Author Topic: Shorted hard drive (Read 786 times)

onsinch · « **on:** December 17, 2012, 12:10:58 PM »

Hard drive wasnt fitted in the mounting brackets properly and so fell and hit the hdd below and shorted out, any chance of fixing this easily

bear in mind i could get 2TB seagate barracuda drive for the cost of the 1TB drive that i just lost

Ivon · « **Reply #1 on:** December 17, 2012, 05:57:05 PM »

You could take it to a Data Recovery place, pay and arm and a leg, and they could do a Plater Transfer. Which is just taking the platters out of the bad drive and putting them into a good one. It's pricey ass hell though.

So you must ask yourself, is the data important or can you get the data again.

As for Seagate, I would not recommend them...I got (2) 2TB Barracudas and one was failing (Re-Allocated Sector Count began creeping up by about 2% per 3 days). Then one of the 3 at work is also going bad...again, Re-Allocated Sector Count.

The second Barracuda I have has massive Read Error and Seek Error Rates, yet all the other drives (Western Digital and Hitachi [before they got bought up by WD]) have '0'.

I've replaced the 2 failed Barracudas (home and work) with Western Digital Reds (WD's NAS drives). Those drives come in 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB. And seem to be performing nicely.

Things to know:

WD Reds are variable spin rates, that I believe go up to 5400RPM. So this drive shouldn't be used for Boot or Gaming, but is perfect for Seeding, Streaming (buffers can handle the variable RPMs nicely), Backup, General Storage.

-Always do your research though, and remember SAVE THE RECEIPT, AND REGISTER YOUR PRODUCTS FOR THE WARRANTY-

Tiffanys · « **Reply #2 on:** December 17, 2012, 06:08:32 PM »

Depends if it still works... If it's dead in the water then it depends what's on it and how important is it is to you.

If it's just about replacing the drive then most places have very good RMA policies. I know Western Digital has lifetime RMA and you can do an Advanced RMA where they ship you the new one first.

onsinch · « **Reply #3 on:** December 17, 2012, 07:37:52 PM »

The drive was bought used so didnt have warranty, and it only had 700GB of anime, of which i have watched approximately 400GB so i couldnt really care less

just wondering whether it would be cheaper to fix than buy a larger drive, i am going to buy parts for new pc tomorrow anyway and i was planning to reuse this drive to save costs

Mistgun_Zero · « **Reply #4 on:** December 17, 2012, 07:58:10 PM »

Buy a new WD. Simple choice really. If you are going for external storage WD Elements is one of the best there is and has almost zero problems. I am using one and I can assure you of that.

ConsiderPhlebas · « **Reply #5 on:** December 17, 2012, 08:22:58 PM »

Fixing these kinds of things is not a good idea. you can never trust them again.
Salvage data if necessary, which it seems you don't want, and get something proper.

AceHigh · « **Reply #6 on:** December 17, 2012, 08:28:41 PM »

Tell me what are the symptoms when you attempt to access it (noises, how pc reacts to it, etc...)

halfelite · « **Reply #7 on:** December 18, 2012, 01:56:52 AM »

If the main logic board is what shorted all it takes is to find the same make and model drive and swap the board on the top, requires some soldering and desoldering as the platter motor is usually soldered to the board. If you dont have same make and model scrap it and just buy a new.

Pentium100 · « **Reply #8 on:** December 18, 2012, 03:55:45 AM »

If the logic board was shorted out, then most likely the protection diodes or fuses blew - you might be able to find and replace them, however you most likely will need to have an oscilloscope to see what is happening with the drive.
On the other hand, if you don't need the data and have the money, then buying a new hard drive is easier...

megido-rev.M · « **Reply #9 on:** December 18, 2012, 04:15:34 AM »

Quote from: onsinch on December 17, 2012, 07:37:52 PM

The drive was bought used so didnt have warranty, and it only had 700GB of anime, of which i have watched approximately 400GB so i couldnt really care less

just wondering whether it would be cheaper to fix than buy a larger drive, i am going to buy parts for new pc tomorrow anyway and i was planning to reuse this drive to save costs

Not really worth the hassle for repairing I say.

kitamesume · « **Reply #10 on:** December 18, 2012, 07:13:49 AM »

Quote from: onsinch on December 17, 2012, 07:37:52 PM

The drive was bought used so didnt have warranty, and it only had 700GB of anime, of which i have watched approximately 400GB so i couldnt really care less

just wondering whether it would be cheaper to fix than buy a larger drive, i am going to buy parts for new pc tomorrow anyway and i was planning to reuse this drive to save costs

sell it for $10 to someone who'd like a fancy paperweight, then use that $10 to pay for a cab to get to your trusted store.

ok on a serious note, nothing is stopping you from repairing it, it "might" be cheaper depending on the damage it has, get a professional harddrive-technician(preferably an ex-WD/seagate tech team staff... im asking too much on this.) to take a look at it and expect to pay around $30-$100 for the repairs.

Freedom Kira · « **Reply #11 on:** December 18, 2012, 10:16:19 AM »

Quote from: Ivon on December 17, 2012, 05:57:05 PM

WD Reds are variable spin rates, that I believe go up to 5400RPM. So this drive shouldn't be used for Boot or Gaming, but is perfect for Seeding, Streaming (buffers can handle the variable RPMs nicely), Backup, General Storage.

I think you meant Greens. Reds are meant to be used in NAS units and specifically in RAID arrays, and have a number of features meant for that task that would put them at a disadvantage when used as single disks.

Pentium100 · « **Reply #12 on:** December 18, 2012, 08:13:03 PM »

Quote from: Freedom Kira on December 18, 2012, 10:16:19 AM

I think you meant Greens. Reds are meant to be used in NAS units and specifically in RAID arrays, and have a number of features meant for that task that would put them at a disadvantage when used as single disks.

And what would those features be? TLER? Not crashing the entire system due to a bad sector is preferable for all hard drives. True, RAID needs drives with TLER, but that feature is useful for single drives too.

And Reds are designed for 24/7 operation, which is good.

onsinch · « **Reply #13 on:** December 18, 2012, 08:53:08 PM »

Quote from: AceHigh on December 17, 2012, 08:28:41 PM

Tell me what are the symptoms when you attempt to access it (noises, how pc reacts to it, etc...)

Its the logic board thats gone because i actually saw it fall out the hdd cage and land on the metal casing of the hdd below which was followed by a burning smell similar to when i blew up my radeon 6850

its not really a problem, the drive was in all sense redundant, i was storing anime and seeding it on a connection that had an upload speed of 100kb/s which is shared amongst 2-3 people who use steam, and also on my connection the upload speed is throttled if i go past 50% of my download speed (overhead

)

anyway, i figured i didnt need a new storage drive seeing as though: my games are all less than 10GB (i can fit all my games on a 32GB SD card

), i have a seedbox and i just found 3 120GB drives in my room

Freedom Kira · « **Reply #14 on:** December 19, 2012, 05:18:59 AM »

Quote from: Pentium100 on December 18, 2012, 08:13:03 PM

And what would those features be? TLER? Not crashing the entire system due to a bad sector is preferable for all hard drives. True, RAID needs drives with TLER, but that feature is useful for single drives too.

And Reds are designed for 24/7 operation, which is good.

TLER is one of them. For the others, take a look at Anandtech's review. Of the listed features, only the vibration reduction feature is really beneficial for regular use.

Regular hard drives usually have some kind of read error recovery. This causes a hanging system, not a crash, but it is preferable over throwing read errors everywhere if used as a single disk, as they are designed for. So, no, having TLER in a single disk is detrimental. It's useful in a RAID array because a read error from a single disk can be repaired easily, assuming there is enough redundancy to do so.

Pentium100 · « **Reply #15 on:** December 19, 2012, 07:22:21 PM »

Quote from: Freedom Kira on December 19, 2012, 05:18:59 AM

Regular hard drives usually have some kind of read error recovery. This causes a hanging system, not a crash, but it is preferable over throwing read errors everywhere if used as a single disk, as they are designed for. So, no, having TLER in a single disk is detrimental. It's useful in a RAID array because a read error from a single disk can be repaired easily, assuming there is enough redundancy to do so.

Reported read errors are preferable to random slowdowns, freezes and crashes (if the drive in question is the system drive and takes too long to read the sector and Windows decides to completely freeze or crash). When it is confirmed that there are read errors, I can run software to try to recover the data (or alternatively, just remap them), but having the drive itself do it is not that good. Well, at least not for me, since I do not like getting up and seeing one of my servers frozen because a single HDD (out of 10) decided to take too long to read a sector instead of just reporting the read error. If the drive manages to successfully read the secotor (after a minute) or completely freeze the system, I may not even know that this was because of a hard drive (since a system can freeze because of other problems too), so that makes diagnosing the problem take longer.

I recently installed Windows on a laptop that had a hard drive with a lot of bad sectors (the owner of the laptop said he'll buy a new drive eventually, I guess when the drive fails completely). Except those sectors weren't really "bad" - the drive would read them ... in 10 - 20s. This not only caused Windows to slow down reading the affected sectors, but also caused the drive to drop to PIO mode making it extremely slow even for good sectors. No filesystem tool would detect those sectors, I had to scan the drive with MHDD, make a list of the "slow" sectors and then manually mark them as bad in the FAT (I had to use FAT32 because I don't know how to manually mark bad clusters on NTFS). If the drive had TLER, all those sectors would have been marked as bad during the initial format and I would not have had to do this.

Freedom Kira · « **Reply #16 on:** December 20, 2012, 07:14:26 AM »

Well, okay. It may be detrimental to you, but I would put it as beneficial to the average consumer who does not run several servers and does not have data recovery software.

onsinch · « **Reply #17 on:** December 20, 2012, 08:35:15 AM »

Quote from: Pentium100 on December 19, 2012, 07:22:21 PM

... I can run software to try to recover the data ...

You can, but can my grandparents???

kitamesume · « **Reply #18 on:** December 20, 2012, 10:03:54 AM »

Quote from: onsinch on December 20, 2012, 08:35:15 AM

Quote from: Pentium100 on December 19, 2012, 07:22:21 PM
... I can run software to try to recover the data ...
You can, but can my grandparents???

you could offer the service yourself you know, you could ask for compensation in return. i do this with my dad's work computers for some pocket change.

onsinch · « **Reply #19 on:** December 20, 2012, 12:51:35 PM »

Quote from: kitamesume on December 20, 2012, 10:03:54 AM

you could offer the service yourself you know, you could ask for compensation in return. i do this with my dad's work computers for some pocket change.

in my family if i refuse to do something i get told off, whereas my younger siblings get paid

, its actually gotten so bad that my younger siblings actually rake in something around £20 a week compared to my £10

however, i get £7500 just to pass my end of semester exams