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!"
First questions to mind: (Score:5, Interesting)
Which University of California?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing insightful to say. (Score:2, Interesting)
Interesting but WRONG conclusion. (Score:2, Interesting)
I would not call this a mechanism for "hard disk failure."
So do lots of other things (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
The real reason (Score:3, Interesting)
They were all fairly calm when this footage was shot but the wildness ensued soon after.
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
Re:How timely... (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:Over filling a HD (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Not "the" but "a lesser known" (Score:3, Interesting)
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.