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!"

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure this will also keep Linux from starting!

scapegoats

[jimbug]

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

Sure, blame the magnets..

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

So why does this only effect Windows?

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!

Hmmm...

[Edward Teach]

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

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

Misleading title

[Tribbin]

Should be something like:

Magnetic Wobbles Cause Data Loss

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: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: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: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:Sigh

[eat here_get gas]

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

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.