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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!"
Pretty sure this will also keep Linux from starting!
But I'd put the wobbly boots down to being pissed.
Which materials/processes dampen the "avalanche" best? Which hard drive manufacturers use those materials/processes?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
It doesn't effect Windows at all, actually. It might, however, affect Windows.
http://xkcd.com/386/
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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 /.
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.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
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?
I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
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."
You mean "its" there, not "it's." Certain possessives don't have apostrophes in ou'r language.
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...
Should be something like:
Magnetic Wobbles Cause Data Loss
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
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 ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!
Because... I didn't install it?
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?
Luckily Mac OS X is safe, as it is pretected by a global reality distortion field.
Replace the HD or hand in your geek card please.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
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.
No that's not it. In Soviet Russia, you fail hard drive... No. Where's that goatse link?
That's what they get for using a hard drive!
>It seems to me that years ago, slashdot authors did more than dump articles into summaries
Your memory is faulty.
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.
- mritunjai
good case of the magnetic wobbles...
www.purevolume.com/martyd
We all know the real reason here. It's all those perpendicular bits on the dance floor getting drunk and falling down.
h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html
They were all fairly calm when this footage was shot but the wildness ensued soon after.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
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.
/. and agree with the anti-MS sentiment and used to be a Mac user.
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
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).
degnahc ytiralop retfa
I think you mean 640K. (Sorry if I missed a sarcasm tag there).
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.
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
I though reversing the polarity solved problems, not caused them. Guess it only works on isolinear storage...
Magnetic wobbles? I thought it was static electricity from nylon underwear :)
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
No, it isn't, nor has it ever been.
You can count on /. for polarizing articles like these.
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
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.
- dm - The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.