| Morten Reistad 2005-09-26, 5:54 pm |
| In the 1980's we all got to know the problem called stiction.
The lubricant inside the disks got sticky with age, and the
disk refused to start up. It could be helped along with a little
nudge around the time you applied power.
With the nineties came better lubricants and production
processes, and the problem was gone. Until last week.
Now I have seen the very same symptoms on two very different cheap
disks, one a 60MB 2.5" 5400 RPM laptop disk, around 8 months old, and
a 160MB 7200 RPM 3.5" ATA disk less than 6 months old. I have tested
both in my little lab machine, and they both behave as stiction disks.
Apply power, and they just make a little whirr without starting up.
Apply a little twist in the plane of the spin, and they start
right up. No errors, can backup, format etc; until it spins
down and get cold again. The laptop disk has it in a very
reproducible form.
I was a little surprised to see this; so I asked a few sysadmin
friends. Now they report a handful of disks with these symptoms, and
some were thankful for the tip to spin them up; as some were
laptop disks for users without too much backup of their data.
I will withhold the names of the manufacturers from public
view until I have a statistically significant sample.
Now I ask the question to a larger audience. Is this just some
freak occurrence, or is it a pattern.
In short, is stiction back?
-- mrr
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