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ST3000DM001

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Re: ST3000DM001

#151
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a small web hosting company back then, and we used a bunch of IBM Deathstar's. They certainly lived up to their name! I disassembled one just to see what went wrong, and I found the cause (of that drive's failure, at least). Here's a list of terms for reference: http://data-recovery-tips.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/h... At some point, the bearing that serves as the pivot that the actuator arm and act…

I have a recording from one of my drives which I believe was a failing Deathstar. Not a pleasant sound to experience. https://r-1.ch/hdd.mp3 (warning, loud)

I have some sounds on soundcloud, two different drives failing:

https://soundcloud.com/ryan-flowers-916961339/sets/hard-driv...

The associated blog post: https://miscdotgeek.com/adventures-in-hard-drives/

Re: ST3000DM001

#152
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I have seen is not having rotational vibration sensors. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-failure-lawsui... > The Seagate 3 TB models failed at a higher rate than other drives during the Backblaze deployment, but in fairness, the Seagate drives were the only models that did not feature RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors that counteract excessive vibration in heavy usage models -- specifically because S…

Do drives in this type of stationary assembly (i.e. a server rack or a stationary PC) ever trigger their vibration protection? Barring of course during a bit of bumping in the server rack. I mean, these drives are not sitting in laptops. I have a hard time thinking the lack of this feature bears any weight on the huge failure rates Backblaze and discrete customers saw, though I'd accept the argument if there was a 2.…

As I understand it another driver in the same rack doing work is enough to effect the performance of the other drivers in the rack. This is why you use fancy expensive "enterprise grade" drives as they can cope better with it.

https://www.dtc.umn.edu/publications/reports/2005_08.pdf

> In the presence of an external vibration caused by adjacent disk drive seek operations the bandwidth performance of a consumer-grade disk drive “feeling” these vibrations will decrease about 10%-15% when reading data and about 25%-40% when writing data

Don't really know if this is enough to actually cause damage if the disk does not have the hardware to detect this vibration.

Re: ST3000DM001

#153
post #21
post #19

In 2012 I was working at the Internet Archive. I remember the 2011 Thailand floods restricted the supply of hard disks and pushed up prices. The best deal we could find was buying these Seagate hard disks as external drives at retail from Costco. We picked up a truck load. Then had somebody with a screw driver remove them all from the enclosures and install them in new servers. The error rate was high, the drives did…

Dropbox (or maybe BackBlaze?) called that "shucking".

I worked at an ISP in 1996, where we would buy external Boca 28.8k modems in bulk from retailers and take the boards out to put them in our racks because they were cheaper - yet identical - to the "ISP-grade" versions that Boca sold as just boards.

Back then we referred to it as shucking the modems, so it's definitely not a new term in IT/computing (never mind the actual origin of the word).

Re: ST3000DM001

#154

Back in the mid 90s I was working in IT at a midsized company. We used Compaq desktops (this is the Pentium Pro timeframe). The HD in the system where quantum fireball (IIRC). They failed at an amazing rate all in the first 3 months (30%). We called Compaq at one point and said, look we want replacement drives for all of our remaining systems. After much back and forth (stupid on their part as we had 1000+ machines o…

I recall a similar experience with a particularly poor-performing $10k+ 3D graphics card for CAD/CAM back in the 90s. It had gone back and forth multiple times for crashing the system, locking up and just plain chugging along relative to the other cards we purchased. The problem was definitely the card, but the vendor claimed there was nothing wrong. Every time it was sent back to us there were more wire traces added to the card and other rework done with no explanation.

After running a pair of probes hooked up to 110vac along the fingers of the VESA bus connection on the video card (and a few microprocessor chips exploded), the scorch marks were cleaned up and it was sent back one more time. We finally did get a new card that worked perfectly along with a long, vaguely threatening letter.

Sometimes the clearest path is through the mud.

Re: ST3000DM001

#155
I had a backup JBOD with 36 of these drives. I thought since it was a backup machine that rarely will be used I could buy non-enterprise drives... Big mistake. There were 47 disk failures from 2013 to 2018.

Re: ST3000DM001

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read same and could not believe that author is calling them selves "good customer" and meantime also intentionally failing hard drives with teaser. Some mental gymnastics there ;)

It is an amusing story from a completely different time and place in IT. Today people would just loudly and publicly complain on Twitter and other social media to embarrass the vendor into sorting it. Sharing a story, not speaking to the nature or the correctness of the solution. I have worked on both sides. Once when I was on the vendor side a very large customer returned a very expensive switch as RMA. A set of 16…

My understanding is that having crappy latch design is incomparable to intentionally frying hard drives with taser.

Re: ST3000DM001

#157
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.

Fraud requires that there is some financial benefit to gain that you are not entitled to

It's still shockingly wrong.

Re: ST3000DM001

#158
post #90
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean at first it sounded like fraud, but then you explained it, and then it really sounded like fraud.

Nah, it's fair. We've had to fry our failed HDDs because otherwise the vendor would replace them with those we've returned previously. Then they would not endure RAID rebuild and the cycle would repeat.

Not keeping track of serial numbers?

Re: ST3000DM001

#159
post #114

So why did this drive fail? Has nobody dissected it to figure out exactly which component no longer functioned correctly?

All I have seen is not having rotational vibration sensors. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-hdd-failure-lawsui... > The Seagate 3 TB models failed at a higher rate than other drives during the Backblaze deployment, but in fairness, the Seagate drives were the only models that did not feature RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors that counteract excessive vibration in heavy usage models -- specifically because S…

Is there any way to tap this hdd sensors data on linux? I remember there were some apps on windows that read these hdd sensors data and use them as accelerometer / gyro, which was pretty neat when run on a laptop (this was when iBeer and virtual lighter apps were still a hot thing).
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