Hard Disk Problems

[Chandler]

The hard disk in my mum's laptop appears to be dying; it's a Fujitsu "Silent-Drive" but is far from silent and makes loud disk crunching noises.

When we first got the machine (used) it used to hang randomly, and I put it down to driver errors, but I now think that it may have been that the pagefile or some other system file was located on a bad sector.  This problem went away and the machine has run fine for a while.

Now, there is a lot of work on it, and I decided it was best to make a backup on the Quantex so began transferring the files across the network.  On one file the transfer stopped, so I went in to look and the drive was making a repeated sound over and over again, and no programs would load.

I rebooted and tried to open the file (50MB PowerPoint) and it opened fine.  So, I attempted to copy it again, and got an Invalid MS-DOS Command error (from Windows XP) with a load of Disk warnings in the Event Log.  I opened up the file again, and did a Save As... and it saved the entire file fine!

I know that the drive is beyond repair (over 40 re-allocated sectors and 50-odd pending) but it's strange that I could open the file from within PowerPoint but not copy or move it from Explorer. ???

[Chandler]

I tried a warranty repair request with Fujitsu but they totally refused to honour it, saying that the computer manufacturer has to do it (which there is no chance of since I'm not the original owner).  I'd recommend avoiding Fujitsu Silent-Drives if this is how long they last, the notebook is only just over a year old and the hard drive is totally worn out.  I've had a Hitachi drive in my other laptop last for 2 years so far and it's being running pretty much flat out for that time.

When the hard drive in my Quantex went bad, Maxtor replaced it for free, no questions asked, even though they knew it was OEM.  The 3-year warranty applied.  Fujitsu drives, also have a 3-year warranty, but they won't honor this since it was sold with a computer.

If you want a reliable laptop hard drive, go for Hitachi, otherwise go for Fujitsu and be very disappointed.

[query]

Unfortunately, it's the luck of the draw - any given drive may fail early or last longer than average.  Further unfortunately, all four major notebook manufacturers would likely have denied your coverage on an OEM part -- I don't think any of the four notebook drive makers sell retail parts.

I've seen very few problems with Fujitsu notebook drives - but a large number of Hitachi Travelstars in recent model Dell notebooks fail of late.  Hitachi seems to be having particular reliability problems with the 7K60 series of 7200 rpm drives.

[Chandler]

Thanks for the reply and for the heads-up on the 7K60; I very nearly bought one of these a couple of weeks ago but decided the cost was too high.

The Fujitsu drives are the cheapest out of all of them, by quite a significant amount once you get to 40GB.  I may give them another chance; since I don't know the history of this machine it could have been abused.

As a temporary measure is there any way to repair the drive?  I tried chkdsk /R but it just gets stuck at 37%.  The Fujitsu diagnostics also get stuck, so I guess there's no hope.

[query]

Even if you can repair it temporarily, I would not trust it.

Today, a Powerbook crossed my path on which the owner managed to physically destroy (crack) the hinge mounts - no small feat, since they are not plastic, but titanium alloy.  The machine also had a dying hard drive - perhaps no coincidence.

More than with desktops, I tend to equate drive failures with rough handling in notebooks (particularly when someone brings in a machine that has a drive equipped with a shock sensor, which displays a clear "shock tolerance exceeded" error -- most Hitachi/IBM drives have these).

[Chandler]

I was wondering, how much shock is 800G?  My own laptop has a Hitachi DK23 series drive and I believe that it has a shock sensor (it gives a G-Sense reading via SMART).  It's taken a few non-operating knocks while moving to/from university yet has been problem free.

How hard are people hammering these things to cause damage?  I suppose I can't blame Fujitsu for not providing a replacement; I guess Maxtor are just a special case.

I've been reading some hard drive specs recently and noticed that they quote two shock figures, the regular shock, and then a vibrational shock.  Could the vibrations from a dodgy CD/DVD be enough to damage a hard drive when it is reading/writing, especially in a laptop where everything is so close together?  

Similarly I've seen people stick a subwoofer next to their tower.  Ignoring the fact that many subwoofers are unshielded would vibration from one be sufficient to cause damage?

You're right about not trusting the old drive now, so I'm looking for a replacement.  The drives in my price range are the Fujitsu MHT2040-AT and Hitachi DK23EA-40F.  Would you recommend either over the other?

[query]

800G is quite a bit of shock - 800 times the acceleration due to gravity.  

I wish I knew exactly how someone treated their notebook to trigger the shock sensor - the one in question is a Dell Latitude D600, which showed no outward sign of damage.  The other one recently was  a Macintosh PowerBOok, which in addition to a damaged hard drive came in with cracked screen supports - cracked titanium metal, no less.

The Hitachi DK23-40s seem to be reliable drives  -- I have one in my Inspiron 8200 that's a couple of years old and has been fine.  I like the Toshiba FDB drives with the 16M cache onboard as well - unfortunately, Toshiba doesn't provide utility support, so I hope I won't need it (I have one in my older Inspiron 5000e).

[Chandler]

I guess I spoke too soon.  My own laptop, with a DK23DA-40 had been in for a replacement DVD/CDRW drive (it was taking a very long time to spin up, if at all).

When it came back to me, they said they had tested the hard drive and found no faults (because I had told them about reallocated sectors) but now it's clicking whenever it unloads the heads.  Before, it would make a metallic "swishy" sound when it unloaded them (if you've used these drives, you probably know what I'm talking about).  I checked SMART again, and the Load/Unload Cycles was over 1 billion.  After a few hours of use, it had gone to over 2 billion (I don't trust this reading since the drives are only rated for 300,000 cycles, but the attribute has gone down to 77%).  Do you think it's got damaged in transit?

[query]

Give it a run with the drive fitness test.  Unless replacing the optical drive required removing the hard drive, and it was done carelessly, I suspect it is a coincidence.

If you were seeing reallocated sectors in large numbers before, it could have been a symptom of a drive beginning to fail.  Ordinarily, you don't see sectors going bad until all the spares have been used up - once that happens, it's time for a new drive.

[Chandler]

I ran the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test and it passed everything.  After using the laptop in warm weather, it suprisingly stopped clicking, I don't know why.

I do believe that the repair wasn't carried out carefully; I look after this machine, and it went back in perfect condition (cosmetically) but came back with a scratch on the case above the keyboard, and while "fixing" the backlight (again) the hinge cover has been damaged (the edges are knarlled).  Do I have grounds to complain about this?

I know that cosmetic damage isn't usually covered under warranty (they've re-sprayed it once when the paint rubbed off) but this is damage caused by their carelessness, not mine.

(the backlight has started flickering again today, 2 weeks after the machine came back, and it doesn't ever get closed, it just sits on the desk! - so that aspect of repair was pretty pointless).

[lap-newbie]

Check TCWO for laptop drives. They have Toshiba 20GB for under $85 with 3 year warranty from the manufacturer.

www.tcwo.com

I purchased mine from them, it works like a champ. I have purchased a lot of hardware from them, have yet to be disappointed in a product.

[Chandler]

I thought I would update with a little bit more information.

I've been monitoring this Hitachi drive for a few weeks, and it definately only "clicks" and "scrapes" (hard to explain - its a really metallic-sound, but quite software rather than harsh) when left idle.  So, if I do something which keeps the drive running all the time (e.g. playing back video from the drive) it is quiet.  If, however I watch a DVD, the drive is quiet for about a minute and then just goes nuts, chirruping/scraping (I really don't know :-[ I'll try to record the sound) constantly (and I mean constantly) followed by clicks every other time.    

The drive hasn't developed any more bad sectors, but something is definately wrong with it (although the manufacturer claim there is absolutely nothing wrong with the drive!)

As for SMART information...
Since it started to make this noise, the Load/Unload Cycle Count has gone through the roof and the attribute has dropped down to 70% (it was 72% just a couple of weeks ago).  (What's even more worrying is that the raw data indicates 4 billion load/unload cycles, again this is since it started to make this noise)

This supports my theory that the drive is constantly unloading/reloading the heads to/from the surface, but why is it doing it?

Also, I highly doubt that it has done 4 billion load/unload cycles of the heads :o  so why is it reporting that it has?

[query]

Usually, repeated seeks (load/unload) are indicative of a drive that has lost or is losing the servo tracks on the platters - likely some of them either were or are in bad sectors.

If you have seen bad sectors on it, that's proof enough - no modern drive should show bad sectors.  Have it replaced.

[Chandler]

I have been using a neat SMART monitoring tool called HDD Health (freeware) for about a week.  Today, it popped up a little warning message - "GSense Error Rate changes from 100 to 99".  With this it calculated a TEC of 16/07/2005 (which is probably calculated too soon since I've only been monitoring for a week and it bases it on rate of change).  The Hitachi Drive Fitness Test still passes.

Edit:  It's now increased back up to 100 and the TEC has disappeared

As for the bad sectors, they're not actually appearing to the operating system on this drive (the Fujitsu drive mentioned at the start of this thread has been replaced in my mum's laptop) but SMART indicates bad sector remapping.

What actually determines the G Sense Error Rate attribute though?  I know that I haven't subjected this laptop to any shock, and when this decreased to 99% it was just sat on the desk idle.

I managed to stop the clicking with a program called SilentDrive, which was written for these Hitachi drives clicking.  However, Hitachi fixed the firmware to stop the clicking and my drive was one of the new ones so I don't know why it started doing it.  Sounds suspiciously similar to the IBM Deathstar problem.

[Chandler]

The day has come.  I think I've had a head crash.

The computer suddenly locked up.  I rebooted but it BSOD'd on me.  Now a lot of my files have CRC errors on them.

I've managed to get a lot of my stuff onto my external backup drive, but there are some things which give CRC errors.  Is this data lost or is it possible that it may eventually read them?

SMART indicates 6 pending sectors to be reallocated with 3 being done already.  The read error rate went right down to 15.  Will it do any good to run the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test?  This makes it reallocate but does it reduce the chance of getting the data back?

Thanks in advance.

PS I'm really going to have a go at the manufacturer now.  I told them explicitly that there was something wrong with the drive and asked them to check the SMART data but they returned it stating "No Fault".  If I can tell that a drive is going to fail I would expect them to have been able to.

[Chandler]

I've just run a CHKDSK /R on the drive, and after a couple of hours at boot time, I can copy most of the files to my external drive, albeit VERY slowly.  Initially I tried the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test utility, and it told me that it could "recover" bad sectors by writing blank data to them.

The files don't APPEAR to be corrupted in that they open fine.  I also have some AVI's that I compressed from DVB and these play fine too.

So, does NTFS+CHKDSK really work this well?

[Chandler]

I sent my machine in for repair and it's come back with a new Fujitsu MHT2040AT drive so I'm happy with that - it's quiet and performs very nicely.

For my mum's laptop I replaced the Fujitsu drive with a new Toshiba MK3017GAP and it works well but it is VERY "clicky".  Is this normal with the Toshiba drives?  The noise is noticeable on my mum's laptop because it runs silent most of the time.

[dio6]

@ chandler

I bought a new acer 5672 one week ago and also have my hard drive (a hitachi hts541080G9SA00) clicking all the time. This is not normal. I also ran HDD Health with no problems, but today I sudden got a gsense error rate change from 100 to 99.

I never knew a drive could be clicking this random, so I guess that this is a problem?
Anyway tomorrow ACER is gonna pick up this laptop and check it, and hopefully they will recognize the problem and fix it, because this clicking can be really annoying in silent places.

[query]

The clicking is normal for Hitachi drives.  Ask them for another make of replacement if it is irritating.

[dio6]

is this normal even when it's clicking every 2-3 seconds?
I think I'll keep it then. I d rather compare it with other 5672's first before having it in for more than a week.

Some say it's bad, other say it's normal... anyone with the right answer?

[query]

It's normal. Some people don't mind it;  I think it's annoying.  WD Scorpio drives tend to clunk a bit as well.

If you have the option, Seagate and Samsung mobile drives run just about silently.