drive keeps having partition problems

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

I meant a URL for the datasheet of an ATA/SATA drive of speed 7,200rpm and circa 180GB capacity (i.e. not SCSI, not
15,000rpm, not 1terrabyte capacity), and which says more than "there are 7 recording zones".

Thats all you need, and most datasheets list the
number of sectors per track for the tracks in the zones.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote

A URL, please.

You got that above.

 

[Arno Wagner]

"Rod Speed" blurbed:


I meant a URL for the datasheet of an ATA/SATA drive
of speed 7,200rpm and circa 180GB capacity (i.e. not SCSI,
not 15,000rpm, not 1terrabyte capacity), and which says more
than "there are 7 recording zones".

Typically you need a drive manual for that. It seems vendors
have again started to not post these on the web. Datasheets
usually do not give this information.

ZBR has been used for quite some time, I think even my very old
1GB IBM drive had it.

I do like to blow up Rod as much as the next persopn,
but he is right about this. You can see this from HDD speed
benchmarks, e.g., where the speed levels off, while
latency does not (i.e. the rpm, stay the same).
Today you get something like 50%-65% speed at the end of a
disk, compared to the beginning.

An example for 180GB/7200rpm is here:

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=694&cid=10&pg=7

I can see about 19 speed zones, and there may be more.

Arno

 

[Rod Speed]

Arno Wagner wrote

I expected as much. Rod's "help" is usually illusory.

I just didnt make a distinction between the datasheet and what he calls the manual.

With those Hitachi drives, its the OEM specs that you can see the zone detail listed in.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Franc Zabkar wrote in news:[email protected]

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Franc Zabkar

[...]
BTW, don't be alarmed by the very high numbers for Raw Read Error
Rate, Seek Error Rate, and Hardware ECC Recovered for Seagate HDs. My
own testing and research leads me to believe that these are normal and
do not in fact reflect errors.

Same here too. I believe these are from read accesses that were
started immediately after a seek and before the heads really
settled. This is fine, if the read and the ECC fails, the disk can do
a re-read with rettled heads. On writing, the disk gives the
heads more time after a seek.

Arno

I just tried booting to DOS with Smartdrv disc caching enabled for
drive C:.

If I execute ...

smartudm 0 /r con

... on my 120GB Seagate HD, the "Seek Error Rate" increases by 8
points each time and the "Raw Read Error Rate" and "Hardware ECC
recovered" values both increase by 3 points. The latter two parameters
have identical values. If your hypothesis were correct, then I would
think that there should be at least as many read errors as seeks.

Instead I suspect that there are no real errors at all. At the very
least it seems to me that all three parameters reflect some kind of
count rather than a rate, although that begs the question, why only 3
reads for every 8 seeks?

To test my hypothesis that the "Seek Error Rate" figure is actually a
count, I captured the SMART data before and after a SeaTools zero fill
operation on a 13GB ST313021A Seagate HD. The difference in the Seek
Error Rate was 52232 counts.

According to the U Series 8 Product Manual ...

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/u8pmb.pdf

... this drive has 18700 tracks/inch and 3 data surfaces.

Assuming that there are 3 seeks per track (due to the action of the
embedded servo during head switching ???),

Total and utter gibberish.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Timothy Daniels wrote in news:[email protected]

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Franc Zabkar wrote in news:[email protected]

What bothers me ...

.... is that you take that idiot seriously ...

about the drive's "read error" reporting is that it is
very consistent. I would have thought that reading "preemptively"
before the heads had settled, as you have suggested,

would produce random results.

No. Really?

OTOH, it makes sense that a drive manufacturer would
attempt to squeeze more performance out of the drive by doing
something like this.

That makes sense, but only if you accept that *every* seek results in
a seek error.

So it does *not* make sense.

Clearly you would not want the drive to write to the
platter during a seek failure, so the fact that the zero fill
operation completed successfully (Write Error Rate = 0) would suggest
that there were no actual seek errors.

BTW, if you need to be reminded that things are not always what they
seem, then recall the following thread where a Seagate HD appears to
report nonsensical temperature readings.

However, the readings make some kind of sense if one interprets them
differently:

Which is why they are called mfgr dependent.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage/msg/d43ad36cb35d3824?dmode=source

I would think that it would always be faster to read from all heads
simultaneously. However, that would only be possible if you could
guarantee that all heads in the stack were perfectly vertically
aligned at all times, and that there was no temperature gradient.

Clearly that's not the case today.

Nor was it ever, except for one or two experiments.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Timothy Daniels wrote in news:[email protected]

Interesting. "CHS" don't mean whut it usetuh.

And you give the word Newbee a whole new meaning.
How long have you been here? And not learned a single bit, ever.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Franc Zabkar wrote in news:[email protected]

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Arno Wagner wrote in news:[email protected]

[...]
BTW, don't be alarmed by the very high numbers for Raw Read Error
Rate, Seek Error Rate, and Hardware ECC Recovered for Seagate HDs. My
own testing and research leads me to believe that these are normal and
do not in fact reflect errors.

Same here too. I believe these are from read accesses that were

started immediately after a seek

Like there is any other way.

and before the heads really settled.

The heads are assumed settled once the sector mark (in the servo data)
has been recognized (it bloody well has to since the servo data is read by
the same head) and the synchronization field field has passed the head.
Obviously you can't read the datafield *before* it passes the head.

This is fine, if the read and the ECC fails, the disk can do
a re-read with rettled heads.

Pity that to be able to read the sector contents the sector marks have to
be read first. If the drive would still have trouble to read the sector da-
ta already, imagine how it would be even worse reading the sector marks,
before that.

On writing, the disk gives the heads more time after a seek.

Pity that the distance of the sector marks and the data field is the same for
reading and writing. Once the sector mark is read, the data field follows
in a fixed time. No waiting whatsoever. If not, the drive has a full rotation
time before it can try again.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Rod Speed wrote in news:[email protected]

Yousuf Khan wrote in news:[email protected]

(e-mail address removed) wrote:
[Babbleshit snipped]

Arno

Hmm, how does one look at SMART attributes?
I normally have SMART off at the BIOS (have read SMART can just
cause more issues than it's worth oftentimes.) If I turn it on,
what tool can I use to view the attributes?


I keep the SMART warnings turned on in BIOS always. The only "more
issues than it's worth"-type problems are merely inconvenience
issues. For example, if SMART does detect an error on a drive, BIOS
will throw up the warning during boot time, and then stop the boot
process until you read the message and manually tell it to continue.
This will happen everytime you boot, and if you're rebooting often
(eg. during Windows patch updates), this can become annoying.

However, SMART is one of the most lenient error detection schemes out
there. It usually finds no errors, so if it actually finds something
then it's usually a sign that the drive truly needs to be replaced
sooner rather than later.

Nonsense again.
S.M.A.R.T. doesn't differentiate between internal and external
induced errors. If the PS is at fault replacing the drive won't help.

He used the word USUALLY for a reason, fool.

He also used the word TRULY, moron.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Hmm, how does one look at SMART attributes?
I normally have SMART off at the BIOS (have read SMART can just cause
more issues than it's worth oftentimes.) If I turn it on, what tool
can I use to view the attributes?

I keep the SMART warnings turned on in BIOS always. The only "more
issues than it's worth"-type problems are merely inconvenience issues.
For example, if SMART does detect an error on a drive, BIOS will throw
up the warning during boot time, and then stop the boot process until
you read the message and manually tell it to continue. This will happen
everytime you boot, and if you're rebooting often (eg. during Windows
patch updates), this can become annoying.

However, SMART is one of the most lenient error detection schemes out
there. It usually finds no errors, so if it actually finds something
then it's usually a sign that the drive truly needs to be replaced
sooner rather than later.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Yousuf Khan wrote in news:[email protected]

[Babbleshit snipped]

Arno

Hmm, how does one look at SMART attributes?
I normally have SMART off at the BIOS (have read SMART can just
cause more issues than it's worth oftentimes.) If I turn it on, what tool
can I use to view the attributes?

I keep the SMART warnings turned on in BIOS always. The only "more
issues than it's worth"-type problems are merely inconvenience issues.
For example, if SMART does detect an error on a drive, BIOS will throw
up the warning during boot time, and then stop the boot process until
you read the message and manually tell it to continue. This will happen
everytime you boot, and if you're rebooting often (eg. during Windows
patch updates), this can become annoying.

However, SMART is one of the most lenient error detection schemes out
there. It usually finds no errors, so if it actually finds something
then it's usually a sign that the drive truly needs to be replaced
sooner rather than later.

Nonsense again.
S.M.A.R.T. doesn't differentiate between internal and external induced errors.
If the PS is at fault replacing the drive won't help.

 

[Rod Speed]

Yousuf Khan wrote in news:[email protected]

[Babbleshit snipped]

Arno

Hmm, how does one look at SMART attributes?
I normally have SMART off at the BIOS (have read SMART can just
cause more issues than it's worth oftentimes.) If I turn it on,
what tool can I use to view the attributes?

I keep the SMART warnings turned on in BIOS always. The only "more
issues than it's worth"-type problems are merely inconvenience
issues. For example, if SMART does detect an error on a drive, BIOS
will throw up the warning during boot time, and then stop the boot
process until you read the message and manually tell it to continue.
This will happen everytime you boot, and if you're rebooting often
(eg. during Windows patch updates), this can become annoying.

However, SMART is one of the most lenient error detection schemes out
there. It usually finds no errors, so if it actually finds something
then it's usually a sign that the drive truly needs to be replaced
sooner rather than later.

Nonsense again.
S.M.A.R.T. doesn't differentiate between internal and external
induced errors. If the PS is at fault replacing the drive won't help.

He used the word USUALLY for a reason, fool.

 

[Rod Speed]

Rod Speed wrote in news:[email protected]

Yousuf Khan wrote in (e-mail address removed) wrote:
[Babbleshit snipped]

Arno

Hmm, how does one look at SMART attributes?
I normally have SMART off at the BIOS (have read SMART can just
cause more issues than it's worth oftentimes.) If I turn it on,
what tool can I use to view the attributes?


I keep the SMART warnings turned on in BIOS always. The only "more
issues than it's worth"-type problems are merely inconvenience
issues. For example, if SMART does detect an error on a drive, BIOS
will throw up the warning during boot time, and then stop the boot
process until you read the message and manually tell it to
continue. This will happen everytime you boot, and if you're
rebooting often (eg. during Windows patch updates), this can
become annoying.

However, SMART is one of the most lenient error detection schemes
out there. It usually finds no errors, so if it actually finds
something then it's usually a sign that the drive truly needs to
be replaced sooner rather than later.

Nonsense again.
S.M.A.R.T. doesn't differentiate between internal and external
induced errors. If the PS is at fault replacing the drive won't help.

He used the word USUALLY for a reason, fool.

He also used the word TRULY, moron.

Never ever could bullshit its way out of a wet paper bag, ****wit.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Nonsense again.
S.M.A.R.T. doesn't differentiate between internal and external induced errors.
If the PS is at fault replacing the drive won't help.

Hello precious, your momma been spanking you again? Dry your tears and
go tell her you're a person and you deserve to be respected.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Rod Speed]

Folkert Rienstra wrote


Hello precious, your momma been spanking you again?

Nar, its those nice fellas in white coats that are his problem.

Dry your tears and go tell her you're a person and you deserve to be respected.

No one respects rabid loonys except that they dont bother with those funky canvas jackets
with extremely long sleeves anymore, just taser them and inject them to keep them under control.

 

[Squeeze]

Yousuf Khan wrote in news:[email protected]

Hello precious, your momma been spanking you again? Dry your tears and
go tell her you're a person and you deserve to be respected.

Yousuf Khan

And another troll that drops the mask.
Trolls aren't what they used to be, these days.
They're so easily provoked. It's so disappointing.

 

[Squeeze]

Rod Speed wrote

Nar, its those nice fellas in white coats that are his problem.


No one respects rabid loonys except that they dont bother with those funky
canvas jackets
with extremely long sleeves anymore, just taser them and inject them to keep
them under control.

I'll bet that you know all this from personal experience, yes?

 

[Dave Seven]

However, SMART is one of the most lenient error detection schemes out
there. It usually finds no errors, so if it actually finds something
then it's usually a sign that the drive truly needs to be replaced
sooner rather than later.

Yousuf Khan

But you can just run HDtune (free version) and it will read the SMART
info without having to have it enabled in the bios.


http://www.hdtune.com/