Re: Disk heads won't park [pat II]
On 4/29/2014 6:13 PM, Nuno Magalhães wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 8:21 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
>>
>> The drive isn't failing, but has failed. Replace it.
>
> I already have another one on the way. I was going to buy Samsung but
> then learnt their drive division was bought by Seagate (which also
> bought Maxtor, the brand of the oldest drive on my desktop). I settled
> for a Toshiba DT01ACA100 which would've been here already if the store
> hadn't handed me an DT01ABA100 instead (rpm difference). Maybe i just
> got unlucky with this Seagate, we'll see.
>
> I assume the return spring repair would be both infeasable and way
> beyond USD 0.0025 or the cost of the new drive. :) Alas, such is the
> market. The weird thing is, to an extent, the drive kinda works/ed (i
> guess only one platter is damaged but i won't play expert). It'll make
> a lovely paper-weight, though.
It's not feasible to effect repairs to the moving parts of a modern hard
disk drive. To do so would require breaking the air seal, and doing
that will introduce dust particles into the platter cavity. Screw the
cover back on and fire it up, and in no time flat the dust particles
will scour the platter surfaces, as they get bounced around at 5900 to
15,000 RPM, and if one hits a read/write head it will damage it.
Some of the professional data recovery services have clean room
facilities and trained personnel (or used to anyway) who can effect such
repairs in herculean efforts to recover data, but the drives are never
returned to service. Last I heard such services start around $10,000
USD with no guarantee of data recovery from the failed drive.
>> No software tool can identify the cause of your problem. However, SMART
>> has been telling you for some time that the drive was experiencing seek
>> errors.
>
> That's a subtle hint for me to setup smartd for the other drives (it
> was planned... in the to-do stack).
Don't bother. Cron 'smartctl -A /dev/[device]' the first of every month
and have it mail the output to you. Look at the raw values for seek and
read error rates, reallocated sectors, etc. Once these pass zero and
keep climbing it's time to get a replacement on the way. At that point
the drive may have a year left, maybe a month, or maybe it will die
tomorrow. No way to know. Don't wait until a drive is completely dead
before replacing it. That mentality is for kitchen appliances, not
something that won't spit your data back out after it goes ker-thunk. ;)
> Thank you for your very thorough explanation.
You're welcome.
Stan
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