Gloom and Doom- wish I hadn’t done that!

In the 80's at work, we changed HDD's for greater capacity (IBM PC). In the 90's, I had at 3 HDD failures with the deadly click, click, click... symptom. They were all Dell boxes. In the 21st century, I have had three HDD failures and one SSD failure. The HDD failures were all Seagate drives (maybe a bad lot or two). They were in RAID1, so no data were lost. In fact, one failed under warranty, the next one failed just out of warranty, and the warrant replacement for the first failed within a year. I switched to WD. The SSD was Sandisk that failured after almost a year, and I got a warranty replacement. The OS was on that disk, so the failure caused inconvenience and loss of some e-mails.

John

spec said:

I'm intrigued, as well as not being too bright- what do you mean by your last statement?

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...just a joke, i am not holding my breath. only waiting for that price to come down, before i recover a disk with maybe some old photos & tax statements on it

Well if you wanted any of your data back, I would strongly suggest not opening hard drives and playing with them. All the dirt from the air might corrupt your disk even more than it is now. And rotating the platter is ...

kubeek said:

Well if you wanted any of your data back, I would strongly suggest not opening hard drives and playing with them. All the dirt from the air might corrupt your disk even more than it is now. And rotating the platter is ...

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Hy kub,

I don't think things are as critical as is commonly thought. I agree it is risky to mess with the mechanics though, but in this case the HDD is toast anyway. Provided the heads are safely parked there shouldn't be too much risk rotating the platter. Don't forget that, in normall operation, the disk is whipping around at 7,200 RPM so the mechanics cant be as feeble as the scare strories would have you belive. Also see the Youtube HDD features.

spec

I still haven't sent the damaged HDD off for evaluation and quotation and today, after learning how from Youtube, I popped the lid off the mechanism: what a beautiful bit of electromechanical engineering it is, but everything looked in order. The head was parked as it should be and the platter was unmarked. The disk also spun freely by rotating it with a TORX driver at the cenre of the bairing. In case anyone needs to know, there are normally TORX screws around the periphery, but - this got me- an extra TORX screw buried under the label.


I can't pull the controller board because I don't have a small enough TORX driver, but have ordered a small set from Amazon UK. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00IHSKQ7O?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00
I hope to find some deposits on the component side of the controller, or possibly that the shorting protectors have blown. Apparently there are two and you can just cut them out with a scalpel if they have blown short. I have confirmed that you do need to put the prom from the old controller on to any replacement controller board.

As luck would have it, I remembered that I gave a mate 500GB of edocs and music on a 1TB 2.5" USB HDD about a month ago, which is more up to date than my NAS data. So I have borrowed that and it is just about to finish downloading to the NAS after 20Hrs.

Some stuff will be lost for good though, if I can't get the data off the faulty drive one way or another.

A replacement Hitachi Travelstar 7K1000 arrived a couple of days ago (£56 UK fom SCAN) and a second NAS drive arrived lunchtime today (£136 UK from SCAN) so that will be used to mirror the existing 4TB HDD.

spec

spec said:

Hy kub,

I don't think things are as critical as is commonly thought. I agree it is risky to mess with the mechanics though, but in this case the HDD is toast anyway. Provided the heads are safely parked there shouldn't be too much risk rotating the platter. Don't forget that, in normall operation, the disk is whipping around at 7,200 RPM so the mechanics cant be as feeble as the scare strories would have you belive. Also see the Youtube HDD features.

spec

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I have read that if you open the HDD and expose the platter, it is toast. I just push the I believe button, and never opened one that I cared on saving.

Hi Spec,
I don't think it was a good idea to open the HDA (Head disk assembly.) They should only be opened in a clean room. Even a smoke particle is larger than the distance between the heads and the disk.

Les.

Les Jones said:

Hi Spec,
I don't think it was a good idea to open the HDA (Head disk assembly.) They should only be opened in a clean room. Even a smoke particle is larger than the distance between the heads and the disk.

Les.

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Hi Les,
Of course you are right; I wouldn't dream of messing with a good HDD for the reasons you say, but the thing is this HDD is scrap if I cant get it working just once to extract the data, because, after the initial panic, I now find there are only a few files that can't be re constructed/downloaded to reinstate he lost data. The trouble is that it represents such a load of work. For example, the EAGLE circuits I have done over the past two months have gone, although flat versions are on ETO as png images. Also, there is a directory of semiconductor data sheets, ap reports etc which had been greatly expanded over the last two months, mainly as a result of info from ETO member's posts. For example, if I see a chip or transistor of note, I download the data sheet and any supporting data.

spec

As a general note, I am looking forward to the time when memory is no longer a critical area and you have virtually an infinite amount of high speed memory available on your local machine. The boffins have been talking about various enabling technologies to do this for at least 20 years, whether it be holographic of molecular. My feeling is that ultimately molecular will be the game changer. Of course, that means that all the various memory categories - cache, main, backing, paged etc- will be a thing of the past, especially dynamic RAM which somehow I never trusted.- the whole principle just seems wrong to me. The coup d'état will be if they can make molecular memory non-volatile too.

spec
Can't FRAM be considered a type of molecular memory (https://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/microcon...power/msp430frxx_fram/what_is_fram.page#intro ) ?

John

jpanhalt said:

spec
Can't FRAM be considered a type of molecular memory (https://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/microcon...power/msp430frxx_fram/what_is_fram.page#intro ) ?

John

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Well, well, You learn something new on ETO every day. Very interesting. I had no idea that such an advanced technology is available for general use.

spec

Well, I learned about it last Thursday, but then, I am in a different time zone. Here is the thread with a comment from Ian: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/eeprom-wear-leveling.147520/#post-1256106

Sad part is I just bought a few EEPROM from DigiKey. The FRAM chips will be in my next order. Imagine, 100 trillion rewrites!

John

jpanhalt said:

Well, I learned about it last Thursday, but then, I am in a different time zone. Here is the thread with a comment from Ian: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/eeprom-wear-leveling.147520/#post-1256106

Sad part is I just bought a few EEPROM from DigiKey. The FRAM chips will be in my next order. Imagine, 100 trillion rewrites!

John

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FRAM chips do sound good- thks for link- do you think a 100 trillion rewrites will be enough

jpanhalt said:

Imagine, 100 trillion rewrites!

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I doubt you'll get a refund if it manages only 99.9 trillion .