Sunday night, tomorrow you have an important presentation to deliver or assignment, then without any warning of any kind your screen freezes, you reboot the system after no response from the keyboard or mouse.
No problem the file will be auto saved, hang, what's this message hard disk drive (HDD) not detected ?! gulp, I'll try a reboot, same error!
This kind of scenario can make any IT battle hardened user fold on the spot, but it need not be this way.
The bad news
All hard drives have finite lives and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) as many other products, however HDD will fail when you least expect it or when it hurts most.
Magnetic storage media aka HDD are electro, mechanical devices which operate at the envelope of mechanical tolerances. What do we mean by this? Well modern hard drives spin platters at speeds from 4200 to 15K which are either metal or glass and covered by a process called spluttering a magnetic sensitive material, now the part which decodes and encodes data directly to the platters are part of the head stack assembly, now the tolerance bit, these heads have to repeat ably go to specific locations on the media quickly (less than 10MS), here is where issues can really happen. The heads "fly" above the platters and contrary to popular belief the disk enclosure is not a vacuum, or how could the heads "fly" above the surface?
Now, due to heat, vibration, shock or system malfunction the head stack assembly may place the heads directly on the surface in a inappropriate place and way, thus damaging the surface; you have what most people would call a head crash.
The heat is on
Ok, so heat really can cause issues for your hard drive and here is why. Excessive heat to the media can cause the thermal expansion to the head stack assembly, thus "shifting" the precise alignment. Magnetic properties also change with thermal variations, and finally the PCB (printed circuit board) can enter a thermal runaway scenario; The motor control chip gets warm, the ambient and working temperature of the drive increases, this affects the resistance to failure which is often the main failure type of PCB failure.
UPS, UPS and away
Finally power cycling of hard drive media can cause catastrophic failure along with excess power and brownouts. Typically this type of failure causes clicking or noisy media.
The good news
Most of the above issues can very easily be avoided with such items as hard drive cooling kits, these supply cool air directly to the hard drive enclosure and PCB.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Blog Archive
Categories
- 4 Things You Should Know About Hard Drive Crashes (1)
- A Complete Data Recovery Solution (1)
- back up for laptops (1)
- Backing Up Data on CD's and DVD's (1)
- Backing Up Your Data Frequently Can Save You Money (1)
- Bare Metal Server (1)
- Can I Recover Deleted Files? How to Retrieve Deleted Files (1)
- Consumers and Communications (1)
- Data Recovery (3)
- Data Recovery Freeware - Take Advantage of the Freeware Available to You (1)
- Data Recovery Help (1)
- Data Recovery Situations (1)
- Data Recovery Software (1)
- DBX File Corruption (1)
- Defragmenting Your Hard Drives (1)
- Diagnostic Tips For Hard Drive Data Recovery (1)
- Do You Back Up Your Website (1)
- Do You Know Where Your Data Is (1)
- Ease the Headache of Saving Files (1)
- File Recovery - 3 Ways I Prevent Hard Drive Crashes (1)
- Formatted Data Recovery (1)
- Fully Utilize the Full Benefit of a SAN With Automatic Defragmentation (1)
- Hard Disk Data Recovery - How to Restore Deleted Data (1)
- How to avoid data loss and data recovery (1)
- How to Backup Your Computer Hard Drive (1)
- How to Create an Offsite Data Backup and Restore Plan (1)
- How to Recover Lost Data From a Flash Drive (1)
- How to Recover Photos Deleted From SD Disk Or XD Card (1)
- How to Retrieve Deleted Data From Your Computer (1)
- How to Retrieve Deleted Files From Your Computer (1)
- Identity Theft by Selling a Used Computer (1)
- iPhone Data Recovery Advice (1)
- IT Disaster Recovery - A Finance Perspective (1)
- Laptop Backup Software Program (1)
- need laptop back up software (1)
- Online Backup and the Consequences of Data Loss For Business (1)
- Outlook Express Recovery (1)
- password finders (1)
- PDF Password Finder Tips (1)
- RAID Arrays (1)
- RAID Data Recovery (1)
- Recover Deleted Files - Vista (1)
- Recover Hard Disk Files - How to Recover Deleted Files (1)
- remove a password (1)
- Remove a Password From Your PDF Files (1)
- Restore Deleted Data (1)
- Restore Deleted Files - Vista (1)
- Retrieving Deleted Files From Your Computer (1)
- SQL Data Recovery (1)
- SQL Server Snapshot (1)
- SQL Servers (1)
- The Role of This Software Tool (1)
- Understanding Data Loss and Data Recovery (1)
- website back ups (1)
- What to Do When Everything is Lost (1)
- Why to Buy Online Data Back Up Services (1)
- Will Data Recovery Work (1)