Hard drive clicking.

[Giles Habibula]

I have a 13.5 gig Maxtor 5400 rpm hd on my internet PC. I download about 60 megs per day (I subscribe to the Coast to Coast radio show and download the show every day for almost a year now). I've been using this drive pretty steadily since late 1998 when I bought the PC new, back when Micron was at the top of its game.

The drive I'm speaking of is actually the secondary hd; an identical 13.5 Maxtor is the primary.

Lately, the drive has taken to some clicking ocassionally that is louder than usual. About one louder click every 15 seconds when downloading to it.

My first thought was that my drive was finally failing me. However, after checking my remaining space available on the drive, it turned out that I was down to only 315 megs remaining. In other words, the drive was full.

I deleted 5 gigs worth of old shows (yes I burned them to CDs first), rebooted, did a thorough Scandisk and Defrag on both drives. Both drives showed no errors and no bad sectors. There was none of the louder clicks during this process either, and actually, since then I haven't noticed the problem at all.

So, is it possible that it was clicking like that just simply because the drive was full? Or should I be shopping for another drive because this one is showing signs of failure?

Maybe I'm just getting paranoid? In 12 years of PC ownership, I've never had a drive fail on me yet, so I'm not at all certain what the symptoms are.

[Rip]

I have a 13.5 gig Maxtor 5400 rpm hd on my internet PC. I download about 60 megs per day (I subscribe to the Coast to Coast radio show and download the show every day for almost a year now). I've been using this drive pretty steadily since late 1998 when I bought the PC new, back when Micron was at the top of its game.

The drive I'm speaking of is actually the secondary hd; an identical 13.5 Maxtor is the primary.

Lately, the drive has taken to some clicking ocassionally that is louder than usual. About one louder click every 15 seconds when downloading to it.

My first thought was that my drive was finally failing me. However, after checking my remaining space available on the drive, it turned out that I was down to only 315 megs remaining. In other words, the drive was full.

I deleted 5 gigs worth of old shows (yes I burned them to CDs first), rebooted, did a thorough Scandisk and Defrag on both drives. Both drives showed no errors and no bad sectors. There was none of the louder clicks during this process either, and actually, since then I haven't noticed the problem at all.

So, is it possible that it was clicking like that just simply because the drive was full? Or should I be shopping for another drive because this one is showing signs of failure?

Maybe I'm just getting paranoid? In 12 years of PC ownership, I've never had a drive fail on me yet, so I'm not at all certain what the symptoms are.

She's getting closer to death. Get a new 7200rpm drive and image it over. Hard drives are cheap compared to the pain of fixing it when the drive actually fails, even for people who backup regularly, which are few and far between.

[The Meal]

Clicks happen during "normal" drive use whenever the drive needs to do a bang-bang seek (which for a user, just think of it as a long-distance seek). If you're basically crammed the drive full-up and the command queuing system can't put your files in a sequential order (due to fragmentation and lack of available space), having boatloads of bang-bang seeks (either when writing or reading) isn't a big surprise. So if the clicking went away after you made some room and defragged, I'm not surprised.

HOWEVER. Drives are rated with MTBF's of about five years. That means that of every drive we put out on the market, the average drive will fail in about five years. For every drive that shits the bed in the first 90 days, there'll be four drives that last six years instead of five. You've got yourself a drive that's lasted longer than its been designed to last.

And hard drives fail due to mechanical components breaking down. This isn't a electrical component (where if it lasts the first half-hour it's likely going to last into the forseeable future), this is mechanics. This is a ball-bearing motor spinning round and round and round 90 times each second, with only the thinnest layer of oil keeping those balls lubricated. This is a little GMR ceramic head pushing through layers of lube on the surface of the disk (occassionally flying as high as a couple of nanometers (i.e., basically dragging) the size/speed comparison is that of a 747 flying full-throttle at about an inch above the ground). This is a device that will be heating itself and cooling itself from ambient (25C) temperatures to whatever the interior of your case gets to (55C?) and then cooling off -- relaxing stresses and allowing vibrations to do their nasty a little bit more as time goes on. If, when you're given a hard drive, you expect the timer to go off in five years, and you happen to have one that's managed to last six, how much longer do you *think* you have before that timer finally goes Ding!

Fully disclosure: the industry I work in does better when people purchase more hard drives (although one more drive sold isn't going to make that much of a difference). It's natural to look at the advice I give and think that it may be self-serving. In this case, my advice serves the both of us well.

Best of luck!

~Neal

[Giles Habibula]

Wow Neal, that was beautiful!
Seriously, where else would I be priveleged enough to get such a detailed explanation for my mundane problem? My girlfriend is sitting here very impressed and telling me that this goes way beyond normal customer service, and you're not even getting paid for this. Yet another reason I'm proud to call OO my home.

Anyhow, I thank you for your response, which made things very clear to me. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this drive, but will also be purchasing another one to have ready to go when this one does fail.

As I have no *vital* stuff on this drive, I figure I'll just use it until it quits, and then probably just replace both drives with one larger new one. But it's definitely good to know its days are numbered, so I can have the new one standing by, ready to install.

Incidentally, my oldest PC (from 1993--a 486 with a 170 meg and a 420 meg drives) still functions perfectly--those drives still have no bad sectors and have never even hiccupped.

I imagine the 5 year life expectancy you mentioned has more to do with average use rather than actual time? I used those drives pretty heavily for 6 or 7 years, but now they get used only several times a year. Or maybe it's because they have a larger margin for error since the tolerances might have been more lenient back in the days when not so much was crammed into the same area? I hope that made sense...? I'm just purely guessing at all this, but I'd be curious as to what you think.

Thanks!

[Giles Habibula]

She's getting closer to death. Get a new 7200rpm drive and image it over. Hard drives are cheap compared to the pain of fixing it when the drive actually fails, even for people who backup regularly, which are few and far between.

Thanks. I don't have much critical data on this PC, and I back up those radio shows on to CD every week, so I'm not too worried about that aspect. I'm more worried about the fact that I'm usually using this thing in the wee hours, and if the drive goes kaput and I don't have a spare, I'll be very frustrated.

So thanks guys. Apparently having a spare hard drive on hand is going to be the way to go.

[Jeff V]

I couldn't imagine still using a drive that old. I typically have to double my storage capacity every year or so - with 2 IDE drives in the system, this means the drives usually get replaced at least every 2 years. The old drives get handed down to less important machines (sister, brother. kids) where they eventually die. This year I had to replace my sister's drive (a Deathstar - man were those things ever crap!) I had just done my annual upgrade to provide more storage (swapped a 74 with a 120, the 74 then replaced a 30). I took this opportunity to replace the 74 with a 250 and gave it to my sister. She only does web surfing, so it's no big deal if she crashes and burns. It is a huge hassle when it happens to me, which is why I'm diligent when it comes to upgrading (having been burned a few times in the past).

I've seen 80GB drives recently advertised for $40. Put off a game purchase and buy some piece of mind!

[Smoove_B]

I've seen 80GB drives recently advertised for $40. Put off a game purchase and buy some piece of mind!

Hard drives are insane cheap now. There's no reason to not replace. I picked up a 140 GB hard drive at Circuit City a few weeks ago for $70.

Between the cheap drives and the cheap USB cases, I'm in digital storage nirvana.

[The Meal]

Wow Neal, that was beautiful!
Seriously, where else would I be priveleged enough to get such a detailed explanation for my mundane problem? My girlfriend is sitting here very impressed and telling me that this goes way beyond normal customer service, and you're not even getting paid for this. Yet another reason I'm proud to call OO my home.

And where else can I share a tiny smidge of my useless knowledge and find someone not only appreciative of it, but actually interested to boot!?! I love this place. And responses like yours make me more likely to share answers (like the one above) again in the future. Thanks!

I imagine the 5 year life expectancy you mentioned has more to do with average use rather than actual time? I used those drives pretty heavily for 6 or 7 years, but now they get used only several times a year. Or maybe it's because they have a larger margin for error since the tolerances might have been more lenient back in the days when not so much was crammed into the same area? I hope that made sense...? I'm just purely guessing at all this, but I'd be curious as to what you think.

A bit of both, actually, but mostly based on use. Even if the drive is unpowered but in your PC, however, it's still undergoing thermal cycles and that's still a huge stressor on the mechanics. And if your drive is plugged in to your power supply, you're still spinning it up (at least initially upon powering up your machine). We test some insane number of CSS (Contact Start-Stop -- basically the act of powering up the specific types of drives that were typically built in that time frame; CSS drives aren't quite all the rage any more as they've got competition in the "ramp-load" drives, which spin up the disks, and then merge the heads, meaning the heads aren't resting on a spinning surface when the drive first starts to spin up) cycles on a zillion drives before they go out the door. I think that if you had a CSS event five times a day, every day of the year, for five years -- that ends up close to 10,000 start/stop events. I believe we test 100,000 CSSs (without a failure) before we're satisfied that a drive is good to go in that department. And much like your automobile, starting up a drive is the worst thing you normally do to it (i.e., the biggest mechanical stressor).

You make a great point about drives of six years ago having more lenient tolerances. Moore's law as its applied to hard drives, has shown areal density growth rates of about 90% per twelve months over that span. (I googled up a wacky IBM white paper with this graph showing areal storage density values in megabits per square inch.) So running the numbers, you see that we're packing the same amount of data into a size rougly 47 times smaller than we used to be when your drive was built. To be able to position our magnetic readers/writers that much more precisely, we do have to improve our tolerances within the drive by some amount (although it's significantly less than the amount you'd be lead to believe with that math -- a whole lot of the improvements that we make from generation to generation are to find non-mechanical innovations to allow more precise positioning. But clearly, I wouldn't have a job at all if there wasn't significant work being done in mechanical improvements themselves).

So it's very true to say that we're putting in more precise mechanics in drives nowadays, but does more precision necessarily indicate less robustness to enviornmental hazards? Well, yes and no. Drives built today operate with fluid-bearing motors (as opposed to your ball-bearing drie), as the vibration signature due to rotating imbalances is much easier to deal with on a fluid-bearing drive (not to mention the complete elimination of ball-bearing defects in the vibration profile). And FDB (Fluid-Dynamic Bearing) motors right now *are* a bit more finnicky than their BB (Ball-Bearing) counterparts, but that's more a function of the newness of the technology then it is something inherent to the technology itself. Hard drive designers had decades of experience with BB motors and basically had fine-tuned all the "gotchas" out of the system. We've got all of about four years experience with FDB motors, and while the headaches of that first generation of implementation is not something I'd ever want to work my way through again, I'm pretty confident that we've got a motor system that's about as viable as the old BB system, reliability-wise.

Just about every hard drive product has at least one piece of new mechanical technology implemented into it. And every first-generation technology has its own range of "gotchas" that need be found by folks like me. So in that sense, dealing with the tighter requirements of the product (the demand that we make higher and higher capacity hard drives leading to more and more data being squished into a smaller and smaller area), means some inherent risk with new products. If you opened up the image I linked above, you can see that the areal density growth rate has an "elbow" around 1993, when MR-heads were released. Up to that point, drives did *not* need as much new technology to achieve workable performance, so they were a bit more inherently stable.

Generally the introduction of new mechanics doesn't lead to a battle between "can we make it work" vs. "reliability," but the trade offs are generally "can we make it work" vs. "price." Few of our technologies, once they've matured, make the drive inherently more unreliable (although I'm working on a notable exception right now -- Dual-Stage Actuation). Generally they do add some cost to the price of a drive, and if a company builds 60,000,000 hard drives in a year, adding even a nickle's worth of cost to the price of building a drive adds up quickly. Technology introduction meetings are hilarious (or would be to an uneducated observer) as frequently people are screaming at each other over figures of "Three freaking cents!! Do you really think we can JUSTIFY adding three cents to the BOM?!?! What are you nuts?" (The BOM being the Bill of Materials, or the price of the components that are all stuck together in manufacturing the drive.)

So while certain technology improvements do add some complexity to the inner workings of hard drives (and complexity generally means bad juju for reliability), typically our mechanical improvements are more side-steps in the complexity realm, and many of the generational improvements we make are not mechanical in nature to begin with. Because there generally is some new mechanical technology in every product release, it's more a function of "rolling the dice" on any given product with regards to overall reliability. Of course, as an engineer, I'm doing everything in my power to determine the outcome of that dice-roll before we start shipping drives to customers, so the smarter I am about setting up relevant tests, the better our understanding of the outcome of that dice-roll is ahead of time. But if we test the wrong things or don't properly scale our tests to customer enviornments or do a bad job with statistics or don't have representative parts to test (say our suppliers send us "the good material" up front, then start to backslide when we're building production drives) or any other number of factors, those things can lead to a product being released to the public with a failure rate very different than what the manufacturer predicts it to be.

Search up the IBM 75 GXP "DeathStar" for a very real-world example.

~Neal

[Freezer-TPF-]

Yeah, what Neal said.

(And to be fair to IBM, the older Deskstar drives that were out 5-6 years ago were very nice, quiet, reliable. Too bad they messed them up later down the line!)

[The Meal]

(And to be fair to IBM, the older Deskstar drives that were out 5-6 years ago were very nice, quiet, reliable. Too bad they messed them up later down the line!)

That supports what I was getting at. A perfectly reliable product line can get screwed up (majorly) with but one new technology being implemented in a manner where the reliablity and development teams don't understand the associated risk.

~Neal

[Bad Demographic]

So if you think your hard drive is going bad and buy a new one to replace it, what's the best way to transfer the contents from the old to the new (other than manually)?

[Smoove_B]

So if you think your hard drive is going bad and buy a new one to replace it, what's the best way to transfer the contents from the old to the new (other than manually)?

I cannot whore these USB cases enough. I literally plugged a fresh clean drive into one, and formatted it. Then I unplugged my main rig, removed the old hard drive and swapped places with the fresh one.

Reinstalled windows and had my old computer at my fingertips via hot USB action.

I'm sure others will bop in here and drone on and on about Norton Ghost or DVD burning, but that's *so* 2001.

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 310&depa=0

(just an example - there are like a dozen models and makes)

[The Meal]

Except that Firewire cases are even better.

~Neal

[Smoove_B]

Except that Firewire cases are even better.

~Neal

Yeah...but I don't know how far Firewire technology has PENETRATED into the market. I only have one PC with FW ports - and it's my LAN shuttle case.

But my damn monitor has two USB ports.

[Bad Demographic]

Once you set up the "external" HD, do you just do a copy/paste all?

[Smoove_B]

Once you set up the "external" HD, do you just do a copy/paste all?

I just copied some basic stuff (MyDocuments, Save Game files, music files, IE Favorites, etc...) and the rest I consider archived on the USB drive.

But yea - it is literally drag and drop what you want.

Copying e-mail from Outlook or OE is a bit more work so I didn't do it.

[Giles Habibula]

Neal, you do realize that some college kid is going to print out your 'white paper' up there and turn it in as his thesis ... and likely get an A on it.

Well done!

[Rip]

So if you think your hard drive is going bad and buy a new one to replace it, what's the best way to transfer the contents from the old to the new (other than manually)?

I like Ghost, it's quick and easy. I make an image file of every machine I work on before we touch it. Save it on a NAS for a while.

One of the more recent USB hard drives I bought came with a copy of Ghost with the drive.

For a simple HD upgrade you can do a drive to drive copy swap the drives and everything in under 30 minutes typically. Of course I have a 1 hour labor min