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Magnetic Wobbles Cause Hard Drive Failure

Posted by samzenpus on from the shake-it-up dept.

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!"

7 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Pretty sure this will also keep Linux from starting!

    1. Re:Sigh by Tim+C · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      It's official. Most of you are morons.
  2. SOME types of failures... by DTemp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  3. Hmmm... by Edward+Teach · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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

    --

    Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.

  4. Misleading title by Tribbin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Should be something like:

    Magnetic Wobbles Cause Data Loss

    --
    If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
  5. Re:As usual the slashdot summary is wrong by mshurpik · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    Your memory is faulty.

  6. Re:Not "the" but "a lesser known" by Brane2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...