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What wears out in an HDD?



 
 
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  #31  
Old January 16th 16, 12:36 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Mark Lloyd[_2_]
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

On 01/14/2016 08:37 PM, masonc wrote:
On Fri, 15 Jan 2016 06:48:18 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

So what clicks when the drive breaks?


That's mostly the drive moving the heads to a known spot to recalibrate
the position of the head arm.


You kids may not remember the Commodore disk drive that always banged
its head against the wall to learn its position. Users learned how to
bend things back into place after too many head bangings.


And it banged even more when it found a defect in the disk, like those
intentional defects on commercial software disks.

Oh, for the good old days !



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  #32  
Old January 16th 16, 12:42 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
J. P. Gilliver (John)
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

In message , Sam E
writes:
On 01/14/2016 12:11 PM, Paul wrote:

[nip]

Such a drive, wants to keep the helium inside.
(No need for a breather hole :-) )
I consider such a design to be truly miraculous,
as you know how hard it is to keep helium
gas in anything. Helium gas is used specifically
for lab testing, for the detection and removal
of leaks in vacuum systems. It's a bitch to
keep it from leaking.

Paul


It should be easier than keeping HYDROGEN in. Or antimatter :-)

No, because hydrogen atoms usually go around in pairs, i. e. a molecule
of hydrogen contains two atoms; helium, being a noble gas, has valency
0, so helium molecules contain only one atom.
--
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  #33  
Old January 16th 16, 01:00 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Paul
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Sam E
writes:
On 01/14/2016 12:11 PM, Paul wrote:

[nip]

Such a drive, wants to keep the helium inside.
(No need for a breather hole :-) )
I consider such a design to be truly miraculous,
as you know how hard it is to keep helium
gas in anything. Helium gas is used specifically
for lab testing, for the detection and removal
of leaks in vacuum systems. It's a bitch to
keep it from leaking.

Paul


It should be easier than keeping HYDROGEN in. Or antimatter :-)

No, because hydrogen atoms usually go around in pairs, i. e. a molecule
of hydrogen contains two atoms; helium, being a noble gas, has valency
0, so helium molecules contain only one atom.


And I noticed just today, that Seagate is doing a copy-cat,
and is introducing a Helium drive of its own.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9955/s...ard-disk-drive

"Motivation - avoid a shareholder revolt, when we don't have an He drive."

http://images.anandtech.com/doci/995...eal_sealed.png

They've done the cover a slightly different way, in an
attempt to avoid any patent issues... :-) It doesn't
say "welded" but I assume they had to do something
like that. There are no screws in the top cover.

I thought Seagate was doing pretty well without that.

Maybe to avoid patents, they could have filled
theirs with Argon. Or Neon gas maybe. Something
creative.

Paul
  #34  
Old January 16th 16, 11:02 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Micky
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

On Fri, 15 Jan 2016 06:41:54 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

Micky wrote

What wears out in an HDD?


That varys. Sometimes the don't spin up because the heads are
stuck to the platter. Sometimes the electronics dies. Sometimes
they end up with too many bad spots, usually due to crap
floating around inside the 'sealed' chamber.

Is it only the tone arm that breaks?


There is no tone arm. The preamp for the heads on
the heads arm can die and the head can come off too.

or can the bearings the platter rides on break???


Not break so much as wear out and get very noisy.

Good watches use jewels, rubies, as bearings;


Only the older analog watches.

and cheap watches use metal. What do hard drives use?


Originally metal bearings but now fluid bearings.

I googled but couldn't find much about this.
Does the spindle really ride on an air cushion?


No, the heads do.

Even when the drive is positioned sideways?


Yep. And upside down too. The bigger drives
have more than 1 head and some of the heads
use the underside of the platter even with the
drive positioned normally. They have springs
that hold the heads against the platter and the
heads don't contact the platter when its rotating,
they fly on a layer of air between the platter
surface and the head itself.


Thanks all, and good to see you back, Rod.
  #35  
Old January 16th 16, 01:06 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Mr. Man-wai Chang
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

On 1/15/2016 10:53 PM, Paul wrote:

The Hitachi He6 was the first. It took quite a while,
from the first paper launch, until regular users
could find these for sale.
.....


Thanks!

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  #36  
Old January 16th 16, 05:04 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Micky
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Posts: 1,528
Default What wears out in an HDD?

On Fri, 15 Jan 2016 06:48:18 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:



"Micky" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 14 Jan 2016 21:12:53 +0700, JJ wrote:

On Thu, 14 Jan 2016 05:44:50 -0500, Micky wrote:
What wears out in an HDD? Is it only the tone arm that breaks? or
can the bearings the platter rides on break??? Good watches use
jewels, rubies, as bearings; and cheap watches use metal. What do
hard drives use?

Most of the causes is due to combination of heat and force.

IMO, the arm and bearings and are pretty solid but it's not impossible for
them to break - depending on the material and manufacturing quality.


So what clicks when the drive breaks?


That's mostly the drive moving the heads to a known spot to recalibrate
the position of the head arm. When the drive can no longer read the
tracks, say because the head preamp has failed or some other part of
the system that reads the tracks has failed, it keeps trying to recalibrate
and never succeeds and that can produce audible clicking in some drives.


This would account for how one of my hdds clicked 2 or 3 times on
windows start, 4 or 5 times, before finally failing several months
from the start of all this. Well, when it failed somehow Windows
files coudl no longer be found. But I was prepared with 3, count
'em, 3, backups of the whole drive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearing_(mechanical)#Service_life

Does the spindle really ride on an air cushion?

From where did you have that thought?


From a fairly detailed webpage.


But you confused the spindle with the heads.

  #37  
Old January 16th 16, 07:23 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Mr. Man-wai Chang
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

On 1/14/2016 6:44 PM, Micky wrote:
What wears out in an HDD? Is it only the tone arm that breaks? or
....


BTW, remember to backup your data periodically!

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  #38  
Old January 16th 16, 07:55 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Mark Lloyd[_2_]
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

On 01/15/2016 05:42 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

[snip]

No, because hydrogen atoms usually go around in pairs, i. e. a molecule
of hydrogen contains two atoms; helium, being a noble gas, has valency
0, so helium molecules contain only one atom.


Right. I wish I had remembered that at the time.

--
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http://notstupid.us/

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philosophy only ridiculous." [David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature
(1739)]
  #39  
Old January 16th 16, 10:04 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Mike Tomlinson
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Posts: 654
Default What wears out in an HDD?

En el artculo , Mr. Man-wai Chang
escribi:

Outside air shouldn't be able to reach inside the hard disk


It does, actually. The inside of the drive has to be able to equalise
with air pressure. There are one or two vent holes on every drive,
sometimes with the warning "do not cover!". The vent(s) have a very
fine particulate filter so no airborne nasties can enter the inner
sanctum and cause havoc.

--
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(='.'=) Bunny says: Windows 10? Nein danke!
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  #40  
Old January 17th 16, 12:30 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Ant[_2_]
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

....
Users learned how to bend things back
into place after too many head bangings.


Even sillier than you usually manage.


Oh, for the good old days !


You're free to use them again any time you like.


IIRC, you had to park the drives with software like on 3.5" floppy
disk(ette)s if the drives were being moved. I know I did this on my IBM
PS/2 model 30 286 10 Mhz desktop PC!
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  #41  
Old January 17th 16, 10:05 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Rod Speed
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

Ant wrote

Users learned how to bend things back
into place after too many head bangings.


Even sillier than you usually manage.


Oh, for the good old days !


You're free to use them again any time you like.


IIRC, you had to park the drives with software like on
3.5" floppy disk(ette)s if the drives were being moved.


Nope, you've mangled that utterly. There was
no need to do that with 3.5" floppy drives.

I know I did this on my IBM PS/2
model 30 286 10 Mhz desktop PC!


You got the story completely scrambled.

It was possible to park the heads with the early
hard drives that didnt do anything special
when powered down and saw the heads land
on the platters when they stopped rotating.

  #42  
Old January 17th 16, 10:26 AM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Ant[_3_]
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

On 1/17/2016 1:05 AM, Rod Speed wrote:

Users learned how to bend things back
into place after too many head bangings.


Even sillier than you usually manage.


Oh, for the good old days !


You're free to use them again any time you like.


IIRC, you had to park the drives with software like on
3.5" floppy disk(ette)s if the drives were being moved.


Nope, you've mangled that utterly. There was
no need to do that with 3.5" floppy drives.


No, I meant parking HDDs with 3.5" bootable floppy disks with their park
software.


I know I did this on my IBM PS/2
model 30 286 10 Mhz desktop PC!


You got the story completely scrambled.

It was possible to park the heads with the early
hard drives that didnt do anything special
when powered down and saw the heads land
on the platters when they stopped rotating.


Then, why did IBM say to manually park when moving my IBM PS/2 model 30
286 desktop machine?
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  #43  
Old January 17th 16, 12:48 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Paul
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

Ant wrote:


Then, why did IBM say to manually park when moving my IBM PS/2 model 30
286 desktop machine?


At one time, heads landed on the platter, with no special
provisions. But stiction resulted in the heads sticking to
the platter, and suddenly a user would discover the
motor could not spin at startup. I think one of my first
drives, possibly a Quantum, was supposed to suffer
from that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction (see hard drive section)

They put a textured landing zone on the platter, with
the idea being that the textured area would prevent
the heads from sticking. This would work fine, as long
as the OS knows it is supposed to position the heads
over that area, before the power goes off. I don't
even know if there was a special IDE command for that,
an out-of-bounds address, or some other trick to get
it there.

Later, we got loading ramps. And on looking at this, I jumped
to the wrong conclusion.

https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/f...aper_FINAL.pdf

The "thing" on the very end of the arm, the "pointy part",
is the lift tab. The slider is actually underneath the
end of the body of the arm, somewhat back from the lift
tab. You can see the wires leading up to the slider, to
give some idea where it is.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6288876B1/en

That particular patent, is about some sort of annealing
technique, to make the bottom of the lift tab really
smooth, so it doesn't kick up as much crap on every
ramp landing. The hard drive specification allows it
to go up that ramp 300,000 times.

Paul
  #44  
Old January 17th 16, 01:06 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
J. P. Gilliver (John)
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

In message , Ant
writes:
On 1/17/2016 1:05 AM, Rod Speed wrote:

[]
Nope, you've mangled that utterly. There was
no need to do that with 3.5" floppy drives.


No, I meant parking HDDs with 3.5" bootable floppy disks with their
park software.

I don't remember ever coming across _bootable_ park commands; I remember
ones that could be copied to the HD itself, and called from DOS.
[]
It was possible to park the heads with the early
hard drives that didn’t do anything special
when powered down and saw the heads land
on the platters when they stopped rotating.


Then, why did IBM say to manually park when moving my IBM PS/2 model 30
286 desktop machine?


To move the head into a normally not used part of the disc, so any
damage [to the disc] caused by "landing" didn't matter (which according
to posts in this thread may have also been textured to reduce stiction).
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  #45  
Old January 17th 16, 07:07 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware,general,alt.windows7.general,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Mark Lloyd[_2_]
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Default What wears out in an HDD?

On 01/17/2016 06:06 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

[snip]

To move the head into a normally not used part of the disc, so any
damage [to the disc] caused by "landing" didn't matter (which according
to posts in this thread may have also been textured to reduce stiction).


IIRC, I had a program called "autopark", which would move the heads to
"number of cylinders" after a certain amount of non-use. Since cylinder
numbers went from 0 to "number of cylinders"-1, "number of cylinders"
itself would be an unused area.

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for a change..."
 




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