What would kill hard drives?

[Davej]

Had an old WD sata drive go bad some time ago, but I figured the slave
drive was probably OK. Nope. Finally tried checking it out and it is
dead also. What could a user do to kill both drives? Would ejecting
them from the bays with the power on cause certain death?

 

[Sjouke Burry]

Had an old WD sata drive go bad some time ago, but I figured the slave
drive was probably OK. Nope. Finally tried checking it out and it is
dead also. What could a user do to kill both drives? Would ejecting
them from the bays with the power on cause certain death?

In court that would certainly count as a serious attempt
at diskmurder.

 

[Paul]

Had an old WD sata drive go bad some time ago, but I figured the slave
drive was probably OK. Nope. Finally tried checking it out and it is
dead also. What could a user do to kill both drives? Would ejecting
them from the bays with the power on cause certain death?

Drives have a clamping device across +5V and +12V, to
protect against sudden power loss. That's to prevent
inductive arcing type behavior on sudden loss of power
(the current tries to continue to flow, when the
power connection is broken - the clamp devices prevent
voltage overshoot).

The SATA connector has advanced ground contacts (the
contacts are different lengths), to sequence which electrical
contacts happen first.

So it's designed for hot insertion.

The only problem with hot removal, is mechanical
shock to a rotating drive and loaded head assembly.
Some ejection mechanisms are not well designed.

In principle, you'd want to "park" the drive before
removing it. Do whatever is necessary to spin down the
drive, making it safer to remove. Ejecting at that
point, with head assembly landed, should be pretty safe.

Modern drives have respectable shock ratings. It
wasn't that many years ago, when a spinning drive
only had a 2G shock rating, meaning quick movements
could crash the heads. Modern drives reached a peak
of ability to resist shock a few years ago, and the
shock resistance has dropped a tiny bit since then,
as the density of the drive increased, and the
flying height decreased.

Hitachi was experimenting in the lab, with leaving
the disk heads resting on the disk surface. The
heads lasted one month, before the face was
ground off. It's not the results that count, rather
the fact they're researching that... Even if some
day, the flying height is zero, there will still
be an issue with shock damaging the heads. The
heads could "bounce" in that case. Personally, I
don't see this as a good idea, but, you "can't
stop progress".

Paul

 

[Davej]

Had an old WD sata drive go bad some time ago, but I figured the slave
drive was probably OK. Nope. Finally tried checking it out and it is
dead also. What could a user do to kill both drives? Would ejecting
them from the bays with the power on cause certain death?

Drives have a clamping device across +5V and +12V, to
protect against sudden power loss. [...]
The SATA connector has advanced ground contacts (the
contacts are different lengths), [...]
Modern drives have respectable shock ratings. [...]
    Paul

Thanks Paul. So it is a mystery. Now maybe you can tell me what a
smart person would use for backup these days. I am sure I have lost
some photos and stuff that was on that 640GB slave drive.

 

[Metspitzer]

Had an old WD sata drive go bad some time ago, but I figured the slave
drive was probably OK. Nope. Finally tried checking it out and it is
dead also. What could a user do to kill both drives? Would ejecting
them from the bays with the power on cause certain death?

Drives have a clamping device across +5V and +12V, to
protect against sudden power loss. [...]
The SATA connector has advanced ground contacts (the
contacts are different lengths), [...]
Modern drives have respectable shock ratings. [...]
    Paul

Thanks Paul. So it is a mystery. Now maybe you can tell me what a
smart person would use for backup these days. I am sure I have lost
some photos and stuff that was on that 640GB slave drive.

Charter offers unlimited cloud storage.

 

[Flasherly]

Had an old WD sata drive go bad some time ago, but I figured the slave
drive was probably OK. Nope. Finally tried checking it out and it is
dead also. What could a user do to kill both drives? Would ejecting
them from the bays with the power on cause certain death?

I turn mine off before pulling them, then power up the bay if changing
disks. USB stuff. Slave is dated to PATA and may be avoided
altogether when possible for drive CS pin-selection and correct ribbon
orientation. To kill two drives beyond any shadow of a doubt, I'd
heartily recommend a 10lb. sledgehammer from a full-length hickory
handle. Docking bays haven't been around long enough for consensuses
to emerge, although what plugs into, to power them, obviously isn't of
a same construct as better caliber computer power supply units.

 

[Flasherly]

Side note - WD. I have had WD, and Maxtor, drives I've bought from
larger chain stores deep sales, from their blackest pits, rated for
one-year warranty, which failed as if miraculously to a date,
preordained as if written into a drive's PROM. Surely, an uncanny
feat of construction, even though most of my drives since are Samsung,
a couple Seagates, and probably had at least 2-yr warrantees attached
to the ser#.

 

[Paul]

Had an old WD sata drive go bad some time ago, but I figured the slave
drive was probably OK. Nope. Finally tried checking it out and it is
dead also. What could a user do to kill both drives? Would ejecting
them from the bays with the power on cause certain death?

Drives have a clamping device across +5V and +12V, to
protect against sudden power loss. [...]
The SATA connector has advanced ground contacts (the
contacts are different lengths), [...]
Modern drives have respectable shock ratings. [...]
Paul

Thanks Paul. So it is a mystery. Now maybe you can tell me what a
smart person would use for backup these days. I am sure I have lost
some photos and stuff that was on that 640GB slave drive.

I haven't done a lot of fancy backup setups.

On the Windows 7 laptop, I use the System Image feature,
and transfer the results to an external USB drive.

For some of my other disks, like on this box, I image
over to some 500GB drives I keep in the other room.
I just dangle a SATA cable out of the computer,
and connect up the 500GB and copy the drive over.
There's no name-brand software involved there.

People on the groups here, use various versions of
Acronis. The later versions of Acronis products
are pretty bloated (just like Nero went the same way).
So the recommendations there, could well depend on
what vintage of software people are using.

I guess I'm the wrong person to ask, because I don't
typically do file-by-file backups, differential backup,
that sort of thing. When I backup, I generally back up
everything, and you don't need fancy software to do
that.

On an older OS, you have things like NTBackup. I've
managed to add an NTBackup plugin to a BartPE CD,
such that if I had to, I could do a restore from
an NTBackup, to a new disk. But if recommending such
to another person, don't waste your time and just
get a copy of Acronis.

A free version of Acronis, is available as Seagate
DiskWizard. The software Seagate offers for cloning
disks, is licensed to work if a Seagate drive is
present. The software even comes with a separate
download manual. So if you have a Seagate or WD
hard drive, you can check their sites, for
software that was actually written by Acronis.

This is the user manual, for that (limited) software product.

http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf

"3.2 Full backup

Seagate DiscWizard can create full backups.

A full backup contains all data at the moment of
backup creation. It forms a base for further incremental
backup or is used as a standalone archive (incremental
backups are not available in the current version of
the product).

A standalone full backup might be an optimal solution
if you often roll back the system to its initial
state or if you do not like to manage multiple files."

So that's not a "real" backup tool, as it only does full
backups to a .tib file. Other paid versions of Acronis
do incrementals.

Another tool you can use for backups, is Macrium Reflect Free.
But since I'm an "imaging" type guy, and not a
"file-by-file" guy, this is more a product I would
like. I've set up Macrium Reflect Free here, it's running
on the machine, but currently no images from it have
been stored on my drive pool. Just my home-made-experimenter
type backups are on there

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

But by using Macrium or Windows 7 System Image, they're
relatively easy to use, and at the very least you can
say to yourself "I have two copies of that file now".
It's better than nothing.

I don't really want to dwell on my "home-made-experimenter"
methods, because they're not fit for human consumption
Use something more pleasant. In the case of Macrium, just
use the boot CD image included in the product, to make
a recovery CD. Don't bother with the huge download that
goes with Microsoft WAIK plus WinPE as a recovery CD. The
boot CD built-in, works fine. In the picture here, are
the screens when the Reflect built-in boot CD are used.
You use this CD, to restore an OS to a brand new disk.

http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/1456/macriumlinuxboot.gif

*******

A disk is only really dead, if it won't show up in the BIOS
screen. If your two SATA, won't show up in the BIOS,
and you're using Southbridge SATA ports, then it's probably
dead. If the Southbridge is made by VIA, make sure your
drives are jumpered with the Force150 SATA I jumper, rather
than running at SATA II rates. Since it could just be a
blown SATA ports, you can also move the cable to a
different motherboard port. If a SATA cable is "pinched"
or "kinked", replace it. SATA cables can be damaged
mechanically, if jammed in the computer side panel.

Hard drives are designed (rightly or wrongly), to not
respond to the outside world, if they're not able to read
the config data off the platter. A disk boots internally
in two steps. Minimal firmware allows the drive to spin up.
It then reads "track -1" to get the rest of the firmware
and data structures. If that portion does not complete,
the disk will not identify itself in the BIOS, and will
just ignore you. They should never have done the design
this way - the damn disk could have been designed to
*always* respond to the user, answer diagnostic queries
and the like. But... they didn't do it that way.

Some drives fail, because of firmware issues that cause
the data structures to get corrupted. For a couple
disk drive models, you can connect a three pin serial cable
and issue cryptic commands to recover the disk. *Always*
Google the drive model number, to see if your drive is
prone to firmware-related failures, and see if a hacker
method is available for recovery. Due to the amount of
firmware related issues, I thoroughly review hard drive
model numbers before buying them! One of the reasons
my last purchase was a 500GB, was because the 1TB and 2TB
models were bugged. And I learned about it, by reviewing
the models in advance.

Paul

 

[RayLopez99]

On Sunday, December 2, 2012 12:00:08 AM UTC+2, Paul wrote:

[Useful stuff on backup]

One gotcha that's obvious but got me once is if you use a USB external drive to backup, and it's password protected, make sure you remove the passwordprotection since if you use commercial software to restore, it will not read a password protected drive on reboot. Duh. But I forgot that once muchto my chagrin.

RL

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

Thanks Paul. So it is a mystery. Now maybe you can tell me what a
smart person would use for backup these days. I am sure I have lost
some photos and stuff that was on that 640GB slave drive.

I don't know what smart people do, but I'm a good example of what
paranoid people do. I have batch files written to back up all new
files from my data drives to a separate 2 GB internal drive twice per
day. Additionally, I have other batch files written to back up all new
data files to another internal hard drive nightly. And in addition to
all that, I back up everything new on my data drive twice a month to
external drives. Thats all for the data drive. The system drive is a
SSD which I clone to a separate hard drive every couple of months.

The batch files are simple robocopy commands, like:

@echo off

Robocopy M: D:\MWF\M-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy F: D:\MWF\F-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy G: D:\MWF\G-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy H: D:\MWF\H-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy I: D:\MWF\I-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy P: D:\MWF\P-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy Q: D:\MWF\Q-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy V: D:\MWF\V-BACKUP /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy c:\users\charlie\appdata\roaming\thunderbird\profiles\
D:\MWF\Mailbackup /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy c:\users\charlie\documents D:\MWF\doc-backup /MIR /R:1 /W:1

Robocopy z: D:\V-A\V-ABACK /MIR /R:1 /W:1
Robocopy R: D:\R\RBACK /MIR /R:1 /W:1

echo %date% %time% > D:\Date.txt
echo %date% %time% > D:\MWF\Date.txt

:end

Where D: is a 2 TB SATA with two folders, one for MWF nightly backups
and one for TTS nightly backups.

 

[Robin Bignall]

I'm also a little paranoid. My most important customer backs up his 2
gb data drive 4 times each night: 1 to a backup partition on the system
disk, 1 to an external drive via USB, and to the system disk on 2 backup
machines where it will restore to the data drive if needed.

Do a weekly check that the backup program has complete all tasks.

Other customers do a daily backup to a dedicated hard drive and a CD
burn of the backup.

I'm pretty paranoid, too. I use ShadowProtect, that *could* take an
incremental every 5 minutes if you wanted it to. It was designed for
getting servers back in action quickly. With the desktop version I
automatically backup my data disk every hour, system disk every 3 hours.
Full backups Sundays, to both internal and external disks.

 

[Robin Bignall]

Where are the drives?

The only important one is in the car.

If they are all in the same building you only have one backup.

Given Sandy and Katrina, if they are in the same state you still don't
have an off site backup.

I don't have a business and we don't have Katrinas in the UK, thank
goodness.
The only important data is personal finance, and ten years' worth of
that takes up 1% or so of a DVD.

For 2GB, there are more than 20 on-line storage companies that can
do things inexpensively.

In fact, for 2GB, I'd put everything in a TrueCrypt encryption disk
and back that up to Amazon S3 Glacier: US$0.01/GB/month. No I/O
charges for backing up, only when restoring with the 3 hour or
so response time. Probably could do in multiple continents.

If you want faster retrieval in the case when your local backups
are gone but you still can run your business, use regular Amazon 3S
for about $1.20/GB/year plus transmission costs.

Backup at 10Mb/s (= 1MB/s) would be less than an hour.
There probably is third party software to backup only the changes
so save on transmission time and storage costs. (I'm assuming that
an adversary knowing how much data changes from month-to-month is
not a security issue. If it is a security issue you have to transmit
and store everything each time.)

I can see that something like this would be invaluable if I ran a
business.

 

[jiongs546647]

If you are not mind to obtain a free data backup software, you can visit: http://www.aomeitech.com/aomei-data-backuper.html you can use it for your data backup purpose