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#1
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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 |
#2
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
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 |
#3
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
"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 |
#4
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
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 |
#5
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
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 |
#6
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
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 |
#7
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
"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 |
#8
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
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 |
#9
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
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 |
#10
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Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?
On Jun 1, 1:43 pm, "Folkert Rienstra" wrote:
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. Indeed. However, I would expect it to come out of standby mode when addressed by the host :-) For example, under Linux I can put a drive temporarily into standby with "hdparm -y /dev/sda". However, the Linux IDE/SATA drivers will bring it out of standby as soon as I try to access 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. Okay. I would believe this if it was only the laptop BIOS that didn't know what to do. But not only the laptop BIOS can't initialize it, also the BIOS on my desktop can't initialize it, and the Linux kernel can't initialize it when booting from an external disk. I certainly think a recent Linux 2.6.20 kernel must know how to deal with this situation... I've never met another hard drive feature that the Linux kernel couldn't handle with ease. Of course, now that I dig around a little more, I find this patch on the linux-ide mailing list: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-id.../msg04323.html Maybe with this patch my kernel will figure out what to do? I'll try it tonight... 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. Indeed. Is there any utility to do this?? Dan Lenski |
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