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Home > Archive > Data Storage > February 2007 > Failure of external HDD's - why doesn't any manufacturer wake up to this?
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Failure of external HDD's - why doesn't any manufacturer wake up to this?
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| richard 2007-02-16, 1:13 pm |
| A couple of years ago I bought 4 external HDD's, Maxtors, to increase
storage capacity on some machines (and offer portability) in my business.
After 2 failed in short order I returned the other 2 and swore not to
touch external drives again.
A couple of months ago my IT supplier convinced me to try a Lacie 2T
external HDD (internally, 4 Hitachi 500G's in a raid 0 array). We were
using it to store video clips after editing, pending backup to tape.
Sure enough, it has failed and I am again in the quandry of whether to
send it back for warranty repair - risking propagation of my sensitive
files, and the best I can hope for, is a new, empty drive. Recovering
the data is at least $3,500 and I may not get it all. The drive itself
cost me $2K. ($Australian).
I'm an engineer and it is my opinion that these units are all
under-designed, thermally. Ok they have cooling fans but that means
nothing. In the case of the Maxtor units, the HDD was suspended
internally on rubber bushes and so there's no mechanical heatsinking. A
one-inch fan sucked out a little warm air but the drive itself still ran
hotter than one mounted inside a PC, where the chassis sucks up a fair
amount of heat. One type I looked at didn't even have cooling fans so
the casing was effectively a blanket!
The Lacie drive had been left on (but mostly idle) almost continuously
for the entire 3 months it was in service, and failed during a cold
start. That smacks of a thermal stress failure.
These days I always order my PC's with cooling fans mounted directly on
the HDD bay and haven't had a failure since. Put your finger near the
spindle of a HDD that has been running an hour or so and you'll find it
almost too hot to touch. Friction rises exponentially with temperature
because it's a positive feedback loop. Heat loss also rises
exponentially with temp, which stabilises at a point where they are in
balance - and the better the heat removal, the lower the temp.
HDD failure is every computer user's worst nightmare. The temperature
issues are obvious to even a novice engineer. So why, oh why, do they
continue to underdesign these things - not just in external units, but
inside PC's as well? Of course both manufacturers told me "you know we
dont' get many of these back..." (Probably something to do with their
policy that the faulty unit can't be returned and therefore you have no
hope of getting your data back, so you're better off sending it to a data
recovery service).
Who else has experienced a higher failure rate on external HHD's? Or
undercooled internals?
As far as I can tell my only solution for reliable, portable mass storage
will be to re-engineer a commercial unit to improve it's cooling - but
void its warranty. Who cares, the warranty is useless when it doesn't
cover your data.
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| Paul Rubin 2007-02-17, 1:12 am |
| _firstname_@lr_dot_los-gatos_dot_ca.us writes:
> May Jim rest in peace. I hope he died the way he wanted to. At this
> point, that's the best we can hope for.
I prefer that he turn up alive and not too much the worse for wear.
For those who don't know, his sailing vessel disappeared off the San
Francisco coast about 2 weeks ago and a search has been unsuccessful
so far. However, there weren't any really horrible weather
conditions, known recent pirate attacks in the area, or anything like
that, so there's some chance he'll be found. People have been rescued
under such circumstances before, even after many months at sea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_N._Gray
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| On Feb 16, 11:27 pm, _firstname_@lr_dot_los-gatos_dot_ca.us wrote:
> In article <vpadnVkUKdnZskvYnZ2dnUVZ_uejn...@metrocastcablevision.com>,
> Bill Todd <billt...@metrocast.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> ...
>
> If you want to generalize from your experience, your experience better
> be based on hundreds of thousands of disks. Most home computer users
> (fortunately) don't gather that kind of data.
Richard's observation that common-or-garden external enclosures are
underdesigned is likely quite valid. Although one should perhaps spend
commensurately with the value of one's data, not just on enclosure,
but also on redundancy.
It's also usually true that software could make better use of SMART
data and other early warning signs (I believe this is on Solaris' ZFS
and Fault Management roadmap).
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/fm/
http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock/date/20051121
>
> --
> The address in the header is invalid for obvious reasons. Please
> reconstruct the address from the information below (look for _).
> Ralph Becker-Szendy _firstname_@lr_dot_los-gatos_dot_ca.us
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