[GLLUG] Dying Hard Drives

[James Zaldivar]

"As far as the magnetic theory, I wouldn't buy it.  Chances are it will
start doing crazy stuff to your memory or Chipset/Bios before it damages
your drives, unless of course, you have a refrigerator magnet right on
the drive itself :P"

Even then!  Some of the strongest magnets your average person is ever
likely to encounter can be found on either side of a hdd platter.  You
would have to try pretty hard to find a magnet strong enough to disrupt
the field that's already there.  Refrigerator magnets just don't have
the juice.  Heck - most speaker coils don't have what it takes.

Dan from Dan's Data wrote a couple articles on the subject, they're
pretty good:
http://www.dansdata.com/magnets.htm
http://www.dansdata.com/magnets2.htm
http://www.dansdata.com/gz009.htm


There - I think I've met my daily allotment of nerdy behavior!

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-user-bounces at egr.msu.edu
[mailto:linux-user-bounces at egr.msu.edu] On Behalf Of Nick Kwiatkowski
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2005 5:45 PM
To: linux-user at egr.msu.edu
Subject: RE: [GLLUG] Dying Hard Drives


A couple things that I have run across with strands of hard drives :

  -  Check the quality of your airflow in your computer.  Are all the
fans working at their top speed?  Dust?  Cables?  Heat is the #2 killer
of hard drives.

  -  Check for improperly mounted drives.  Do you have all 4 screws in
the drive holding it to the case?  If you do not, when the drive is
spinning up, it can cause small vibrations (or large ones, if you did a
duct-tape job!), which can cause the spindle to loose balance over time.
This has been known to cause bad sectors in the drive.

  -  Check the power supply, and the power coming out of it.  If you
have a descent motherboard, it will usually come with some sort of
mechanism to check the quality of the +12, +5.5 and +3 leads.  If you
have sudden drops (because of a refrigerator, garage-door,
garbage-disposal, washer/dryer, or a brown-out), it causes un-necessary
stress on the electronic and mechanical components in the drive.  Power
is the number 1 killer of computers.  Well, either that, or a bad
operating system stuffed with spyware ;P

As far as the magnetic theory, I wouldn't buy it.  Chances are it will
start doing crazy stuff to your memory or Chipset/Bios before it damages
your drives, unless of course, you have a refrigerator magnet right on
the drive itself :P  Does your machine seem to do core-dumps at random
times?

-Nick

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