had Windows not start maybe once in ten years over a hard drive. I've had it not start for a variety of other reasons... well the number is greater than one, but I don't keep count (I bet twitter did, though).

C'mon you slackers, it was a slow day, where are my +5 funny posts about the ineptitude of Microsoft?

Re:I'm disappointed.

[eclectro]

Well this article isn't funny because hard drives don't really fail because of wobble. They fail because Balmer throws them.

Re:I'm disappointed.

[bccomm]

They fail because Chuck Norris throws them.

There, fixed that for you.

And now this thread is complete!

Re:I'm disappointed.

[jb.hl.com]

I don't keep count (I bet twitter did, though)

You're making the fatal assumption that twitter can count. ;)

Re:I'm disappointed.

[Anonymous Coward]

And now this thread is complete! Ummm, no......

"Hitler."

There, *now* the thread is complete.

Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily Mac OS X is safe, as it is pretected by a global reality distortion field.

Re:Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Protected, too!

This could explain where my files go....

[sssssss27]

I backup all of my DVDs to my computer because I have a notorious habit of losing them. Every once in a while I'll go to watch a movie that I swear I've backed up and can't find on my computer. So at least now I can blame it on some science thing and not just my failing memory. Every day science makes one less thing your fault, lol.

Re:This could explain where my files go....

[Ogi_UnixNut]

I know you were being funny, but I can tell you that I do indeed have a similar issue with my DVD's.

I keep a backup copy of my DVD's on a large 500GB Drive, which I then use to stream to my Xbox (using XBMC). Now I noticed that after a while some movie files that were fine before will not play. It tells me that they are corrupted. I can't play them back at all (or I can only play back chunks of it). This is without actually changing the files on the drive.

So I can load up my drive, and not write anything to it for a couple of months, then when I come back I shall find that some movies no longer play.

This is not such a big deal, as I wrote a script which simplifies DVD to Xvid conversion down to one step (just need a minimum of three commands, input file, final movie size and audio quality) and as such re-ripping the DVD's is little more than an inconvenience. But I still find it strange that files that were good before just randomly stop working after a while.

This is not only happening with movies, the same happened with my FLAC files. Some of the original FLAC's I made a few years ago will not play (they give stream errors) even though they worked fine when I first put them there and I didn't modify them since then. These are more of an issue, as the FLACs are archives of CD and other sources that have since been lost/stolen/in disrepair and I don't always have the original source.

I have wondered why this happens, as I have never had it happen before. But these magnetic wobbles might be the cause. I have checked the disk many times using badblocks with no problems and the issues generally affect files I have not read or written to in a while. Maybe this is an issue that has always plagued drives, but the high density of modern ones make it more noticeable.

Either way, I should be getting a new RAID5 750GB array soon, and then hopefully I will have fewer issues like this

Re:This could explain where my files go....

[TheRaven64]

If you get this problem a lot, you might want to consider some extra parity information so you can re-construct the file if a few blocks in the middle fail. Sacrificing a few percent of your disk for some redundant information could save you a lot of effort; just set a cron job to run periodically testing and verifying all of the files.

Re:This could explain where my files go....

[LeadSongDog]

Me, I just back up my DVDs to my brain. It's simpler, plus it *always* fails in new and interesting ways.

How about a bewolf cluster of failed drives!...

[Cafe Alpha]

No that's not it. In Soviet Russia, you fail hard drive... No. Where's that goatse link?

Re:How about a bewolf cluster of failed drives!...

[Hoi Polloi]

You didn't even tell us your captcha.

Looks like a precession hit the article

[noidentity]

During that brief time, each magnetic field contributes forces that affect the precession of neighbouring fields. Each of these spins Combining all those wobbles adds up to a lot of energy that changes the polarity of neighbouring bits and spreads across the surface, causing sections of disk drive to be wiped out.

That's what they get for using a hard drive!

Reliability

[tsa]

Don't you guys find it amazing how reliable harddrives are? I've been using harddrives since the early 1990s and I only had two of them fail me, after they were in service for five years or so. I find that pretty amazing, taking into account the density of the data and the way the drives are constructed. And they're cheap too!

Re:Reliability

[Mr2001]

Nah. I had three drives die over the span of a year in my home PC. The first one lasted about 8 months, Maxtor replaced it with another that lasted one more month, and then they sent me a bigger one which lasted about 3 months. By then, the warranty was over, and I bought a Seagate instead (with a longer warranty).

Then there was the time a power outage caused both drives to fail in my server simultaneously... it'd been up and running for around a year with no problems. A little bad weather and boom, not only was my uptime ruined, but so was my data. And of course, this happened at precisely the time when I'd forgotten to make a recent backup.

Now, it probably wasn't a coincidence that both drives in the server and the first two drives at home were all the same model!

Re:Reliability

[Gazzonyx]

You're lucky, or buying the right drives... I'm a broke student, so, I keep buying WD's and cursing them when I get the 'click of death', however at this junction one of two things happens:
1.) It's 3AM Sunday morning and Wal*Mart is the only place I can get a drive. I purchase the next WD that I will later be cursing.
2.) I go to buy a drive (either online or otherwise) and WD's are cheaper than any other real drives; Maxtor's not included - I don't consider them a harddrive, but rather, a ticking timebomb holding my data captive. I purchase the next WD that I will later be cursing.

That being said, I just bought 4 WD 500 Gig AAKS series drives after reading the reviews at Toms Hardware. Fortunately newegg sent me 4 drives from the same lot, pallet, box, partition. I think they all have sequential serial numbers. I think I know how this ends.

In the last 10 years, I've lost about 3 drives to the 'click of death', 1 to power related issues (bad molex?), and I think 1 to a blown motor or thrown bearing. I've got 2 drives starting to act up and they're both at the 3-year-old-failure barrier. Granted, 1 of those is an external that probably gets its heads slammed every now and then, so that's mostly PEBKAC. Oh, yeah, and 2 DOA drives from a shady vendor at a computer show.

What kind of drives do you usually buy, and how often? Your success rate surprises me, to be honest.

Re:Reliability

[dgagley]

I have actually had good luck with WD drives. Over the years I have had bad batches but they were with Segate and Maxtor drives. I still have 1 gig drives I keep as emergency drives I can throw in a external case.

I have bad luck with DVD burners writing on low humidity days however.

Re:Reliability

[tsa]

I always bought WD because they Just Work. A few weeks ago I bought two Toshiba external harddrives that I use for backups. I have one Maxtor that has been doing its job for about four years now. The worst drive I ever had was the Seagate that came in my 8086 XT. That one worked sort-of. I'd rather have a drive (or any other piece of equipment) suddenly completely die on me than start doing weird things.

Re:Reliability

[Smauler]

Then there was the time a power outage caused both drives to fail in my server simultaneously... it'd been up and running for around a year with no problems. A little bad weather and boom, not only was my uptime ruined, but so was my data.

Sounds to me like this could be the result of a power spike, ie. not the drives' fault. I might be wrong, but the chances of two drives failing simultaneously just because of a power outage seems remarkably thin.

Re:Reliability

[pho3nixtar]

1.) It's 3AM Sunday morning and Wal*Mart is the only place I can get a drive. I purchase the next WD that I will later be cursing. Doesn't your Wal*Mart carry Seagate? Mine does, and this particular Wal*Mart isn't exactly in a particularly "hip" area. (yes, I'm aware of the contradiction of mentioning Wal*Mart and "hip" in the same sentence.)

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

They weren't always. I have a couple of seagate 2GB SCSI disks that were pushing $900 a piece and a couple of super pricey Micropolis 9GB SCSI disks- all still operational. It wasn't until my first couple of western digital ide disks in my personal computers died on me in the 90's that I really lost any data. I even survived the IBM 75gxp fiasco reasonably unscathed (2/4 died, 2 still operational). It amazes me that you can buy a 400gb disk now for $99. I always think back to my 40 mb hd, and thinking how I'd never have that much data.. then my 127 mb.. then my 540 mb, and my first gb drive and so on.. each time thinking i'd never fill it and how expensive they were. Now it seems that the top of the line (desktop class anyway) disk will always be $500 or less- that's pretty impressive, especially, like you say, since they really don't fail unless you don't buy seagate ;)

Re:Reliability

[Power_Pentode]

Over the years, various brands and models of drives have had less than stellar reliability. Toshiba MK-134, Quantum "Bigfoot" Furball, IBM DeathStar, and many other turkeys (it'll die once I type this, but my 45GB PATA DeathStar has been running great since 2000 or 2001. Yes, all data on it is replicated to two other physically separated drives).

I've never managed to get a WD drive to work in my main PC at home, though we've used various WD drives at work. At the moment my newer PC drives are all Seagate and Maxtor, and the 160GB perpendicular drive in my notebook is a Hitachi.

Re:Reliability

[Mr2001]

The server was on a UPS, and no other components in the computer were damaged.

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to the link in the second paragraph, the fourth paragraph says this:

  "Research was carried by Joshua Deutsch, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Andreas Berger, who did the research while at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies."

How timely...Windows math.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me about it. W2k(nonbootable CD)+SATA+Nonbootable PC=PITA. Doubly bad because this is the third times it's happened.

Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[mritunjai]

This phenomenon is only one of the several ways for bit rot to creep in and make you lose data.

In bit rot, bits on HDD spontaneously change. It is generally not observable and the results are often blamed on applications and/or OS.

It is lesser known because in the current state of technology, the aplications, OS, filesystem and even RAID can't even detect the problem much less solve them. (RAID doesn't work because it can't tell which copy is right and which is wrong. It assumed what it got from disk is what it wrote to it.)

ZFS (Solaris/SUN filesystem) solves this problem by using end-to-end checksums. However, it exists for few platforms only.

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[egoproxy]

Information provided by some hardware vendors (3Ware for example) says RAID-6 protects against data loss potentially caused by data rot. Reason given that in RAID-6 there is a second parity set.

I guess the likelihood of an undetected media failure when you have 2 sets of parity must be very low.

For those on RAID-5: remember to run periodic Verify processes and make frequent backups!

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[Brane2]

I don't see how such an error would get around ECC and checksums on each sector that the drive verifies and updates by itself.

Once few bits in a sectors would flip, that sector would be invalid...

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[cowbutt]

In bit rot, bits on HDD spontaneously change. It is generally not observable and the results are often blamed on applications and/or OS.

It is lesser known because in the current state of technology, the aplications, OS, filesystem and even RAID can't even detect the problem much less solve them. (RAID doesn't work because it can't tell which copy is right and which is wrong. It assumed what it got from disk is what it wrote to it.)

Sure RAID can, in most circumstances; blocks are protected with checksums and/or ECC, and a single bit flip is likely to be detected and corrected by the drive, or else the drive will throw a read error in response to the IO request. With appropriate handling in the RAID software or hardware layer, the block can be read instead from the other drive(s) in the array. The RAID software or hardware should then attempt a refresh write of the block that failed. If this fails, the drive should be failed out and replaced, but if it was a soft error, or a hard error on a block that is able to be remapped by the drive, then everything's good.

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[Johnno74]

Almost completely wrong.

NTFS and FAT checksum blocks in files, I'd assume EVERY filesystem would do this. In the days of dos floppies, thats what "CRC Error" meant - the checksum didn't match the data. I believe modern ATA drives also detect & correct bit errors at a level not normally visible to the OS - you can see these error counts via SMART counters, and if they are rising, your drive is on the way out. I'd imagine this would be a symptom of exactly what TFA is describing.

And RAID CAN detect and repair these errors. What you said might be true for RAID 1 (mirroring) except for the filesystem checksums would reveal which volume was corrupt and which was correct. RAID 5 spreads the parity over three volumes in a way that means that if one drive flips a bit (or even completely dies) the information on that drive can be reconstructed from the parity information on the other two drives.

Yes, ZFS is cool (the best filesystem out there IMHO) but its not really using any revolutionary new techniques, just combining all the good ideas from the last 50 years in a complete package.

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[Lennie]

You most be kiding, most filesystem do NOT do checksums, just check this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_sy stems

If you're talking about ECC-errors the first that come to mind are errors in ECC-memory, which most workstations don't have. And atleast all servers should too, but not all of them do.

It's actually pretty scary we have so little data protection, but then again, a lot of people don't make backups. And from those that do, a lot of them have never even checked if what they can do a restore would actually work.

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[Johnno74]

I don't know a filesystem needs to do to meet that wikipedia page's definition of "Checksumming" but I can tell you for sure that NTFS and FAT do detect data corruption. Seen it happen many times.

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[DaleGlass]

Most filesystems don't, what you see is an error from the drive which propagates up the chain until the OS gives you an error message.

The hard disk has some redundant info for the sector and by using ECC can determine whether the sector is good. If it didn't read well, then it'll mark it as a "pending sector" (you can see this in SMART), and try to read it until it works or the sector is overwritten. Once it gets the correct data, it'll remap it to a spare area. That part is something the OS usually didn't notice.

Now if that fails, the drive has no choice but to return an error to the OS, which ends up giving you an error message.

FAT is far too simple for anything as fancy as its own ECC checks, by the way. At most it can detect obvious corruption in its structures, such as a file that according to the FAT is located after the end of the disk, but it won't notice corruption in files at all, unless the problem is that the drive fails to read a sector. But in that case it's the drive which detects it, and FAT would let it slip through if the drive didn't detect it.

Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known"

[runderwo]

In bit rot, bits on HDD spontaneously change.

They don't "spontaneously change". They drift over time if not periodically refreshed. In fact, performing this surface refresh used to be the most valuable feature of SpinRite. Today, you can do it yourself with badblocks -n. If a sector goes unreadable due to drift, the drive firmware will automatically mark it "pending", attempt to read it periodically, and reallocate it to a spare sector either when it is successfully read, or when it is overwritten.

I thought Windows failed to start...

[Trelane]

because it flagged even the legal verisons as pirated?

As my basement dweller always said...

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's a bad carpenter who blames his tools."

Well that explains why geeks don't get laid.

This is not NEWS...

[martin_henry]

...it is irrelevant. From the article:

"Obviously, disk drive makers have already learned by an enormous amount of ingenuity and trial and error what materials make good disks," Deutsch said. "But now we understand a lot better one of the reasons why..."
Sounds a lot like this is a problem hard disk makers have already overcome.

The real reason

[auroran]

We all know the real reason here. It's all those perpendicular bits on the dance floor getting drunk and falling down.

They were all fairly calm when this footage was shot but the wildness ensued soon after.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia slashdot articles are relevent.

Diminishing returns

[Max Littlemore]

Returns on RAM for 32 bit PCs diminish to 0 once you get past 4GB. You just can't address any more.

Re:Diminishing returns

[evilviper]

You just can't address any more.

A single application (on a 32-bit OS) can't address more than 4GBs, BUT if you have two apps, which each use up more than 2GBs of RAM, then you'll get plenty of benefit out of 4+GBs of RAM.

Though, now that 64-bit CPUs are plentiful, it's rather pointless to bother.

And?

[jandersen]

So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why

Indeed. But what has it to do with the harddisk?

Over filling a HD

[bluSCALE4]

In my years of being a computer user, the only times I've faced damaged hard drives was when I passed it's capacity. I'd notice Windows complain about being low on space and I'd scramble to delete something I didn't want. If I didn't finish in time, Windows would crash on me and clicking sounds or excessive load times followed. I always imagined the reader arms reaching the extreme end of a disk and doing a fishing motion as it attempted to go into the other reaches of nothingness, which in effect, destabilized the spinning disks or magnets. I know this is groundless, but does any that knows what they're talking about when it comes to HDD actually agree/disagree?

Re:Over filling a HD

[Arimus]

Can't happen these days.

I vaguely recall some old hard drives back when you could position the disk arms using int 21h calls could be positioned outside of their normal bounds... or was that to do with affecting the landing zone so you'd lose data - off for a coffee and to find my old int 21h reference material.

Re:Over filling a HD

[seibed]

there might, in theory, be a method to that madness. Though it would be difficult to prove.

two things happen as a drive gets full:
more seeks all over the surface of the drive may exaggerate wear in the bearings of the actuator, increase the likelyhood of particle generation (through increased air cavitation) or the chances of the head running into one of those loosened particles or already stressed zones. (there are more seeks because as a drive fills, there is more and more fragmentation)
The other thing that may be related would be the drivemaker playing fast and loose with their tolerances near the OD or ID. both areas have their own unique dangers for the flying head, and both are outside the boundaries of optimal airflow (since air moves faster relative to the head at the OD. Naturally, with the exception of the fragmented files already discussed, as the drive fills up, it is forced to utilize the non-optimal areas (which will vary depending on intended usage of the drive) and therefore *may* be subject to increased error rates.

But on the whole, as a "cause of failure", a drive filling up is pretty low. Just spinning it up for the first couple of times probably has a higher likelyhood of failure as would any number of other potential problems.

Re:Over filling a HD

[bluSCALE4]

Interesting, only reason I said it caused damage is because after I reformatted the problem persisted and disk check revealed damaged areas. It was a Maxtor from 2000-01. Thanks for your thoughts, both of you.

Re:Over filling a HD

[EXrider]

It was a Maxtor from 2000-01

Maxtor... there's your problem!

dab oot ton

[Anonymous Coward]

degnahc ytiralop retfa

everytime?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, everytime windows fails to boot I need to buy a new hard drive?

Re:Precission?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they meant precession.

bearings overheating

[phatvw]

Agreed. I'd bet that the mechanical components, specifically the ball-bearings in the drive motor, are more likely to overheat and fail. In addition power-regulation/power-supply components such as large power transistors and resistors on the logic board are likely to fail.

After 5 years of solid running, a lot of hard drives begin to sound different. Guess what, thats the bearings wearing out... More intersting stuff http://storagemojo.com/?p=378

Re:bearings overheating

[darkwhite]

Ball bearings haven't been used in hard drives for a few years now. All new hard drives are made with fluid bearings, as far as I know.

I don't know what exactly the noise comes from, but it isn't bearings wearing out.

Not good enough

[dinther]

Just today I might have had exactly that problem. First drastically slowing down of execution with high HD activity. I decided to reboot and that was it. When Windows was loading it failed halfway and blue screened. Even safe mode would not allow it to boot. Placing the HD in a different PC gave the same problem.

This is typical. I recall the first Diskettes and how reliable they were. As PC's got cheaper these things became notoriously unreliable. CD's same thing. They used to always work and now even silver pressed disks won't always load on relatively new drives. This week I needed to install something from my original Windows XP Pro disk. The disk had never left the shrink-wrap it came in and the surface looked immaculate. But no sir, it would not load on any of my PC's. Now with the increasing HD density we can no longer rely on HD either!

I believe that the critical files on a PC operating system should not be stored on a HD. Why not store the entire OS on flash memory and copy those parts which are accessed frequently such as the registry to the HD on bootup. Also a separate area on the drive could be set aside for temp files while pure data is stored on the less frequently accessed parts of the HD.

In this day and age where we have to rely on HD to store our home video's, photo's and music we need reliable storage more than ever. I find it unacceptable that today's PC hardware has become so unreliable and I am not talking about cheap and nasty $400 Dell PC's here. And don't even start talking about backup. There is nothing reliable and large enough to backup a modern HD to. I rather go back the smaller 80 GIG drives then continue down this wobbly path.

Re:Not good enough

[Fweeky]

"CD's same thing. They used to always work [..] Now with the increasing HD density we can no longer rely on HD either!"

Um, I think the problem here is that, rather than hardware getting less reliable, you've actually dimension shifted from some freaky alternative reality where storage is far more reliable.

"I rather go back the smaller 80 GIG drives then continue down this wobbly path."

What, the ones with largely the same measured failure rates as disks 10x larger and 10x smaller? Was there a time when manufacturers claimed lower AFR's and higher MTBF's, or are you just suffering from confirmation bias?

If you really want more reliable disks and are prepared to sacrifice storage capacity (and money) for it, go SCSI/SAS. Don't forget to whinge when they turn out to be less than perfect too.

Re:Not good enough

[OceanWave]

I agree.

It always seems like technology is pushed just past the point of reliability.

I had exactly the same type of HD failure not even one month outside the warranty. It used to be at least 5-7 years before I would have problems with a drive. (By that time, the storage needs changed enough that the drive wasn't in "serious equipment" anyway.) It really came as a shock when I couldn't get a box to boot, and tested the drive on a FreeBSD installation, and found most of the sectors unreadable. (Windows wouldn't mount the drive, at all.)

Other examples:

I've never had luck with the 1.44MB floppies. I could do a full format, copy files, and find that the same drive could not read the files just 5 minutes later. The 720k disks never had this problem. Back in the C64 days, the 170k floppies would work for years before I had problems and had to get rid of one.

And 56k modems: I have never had one connect at full speed. The connections I could get would always drop, even on a clean phone line. I went back to my 28k--after trying several brands of the 56k--and never getting reliable results.

I have to ensure that I budget enough to replace a mainboard--and most of my other hardware that will be incompatible with the replacement--every two years. Just into the third year, the board will always fail.

I suppose we should soon expect optical storage, RAM and flash memory to meet the same minimal quality standards.

-----------

Too much depends on reliable data storage, these days. Both hardware and software quality need improvement. I am really tired of spending more time maintaining equipment, than getting practical use out of it. It is all too convenient for hardware and software companies to exclude themselves from liability, and it needs to change.

Yet Another Windows Bash

[networkzombie]

Way to lower Slashdot's credibility! Now I'm not even interested in the article. It's obviously biased.

Wal*Mart - funky fresh goodness!

[Gazzonyx]

Nah, I wish they carried Seagate. This is a Wal*Mart in Reading, PA. They actually have a fairly large variety of crappy, run-of-the-mill computer hardware. Linksys, WD, Logitech, Saitek, and Durabrand. Where is your Wal*Mart? You must be in a different region or something. I think the way that they do warehousing, regions all get the same products.

Wal*Mart is 'hip' (as the kids phrase it), speaking strictly relatively, when you consider we're hanging out at slashdot. "Hey, kids - you go hang out at your Wally World, if you'd like. I'm off to to discuss package management over at slashdot!"

Re:Wal*Mart - funky fresh goodness!

[pho3nixtar]

My Wal*Mart is located in the mid-TN area. They carry Seagate SATA drives, but bass ackwards enough they don't carry PCI host adapters. Thing is a lot of people in my immediate area, if they even have a computer at all, generally have older computers that lack system support for sata devices. The local radio shack carries them, but I think they're the crappy radio shack brand. I say that subjectively, since I've never bought one from them. Just going on general opinion. Anyway, your next bet if you live around here is to drive all the way to Nashville, which is about 45 minutes to an hour (depending on how close to the interstate you live...) and get the PCI adapter at CompUSA. But in general, most of the variety we have is also crap. It's a Wal*Mart thing in general. The only reason they even attempt to sell computer equipment is to make money. You want some technical help you're on your own, which really sucks for my area since techies are fewer than in Nashville. Which, I guess that can be good in some ways...

Wal*Mart is 'hip' (as the kids phrase it), speaking strictly relatively, when you consider we're hanging out at slashdot. "Hey, kids - you go hang out at your Wally World, if you'd like. I'm off to to discuss package management over at slashdot!" Touche'.

Reversing the polarity

[Catastrophator]

I though reversing the polarity solved problems, not caused them. Guess it only works on isolinear storage...

Re:Reversing the polarity

[dajak]

Reversing the polarity actually doubles the storage space on the HD, but you do have to reconfigure the crystals with a proton beam (for instance by extending the warp field) first to make it work.

BOFH

[JudeanPeople'sFront]

Magnetic wobbles? I thought it was static electricity from nylon underwear :)

I don't get it - magnetic wobbling?

[suv4x4]

But I'm sure it must be free energy in there somewhere! Man, imo gonna start a company based on this.

- Sean McCarthy, Steorn CEO

Superparamagnetic Effect.

[D4rk Fx]

Use the scientific term for it. Haven't flash animations from Hitachi taught you anything?

Yes..

[Anonymous Coward]

..this must be why Windows fails in sophisticated ways beyond simple R/W errors. I always thought it was due utterly poor software design and programming, since it has yet to happen even once to the *NIX-based OS' I've used during the last 9 years, but I sure got told this time.

or

[brilanon]

the next time Windows starts to fail?

As usual, useless research is carried out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. "one of the major causes" is just as wrong, if not moreso, than "the major cause".

I've yet to ever have a disk fail due to 'magnetic wobbling'. I know no one who has had a disk fail (or even had data loss) from 'magnetic wobbling'. I've never heard of this sort of crap before this article.

One of the major causes? Please, as far as 'magnetic wobbling' goes, you're far more likely to lose a hard drive due to Christopher Walken showing up at your house drunk and urinating on your computer.

the next time Windows starts to fail !!!

[xhydra]

You basement jerk-offs will do anything to take a swipe at Windows.

hehe

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL magnets

Sigh of the times.

[Anonymous Coward]

"None of us regularly get phonecalls such as "oh, my Linux won't start, OMG, what I'm gonna do?". We do get them related to Windows, though."

Except when the IBM Deathstars came out.

Semiconductor failure

[Anonymous Coward]

In most of the hard drive failures I've seen where the clicking/clunking occurs, it is generally due to the failure of a semiconductor component on the drive's controller board. Substituting a controller board taken from a known-good drive of the same brand, model, and size often lets me recover the data from from the failed drive.

Cripes, I'll Bite on this Windows Thing

[riffzifnab]

I don't think the poster is taking a jab at windows, they are more likely in the camp where Windows = computer. I think most people are smart enough that if they know wtf a hard drive is that they would realize that it would affect all the other OS'es out there too.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -Hanlon's razor

Fluid bearings

[zerofoo]

Most drive manufacturers have gone to fluid bearings. These bearings don't have mechanical contact, the hydroplaning action of the fluid means the bearing parts never touch.

I haven't had a fluid bearing drive fail yet due to bearing failure.

-ted

My bad

[Aqua_boy17]

Sorry, I've been busy trying to get my Vista machine to boot up...

I hate to point this out....

[Doomedsnowball]

Is this news? What if someone discovered a better way to hitch a horse to a wagon? I don't think we'll be using mechanical storage in the near future when there are so many solid-state devices ready to hit the market. I think a lot of slashdotters need a course in isomorphic thought. What if someone found a more efficient way to burn a witch? I'm sure it will be titled, "Company announces (Insert Mega Corp. Product here) killer". It's all so 500 processor cycles ago.

The Circle is Complete

[PingPongBoy]

We've come round full circle, naturally, to the issue of how do I back up massive amounts of data on removable disks? I created a drive image of my Vista boot partition. That required two DVDs. That was required even from the factory install. After I installing several software packages, the space requirement was only marginal. What does Windows provide to require so much space?

For the masses, DVDs are quite affordable and easy to use. Also they tend to accumulate files and data rather than re-create large data files.

So for most people, do a backup.

The circle closes tighter with the question of how long DVDs can last?

At any rate, would it help at all to run a refreshing program on data stored on a hard drive? This would be analogous to retensioning tapes. The refreshing program randomizes the free space of a hard drive and then copies old files back to the same drive and deletes the originals, the idea being an old file may slowly decay but a fresh file would have to start decaying from a more pristine state where the 1s and 0s haven't drifted. The whole idea makes sense only so far as the magnetic avalanche has a higher likelihood of failure compared to that of the rest of the drive mechanism--the bearings, motors, power surge damage, etc. even without the higher workload of periodically refreshing everything on hundreds of gigs.

So far, I've been checking my files for corruption with an MD5 hash. Files that are years old have remained intact. Perhaps 1 in 100 DVD writes turn up to have a mismatched MD5. A write to another disk solves that problem. Check your DVDs and don't smack your hard drives around for peace of mind.

Re:The Circle is Complete

[crabpeople]

"how do I back up massive amounts of data on removable disks? I created a drive image of my Vista boot partition. That required two DVDs"

You're not seriously suggesting that 2 dvds (9gb) is a "massive" amount of data are you?

Who cares about backing up windows anyway? Its the userdata thats important. For most people with even a moderate mp3, video and picture collection it would take tens if not hundreds of dvds to back up.

Solid State Drives

[seniorcoder]

I'm really, really looking forward to the day when I can afford a Raid 1 of large capacity SSDs. Solid State Drives are basically flash memory with an SATA or PATA interface.

Pros:

• More reliable: No moving parts; no head crash; no wobble
• Low latency, high throughput (all seem to offer low latency, some don't do so good on throughput)
• Low power requirements
• Low heat production
• No noise

Cons:

• High price
• Small capacity

Samsung SSD
http://www.samsung.com/eu/Products/Semiconductor/p roducts/ssd.asp

Lexar SSD
http://www.lexar.com/ssd/expresscard.html

Sandisk SSD
http://www.sandisk.com/OEM/ProductCatalog(1274)-Sa nDisk_SSD_Solid_State_Drives.aspx

Transcend SSD
http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/ModDetail.asp ?ModNo=162

You can buy a 32GB Samsung from NewEgg for $534 incl shipping.

Re:Solid State Drives

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn thats expensive. I wonder if it would be cheaper to buy an adapter:

http://www.buyextras.com/idetocoflcfc.html?gclid=C IPp1KGCtI0CFRD9YAodMi6svg

and then buy a cf card.

Mod up; a distinct possibility?

[awfar]

Also, this effect may be tied to the maximum storage areal density; if "dropping" in a new bit disturbs the existing bits or information (data or servo) during a write, the guard areas must be larger than necessary; disk and head materials and architecture, along with control of write current profiles, could open up significant storage space that is now set aside and wasted.

----

I am an unemployed person, so if you have a job...

My Windows...

[Khyber]

...keeps failing because it keeps losing it's NTFS.sys file or horks it's own partition (the most recent happening four days after a fresh Windows install.) I still have hard drives from the 80's that work. Slow as shit, but they still work.

Demonstration...

[Anonymous Coward]

The affect of the parent's post was me creating this post. The effect is this post getting modded -1 redundant.

Not failure, but areal density...

[awfar]

This is not about disk failure, but the ability to create and control ever smaller magnetic features; the effect that writing has on the information around it. If this phenomena can be understood and controlled, possibly, areas set aside as unusable guard areas can be used reliably, increasing the areal density. More, and more reliable, data storage for everyone!

----
Unemployed; got a job...???

Hammered the heads?

[Immerial]

What?? Hasn't everyone at least hammered the drive head at least once?! I guess I shouldn't shake the drive like that when the red light is one :)

Mod parent "wrong" and "ZFS fanboism"

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS is all very well and good, but your comments on RAID and "The current state of technology" are totally off the mark.

Most modern hard drives support SMART and all drives compatible with PC systems implement block and/or sector checksumming a'la IBM's ECC. Wikipedia's writeup on this is unfortunately extremely weak (concentrating on telecommunications error correction and providing very little on error correction in the HDD controller and below). Perhaps someone with more expertise in this area will step in and fix that?

Despite your claims, the most popular RAID levels (5, 1+0, and simple mirroring) as well as several less popular ones (6 and 5+0 for example) are capable of detecting and correcting multiple bit rot errors (to the limit of the accuracy of their CRCC implementation, just like ZFS).

Sounds like BS at first, but then ....

[PPH]

From TFA

Magnetic avalanches occur when a magnetic head hovers over a patch of disk drive causing the polarity of that part of the drive to change its alignment or spin.

Huh? What do they mean by 'hover'? In my experience, heads keep moving, as does the disk. Most modern O/S h/w drivers have some pretty sophisticated algorithms to sequence disk reads/writes to optimize head movements.

But then I recalled my (limited) experiences helping friends fix slow Windows systems and the number of times defragmenting the disk sped things up. That task went the way of the dodo on every other modern O/S as a byproduct of driver improvements. But evidently not on Windows.

So, maybe there is really something to the way Windows handles read/write scheduling that messes up disks.

Stupid first line

[Master of Transhuman]

"Main causes of drive failure"?

What do they mean by "fail"? To me, hard drive failure means the frickin' thing won't start up at all or spin or function - i.e., hardware failure, either electronic or mechanical.

I don't understand what they're talking about. When was the last time your hard drive just "lost data"? Maybe there was a screwup in the file system, okay. Maybe that WAS caused by this "magnetic avalanche". But just "lost data"?

I don't know anybody who simply "loses files" WITHOUT the hard drive being on the verge of mechanical failure.

As I read this piece, they've determined a way to make hard drive recording more reliable. Fine. That has absolutely NOTHING to do with solving the "main cause of hard drive failure" which is and will remain electronic or mechanical failure resulting from age, heat, power disruptions and other gross physical causes.

Failure Assured

[Anonymous Coward]

If the area of the disk that suffers the bit rot happens to be part of the sector frame.... then you start losing blocks.... and they cannot be retrieved...
  it's been a looooong time since an IDE HDD of ANY stripe had the smarts onboard to perform a TRUE low-level format the way SCSI drives can.... They lobotomized that functionality to lower the cost of the drive... that process is now only possible during final drive assembly and test and the process requires an external system harnessed to the drive....

So losing Bits... CAN kill a drive dead.... long before electromechanical failure....
wobbling bits makes cheap drives fall down...

-NAN

CD based Linux?

[OrangeTide]

I didn't know you could run Linux from a CD!! I'm going to sell my harddrives off on ebay today, since I no longer need them. THANKS!

it's a good argument...

[vuffi_raa]

it's a good argument for the solid state drives like in the new umpcs

Simple English

[Anonymous Coward]

Affecting a situation, in order to cause an effect, is possible by effecting a change.

It's disappointing to see that the education system has apparently failed at providing its pupils with the simple knowledge to know the difference between "effect" and "affect". I suppose it's too much to ask, since too many people can't even distinguish proper usage of words such as: "its" and "it's"; "to" and "too"; and "there", "their", and "they're". Don't even get me started on the last item in that list. There is NO excuse NOT to know the proper usage of there/their/they're. They're = "they are". Their = "belongs to someone; ie 'their dog'". There = "Every other usage!".

What's worse is most people who can't write don't care. Way to show the world you're capable of learning the BASICS of your own primary language.