Magnetic Wobbles Cause Hard Drive Failure 276
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!"
Grammar Nazi x2 (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
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:Buy lots of ram (Score:2, Informative)
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:Sigh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:SOME types of failures... (Score:3, Informative)
It seems possible that this magnetic affectation could be a cause of spontaneous damage the hard drive servo information [storagereview.com].
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.
Not "the" but "a lesser known" (Score:5, Informative)
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:Which University of California?! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So do lots of other things (Score:4, Informative)
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'.
bearings overheating (Score:4, Informative)
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 [storagemojo.com]
Re:Sigh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:First questions to mind: (Score:3, Informative)
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:It "effects" it's neighbors... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:SOME types of failures... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It "effects" it's neighbors... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:scapegoats (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)