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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2010 10:05 pm Post subject: Hard Drive Break In and other info |
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I thought I would put this in a new thread, as it is buried in the other thread.
Tim's (videograbber) hard drive break in:
| Quote: | I use a tool from Western Digital, called Data Lifeguard Diagnostics (DLGDIAG for Windows). It's a free download on their website, and works with drives from all vendors. (I've tested Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and Maxtor with it.)
The key is not to do a Quick Test, which takes just ~1 minute, and samples the entire extent. Nor to do an Extended Test, which takes a long time and reads the whole thing. Rather, do a Write Zeroes test, which writes and reads every sector on the disk, one track at a time. If there's a problem with the disk, it will find it. I've used it to weed out ~5 bad apples out of about 100 drives. It takes ~16 hours to qualify a 1.5TB drive.
Surprisingly enough, a full disk read of every sector will NOT expose all potential drive issues. I learned that lesson the hard way a number of years ago, after having decided a new 500G drive was clean, and then finding fatal flaws about 350G in while writing. The ReadTest didn't find the problem, but the WriteZeroes test did.
Lots of folks I've talked to have the impression that manufacturers actually test their "brand new" drives before shipping them, and while I'm sure they do perform random sampling, with current prices there is no possible way they could actually test the enitre surface(s) for write/read functionality. (They rely on the built-in error recovery mechanism to deal with it. The problem is that some drives hit a patch where the error density is so high it can't cope with it.) Since they don't test fully, I do... and about 100 drives later, I'm pretty satisfied with the results.
When I buy new drives, I always test them immediately, and RMA those back that fail. If everyone did that, there'd be a lot less negative ratings on Newegg. As it is, every time someone draws the short straw and gets a defective drive, up goes the negative review, along with a comment that they're never going to buy brand XYZ again, and will stick with brand ABC. Of course, you can find the same "evaluations" with ABC and XYZ reversed, from other posters.
The funny thing is that people will buy drives and put them in service, thinking that since they're brand new, they're just fine. A couple months down the road (or a few weeks, or a year later!) they finally use enough of the disk to find the problem area, and conclude "it went bad on them", when in fact, it was bad the day it arrived!
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| Quote: |
WARNING: Read that data, periodically!
This might be a good place to point out to those who are using high capacity hard drives as archival storage mechanisms (like myself), that engineers from several major drive manufacturers have admitted that filling a drive then putting it on the shelf for years is not a good idea. The newer drives were never designed with that in mind, and expect that the drive surfaces will be read periodically, on a fairly regular basis. That will give it a chance to detect that the read signal level is deteriorating, and rewrite the affected blocks. (In place... most of the time, when possible, or relocated, if necessary.)
The problem is that the magnetic field imposed on the medium tends to self-demagnetize over long periods of time, so if you pull out a drive after 5 years that you filled once, which was 100% perfect when written, there's a good possibility that not everything will be readable. There will be a certain percentage of data loss... just from sitting on the shelf. This is something that the LOC and others who archive large volumes of magnetic data over long periods need to be aware of.
The good news is that all it takes to avoid this problem is simply to do a full surface read on each drive, once every 2 years (1 year, if you're really paranoid). In the process of doing so, any deteriorating data will be detected and refreshed automatically, before it degrades to the point that it becomes irretrievable.
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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2010 10:08 pm Post subject: |
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Any other good tidbits?
I just tried to resurrect my old laptop hard drive. I could read the data off of the drive, but I couldn't use it as a main drive with XP. I tried installing XP again and it came up with inf problem. After this, I went ahead and wiped it and installed Ubuntu. It works, but it looks like I have lost about 7gb out of 40gb.
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AnalogRocks
Forum Moderator
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 26706
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
TV/Projector: Sony 1252Q, AMPRO 4000G
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| Posted: Sat Mar 20, 2010 10:10 pm Post subject: |
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Hmmm strange. I use to pull hard drives off the shelf after 7 years and read them fine. Maybe it's the newer bigger drives that are more affected.
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CRT.
HD done right!
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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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I haven't had a big problem, but I have noticed reduced capacities on my old hard drives recently. I have reformatted four drives in the last six months and have seen a loss of about 10%. It isn't that big of a deal to me, as I only need about 20 gig for all of my files.
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Ben851
Joined: 13 Sep 2008
Posts: 221
Location: Ottawa, Ontario
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| Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 5:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Spanky Ham wrote: | Any other good tidbits?
I just tried to resurrect my old laptop hard drive. I could read the data off of the drive, but I couldn't use it as a main drive with XP. I tried installing XP again and it came up with inf problem. After this, I went ahead and wiped it and installed Ubuntu. It works, but it looks like I have lost about 7gb out of 40gb. |
Make sure that the "missing" storage space isn't actually just allocated as your swap partition..
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Thanks,
Ben
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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Fri Mar 26, 2010 9:57 pm Post subject: |
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Ben,
It isn't. When I was installing Ubuntu, that was the amount available.
I just bought a WD Caviar green 1.5tb HD from Newegg for $99 with free shipping. I am going to do the Write Zeroes test later on this weekend. Also, I was reading on the WD forum that this test missed some errors. Someone posted another program called HDsentinel that found the errors. I am going to try this test out as well. They have a free download for both Windows and Linux (sorry Apple  ).
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akajester
Joined: 09 Jul 2008
Posts: 934
Location: Wisconsin
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| Posted: Thu Apr 01, 2010 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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I just had a 1gb drive go bad. It's failing the read test which is not cool. Anyways. when I get the replacement I'm definitely doing a write zeros test on it! thanks for the info!
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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Tue Apr 06, 2010 2:33 pm Post subject: |
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I just did my WD 1.5 tb hard drive yesterday. It passed with no errors, but after installing the OS it only shows 1.39tb. I am not sending it back and will live with it. I might try to see if I can do an Extended test and see if it can repair any problems.
My procedure and the one I recommend is to use the DOS version. The latest Windows version has a problem. With the DOS version you boot to the disc drive, so you don't need to have another HD attached. It took five hours to do the full Write Zeroes test. This is considerably shorter than the Windows version.
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VideoGrabber
Joined: 09 Apr 2006
Posts: 933
Location: Michigan
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| Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 5:15 pm Post subject: |
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Spanky wrote:
> I just did my WD 1.5 tb hard drive yesterday. It passed with no errors, but after installing the OS it only shows 1.39tb. I am not sending it back and will live with it. <
That's good, because that's all the capacity you'll get on any 1.5TB drive. The reason is that they rate the capacity in bytes:
1,500,299,264,000 -- so 1.5TB, right? Well 1.5 decimal TB, but in the binary format we're used to, that's only 1.36 TB.
The good news is that you're not missing anything on that drive. The bad news is that the way they do it is confusing to most people. I think this is probably the #2 complaint (behind getting a defective drive) on Newegg comments, since drive capacities skyrocketed.
Hey, it's "only" 140 GB difference... hardly nuthin. Funny though when you remember back to when entire drives were less than that. The power of 1.024 ^ 4 (you lose 9%).
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- Tim
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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 4:10 am Post subject: |
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Yeah, my best friend enlightened me when I lamented the fact. When did they change?
Tim,
Have you tried the DOS version?
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VideoGrabber
Joined: 09 Apr 2006
Posts: 933
Location: Michigan
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| Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 5:35 am Post subject: |
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| Spanky Ham wrote: | | Yeah, my best friend enlightened me when I lamented the fact. When did they change? |
I'm not sure they ever did. It's been a sore point for a long time... as soon as drive capacities got "significant". I remember people moaning about how the first gigabyte drives were ~69 MB "short". "Hey! I paid for 1000MB, how come I only got 931MB?" The manufs actually got sued at one point, and forced to indicate somewhere in their materials that the capacity rating was in decimal gigs.
| Quote: | Tim,
Have you tried the DOS version? |
No. I realize it is faster, but I normally use a USB interface (all my eSatas are tied up with other stuff), which slows things down even more. By running in Windows, I can continue to use the machine for other stuff, since there's almost no loading. Running in DOS means that machine is completely unavailable for 5+ hours.
Since I always maintain a queue of empty drives with at least ~10TB (over 20, ATM), it's not like I'm in a big hurry to put a new drive into service ASAP.
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- Tim
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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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Hmm, I guess I never paid attention, but I always thought my drives were the stated capacity.
I understand about using DOS. Just don't use the latest Window's version. It took three months for WD to admit that they had a problem with it.
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VideoGrabber
Joined: 09 Apr 2006
Posts: 933
Location: Michigan
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| Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 5:45 pm Post subject: |
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Sapnky commented:
> I was reading on the WD forum that this test missed some errors. <
Any particulars?
> Someone posted another program called HDsentinel that found the errors. I am going to try this test out as well. <
Any results from that?
> The latest Windows version has a problem. <
When I read that, I wonder, what IS the latest Windows version, and is that the one I have?  I assume the problem you referred to is that some errors are missed, though it would be hard for me to see how (knowing what the WriteZeroes test does).
> Just don't use the latest Window's version. It took three months for WD to admit that they had a problem with it. <
I did pop into the forum, but I didn't spend enough time to locate this discussion. Did you happen to save a link? Thanks.
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- Tim
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Spanky Ham
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 5643
Location: Comedy Central
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| Posted: Sun Apr 18, 2010 7:23 pm Post subject: |
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It is funny that I can't find the thread now. I remember that there were some complaining that Hdsentinel was picking up problems that the WD wasn't. I never tried HDsentinel, as mine looked ok. Also, I was tired of waiting to get my computer up and running. As for the version, I am not sure. I think it came out in January. I am not sure about the errors, but mine kept telling me I had a bad cable. I used the previous version and it kept saying I had errors. I gave up after about twenty minutes. That is when I went with the DOS version. As for those that said it missed errors, I think they found issues later on when the WD program said it was ok.
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