Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?

Hi all,
I've just experienced a mystifying failure of a hard disk that was
literally only one day old. It is a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (80gb
5400RPM SATA) that came with my new Dell laptop. I had installed
Ubuntu Feisty Linux, and everything seemed to be working fine, and I
even checked the S.M.A.R.T. data for the drive and it looked great.

I was playing around with drive power settings using hdparm under
Linux, and I enabled "power-on in standby mode", which is supposed to
enable staggered spin-up. No particular reason, I was just trying it
out. I assumed the effect would be harmless in a single-drive
system. Everything continued to work fine, until I powered off the
computer an hour or so later...

I tried to turn it back on, and BIOS reported failure of the first
disk drive. I tried a variety of rescue CDs and boot disks, to no
avail... I could not get the drive to respond. I then removed the
drive from the laptop and put it in my desktop tower. Again, the
computer was unable to communicate with it, ruling out the possibility
of a drive controller issue. I tried holding the drive in my hand as
it powered up, and I could not feel the characteristic hum of the
motor!

So I'm quite mystified. The coincidence is uncanny, and I've never
had a brand-spanking-new drive fail like this. Is it possible that
enabling "power-on in standby mode" destroyed this drive?? In my
experience, drives in standby mode are still capable of communicating
with the host, so I don't understand what the problem with this drive
could be. Anyone have any advice/anecdotes/explanation?

Dan Lenski

Your BIOS can fail to send the START STOP UNIT command to the boot drive.

Or the drive firmware can have a bug in this path, in which case yes, the
drive is killed. But this is unlikely.

Solution:
- attach the disk to the second Linux machine as _non-primary_ disk.
- boot Linux
- play with "hdparm"

Or:
- find an USB/1394 box for the disk
- install in inside
- attach the box to a Windows machine. What will Windows say?

--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation

http://www.storagecraft.com

"Dan Lenski" wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi all,
I've just experienced a mystifying failure of a hard disk that was
literally only one day old. It is a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (80gb
5400RPM SATA) that came with my new Dell laptop. I had installed
Ubuntu Feisty Linux, and everything seemed to be working fine, and I
even checked the S.M.A.R.T. data for the drive and it looked great.

I was playing around with drive power settings using hdparm under
Linux, and I enabled "power-on in standby mode", which is supposed to
enable staggered spin-up. No particular reason, I was just trying it
out. I assumed the effect would be harmless in a single-drive
system. Everything continued to work fine, until I powered off the
computer an hour or so later...

I tried to turn it back on, and BIOS reported failure of the first
disk drive. I tried a variety of rescue CDs and boot disks, to no
avail... I could not get the drive to respond. I then removed the
drive from the laptop and put it in my desktop tower. Again, the
computer was unable to communicate with it, ruling out the possibility
of a drive controller issue. I tried holding the drive in my hand as
it powered up, and I could not feel the characteristic hum of the
motor!

So I'm quite mystified. The coincidence is uncanny, and I've never
had a brand-spanking-new drive fail like this. Is it possible that
enabling "power-on in standby mode" destroyed this drive?? In my
experience, drives in standby mode are still capable of communicating
with the host, so I don't understand what the problem with this drive
could be. Anyone have any advice/anecdotes/explanation?

Dan Lenski

"Dan Lenski" wrote in message
oups.com...
Hi all,
[SNIP]

So I'm quite mystified. The coincidence is uncanny, and I've never
had a brand-spanking-new drive fail like this. Is it possible that
enabling "power-on in standby mode" destroyed this drive?? In my
experience, drives in standby mode are still capable of communicating
with the host, so I don't understand what the problem with this drive
could be. Anyone have any advice/anecdotes/explanation?

Dan Lenski

You've just experienced an early failure. Nothing special, just a fact of
life. The frequency of failures usually follow the 'bathtub' curve.
Relatively many drives fail early in their life due to one weak component
that barely made it through the manufacturing tests. The failure rate drops
over time and remains low for a number of years. Then it goes up again when
the drive components start to wear.

Just call Dell and have the drive replaced under warranty.

Rob

On Jun 1, 12:15 pm, "Rob Turk" wrote:
You've just experienced an early failure. Nothing special, just a fact of
life. The frequency of failures usually follow the 'bathtub' curve.
Relatively many drives fail early in their life due to one weak component
that barely made it through the manufacturing tests. The failure rate drops
over time and remains low for a number of years. Then it goes up again when
the drive components start to wear.

I guess so. It's just... spooky! Is it typical for such early
failures to occur when the drive is power-cycled? I'm going to live
in fear of the "hdparm -s1" option in the future :-)

Just call Dell and have the drive replaced under warranty.

I've done that, after assuaging my conscience that this wasn't my
fault. Well, actually I used their Internet chat tech support...
which was a pleasant surprise since it turns out to be less annoying
than speaking on the phone.

Dan

Dan Lenski wrote:
On Jun 1, 12:15 pm, "Rob Turk" wrote:
You've just experienced an early failure. Nothing special, just a fact of
life. The frequency of failures usually follow the 'bathtub' curve.
Relatively many drives fail early in their life due to one weak component
that barely made it through the manufacturing tests. The failure rate drops
over time and remains low for a number of years. Then it goes up again when
the drive components start to wear.

Didn't Google, or some other large company, recently discredit the
bathtub curve failure rate theory?

On Jun 1, 12:13 pm, "Maxim S. Shatskih" wrote:
Your BIOS can fail to send the START STOP UNIT command to the boot drive.

Or the drive firmware can have a bug in this path, in which case yes, the
drive is killed. But this is unlikely.

Solution:
- attach the disk to the second Linux machine as _non-primary_ disk.
- boot Linux
- play with "hdparm"

Tried this. (I actually booted off a USB-drive containing some Linux
utilities since I only had one SATA cable.) When Linux boots, it
complains of an inability to communicate with SATA disk 1. So no /dev/
sd* node ever gets allocated for the disk.

I can see the possibility that BIOS fails to send the appropriate
initialization commands to the drive, knowing how buggy BIOS can be.
But it seems unlikely that *both* BIOS and the Linux kernel would fail
to do so! And from other mailing list posts, I've read that SATA
drives should not have any problem identifying themselves to the host
in standby mode, before spin-up.

Or:
- find an USB/1394 box for the disk
- install in inside
- attach the box to a Windows machine. What will Windows say?

An interesting idea. Though I don't have a SATA enclosure handy, only
an IDE enclosure.

I guess the drive really is just plain dead. I really wish I could
confirm or refute the notion that standby mode did it, though!

Dan

Dan Lenski wrote:


I guess the drive really is just plain dead. I really wish I could
confirm or refute the notion that standby mode did it, though!


So get another one and try it again, repeat until you have a
statistically valid sample :-)



--
Nik Simpson

"Dan Lenski" wrote in message oups.com
Hi all,
I've just experienced a mystifying failure of a hard disk that was
literally only one day old. It is a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (80gb
5400RPM SATA) that came with my new Dell laptop. I had installed
Ubuntu Feisty Linux, and everything seemed to be working fine, and I
even checked the S.M.A.R.T. data for the drive and it looked great.

I was playing around with drive power settings using hdparm under
Linux, and I enabled "power-on in standby mode", which is supposed to
enable staggered spin-up. No particular reason, I was just trying it
out. I assumed the effect would be harmless in a single-drive system.
Everything continued to work fine, until I powered off the
computer an hour or so later...

I tried to turn it back on, and BIOS reported failure of the first
disk drive. I tried a variety of rescue CDs and boot disks, to no
avail... I could not get the drive to respond. I then removed the
drive from the laptop and put it in my desktop tower. Again, the
computer was unable to communicate with it, ruling out the possibility
of a drive controller issue. I tried holding the drive in my hand as
it powered up, and I could not feel the characteristic hum of the motor!

And why should you? You set it up to "power-on in standby mode".
So it does.


So I'm quite mystified. The coincidence is uncanny, and I've never
had a brand-spanking-new drive fail like this. Is it possible that
enabling "power-on in standby mode" destroyed this drive??

Nope, it is just doing what you told it to do, its in standby until
you tell it to come out of it.

In my experience, drives in standby mode are still capable of communicating
with the host,

And it probably does.
Problem is likely that host doesn't understand why it is in standby mode,
so it fails it.

so I don't understand what the problem with this drive could be.

Most likely none.

Anyone have any advice/anecdotes/explanation?

Most likely your host isn't compatible with power-on in standby mode.
Set the drive back to normal. That may be easier said then done, apparently.


Dan Lenski

On Jun 1, 1:37 pm, Nik Simpson wrote:
So get another one and try it again, repeat until you have a
statistically valid sample :-)

I hadn't planned to get into the hard disk testing business anytime
soon :-)

I'm just worried that there could be some issue with standby mode on
this brand of drive. Having my drive die after 2 days is bad
enough... having it die after 2 months when I have all my work on
there would be a lot worse.

Dan

On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:03:47 -0000, Dan Lenski
wrote:

Hi all,
I've just experienced a mystifying failure of a hard disk that was
literally only one day old. It is a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (80gb
5400RPM SATA) that came with my new Dell laptop. I had installed
Ubuntu Feisty Linux, and everything seemed to be working fine, and I
even checked the S.M.A.R.T. data for the drive and it looked great.

I was playing around with drive power settings using hdparm under
Linux, and I enabled "power-on in standby mode", which is supposed to
enable staggered spin-up. No particular reason, I was just trying it
out. I assumed the effect would be harmless in a single-drive
system. Everything continued to work fine, until I powered off the
computer an hour or so later...

I tried to turn it back on, and BIOS reported failure of the first
disk drive. I tried a variety of rescue CDs and boot disks, to no
avail... I could not get the drive to respond. I then removed the
drive from the laptop and put it in my desktop tower. Again, the
computer was unable to communicate with it, ruling out the possibility
of a drive controller issue. I tried holding the drive in my hand as
it powered up, and I could not feel the characteristic hum of the
motor!

So I'm quite mystified. The coincidence is uncanny, and I've never
had a brand-spanking-new drive fail like this. Is it possible that
enabling "power-on in standby mode" destroyed this drive?? In my
experience, drives in standby mode are still capable of communicating
with the host, so I don't understand what the problem with this drive
could be. Anyone have any advice/anecdotes/explanation?

Dan Lenski

This is as expected. You need to send a

Power-Up In Standby feature set device spin-up.

command to spinup the disk, or a

Disable Power-Up In Standby feature set.

to disable the feature.
--
Svend Olaf