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!"
Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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.
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Also, last July, I went to a non-nerd relatives house, to help "setup his new digital camera". I was surprised t
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Re:Sigh (Score:5, Funny)
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I've had this problem before... (Score:2, Funny)
First questions to mind: (Score:5, Interesting)
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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?
As my high school music teacher always said... (Score:5, Funny)
- RG>
Insidious! (Score:2)
Which University of California?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Which University of California?! (Score:5, Informative)
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Well I, for one, welcome our new, neutered vampire overlords...
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.
See! (Score:2)
Typical Nazis! (Score:2)
SOME types of failures... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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You can demonstrate this yourself; open up a running hard disk and remove the platter - in pretty much all cases a rather physically violent ending will occur. That's because the disk is *upset*; you took away its data!
It's hoped that, once we have disks who's lifetimes can be measured in decades instead of a handful of years, the devices will be mature enough to take such failures in their stride.
Re:SOME types of failures... (Score:4, Informative)
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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]
It "effects" it's neighbors... (Score:2)
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If you're going to comment on someone's grammar or spelling, make sure your own is correct.
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Does it only affect windows? :) (Score:2)
Well, it just happened to my desktop machine. Windows just stopped booting. Some weird kernel messages or something like that. Odd thing is, it didn't affect my Linux partition!? What are the odds of that? Are you sure this isn't some report sponsored by Microsoft to make it look like it's not their fault?!
Buy lots of ram (Score:2)
Actually, for the speed it operates at and amount of use, the hard drive is probably one of the most reliable things in a computer.
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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
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Diminishing returns (Score:2)
Returns on RAM for 32 bit PCs diminish to 0 once you get past 4GB. You just can't address any more.
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Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
So next time Windows fails to start, you'll know why!
Pretty sure that's not the main reason. :-(
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."
Re:Interesting but WRONG conclusion. (Score:4, Funny)
I sure as hell wouldn't call it a "hard disk success"
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...
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I did not take the 3 minutes to take the back off and take the drives out.
I'm not sure if it were magnetic whobbles that destroyed my drive though.
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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'.
Misleading title (Score:4, Insightful)
Magnetic Wobbles Cause Data Loss
Windows won't start?? (Score:5, Funny)
Because... I didn't install it?
Re:Windows won't start?? (Score:4, Funny)
As usual the slashdot summary is wrong (Score:2)
It seems to me that years ago, slashdot authors did more than dump articles into summaries with reading them first. What happened?
Re:As usual the slashdot summary is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Your memory is faulty.
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good case of the magnetic wobbles...
I'm disappointed. (Score:5, Funny)
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?
How about a bewolf cluster of failed drives!... (Score:4, Funny)
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Mac OS X (Score:2, Funny)
This could explain where my files go.... (Score:4, Funny)
Looks like a precession hit the article (Score:2, Funny)
That's what they get for using a hard drive!
Reliability (Score:2)
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Then there was the time a power outage caused both drives to fail in my server simultaneously... it'd been up and running for around a year with no problems. A little bad weather and boom, not onl
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1.) It's 3AM Sunday morning and Wal*Mart is the only place I can get a drive. I purchase the next WD that I will later be cursing.
2.) I go to buy a drive (either online or otherwise) and WD's are cheaper than any other real drives; Maxtor's not included - I don't consider them a harddrive, but rather, a ticking time
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Wal*Mart - funky fresh goodness! (Score:2)
Wal*Mart is 'hip' (as the kids phrase it), speaking strictly relatively, when you consider we're hanging out at slashdot. "Hey, kids - you go hang out a
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.
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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!
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Once few bits in a sectors would flip, that sector would be invalid...
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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
I thought Windows failed to start... (Score:2)
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_
And? (Score:2)
Indeed. But what has it to do with the harddisk?
dab oot ton (Score:2, Funny)
Not good enough (Score:2)
This is typical. I recall the first Diskettes and how reliable they were. As PC's got cheaper these things became notoriously unreliable. CD's same thing. They used to always work and now even silve
I don't get it - magnetic wobbling? (Score:3, Funny)
- Sean McCarthy, Steorn CEO
Re:Question (Score:5, Funny)
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(Seriously, though, I'm currently frustrated by this very thing, since my notebook's HD is dead as a doorknob -- it only works at all with a livecd. I'm choked about the situati
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Yeah, I'm just whining. But I would really rather prefer a notebook without Vista, and it doesn't look like I have any choice if I buy via my friend.
/walks off in shame
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.
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Thanks, that is the most concise and helpful definition I've heard.
Cheers,
Greg
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Is there an open source hardware raid solution I can buy? And, can I hack it in PHP, Perl or Python (have to get my ppp in)
InnerWeb
For impaired readers, the above is a crude attempt at humor.
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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).
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I vaguely recall some old hard drives back when you could position the disk arms using int 21h calls could be positioned outside of their normal bounds... or was that to do with affecting the landing zone so you'd lose data - off for a coffee and to find my old int 21h reference material.
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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 th