Re: failing hard drive?

On Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:46:07 -0400, Paul <[email protected]>
wrote:

>On Wed, 4/22/2026 1:50 PM, [email protected] wrote:
>> I suspect one of my 3 hard drives is going bad on my old Abit build.
>> I've been hearing some noise for a while and yesterday when I turned
>> the pc off there was a fairly loud SMACK just before the fan lights
>> went out. Since then everything seems to work ok and HDTune seems to
>> think their Health is OK. Is there anything I can be looking for to
>> try and id the failing drive?
>> 
>
>If this is a 0.8" high hard drive, instead of a plastic landing
>ramp off to the side, it may be landing the heads in a landing
>zone near the hub. Presumably there is a "stop" at the
>arm bearing, that prevents the arm from attempting to "climb the hub"
>which would destroy it. The voice coil would not de-energize
>unless the transition to that location had completed.
>
>This is my dead ST 3250310AS 250GB drive, showing it still has a
>bumper of some sort, on the voice coil end. That's so it doesn't hit
>the stop too hard. If the rubber comes off, then you'll get an
>acoustic effect. I included the cover in the shot, to show there
>are seven T-9 Torx screws, one screw fits into the center of
>the voice coil bearing.
>
>   [Picture]  landing-zone-drive-bumper-on-arm.jpg
>
>    https://postimg.cc/9DNRN5jv
>
>    https://imgur.com/a/FwnlXGq
>
>The white filter-pak in the upper left, the surface is clean
>and white, so the surface of the platter did not fail. Yet the
>evidence is, the surface is damaged, based on numerous CRC errors.
>We have seen pictures of previous generation drives, where the
>plateup was "rust colored", where the filter pak was filthy
>and dark colored from debris. And yet such drives had been
>functioning right up to the end... Makes you wonder just how
>small the debris flakes are. Must be beyond-microscopic.
>
>I have two of those drives. The opened one is a total failure.
>The running one has gone read-only and has no spares left. I
>tested a data recovery software which is "better than ddrescue",
>and within 24 hours of read attempts, the drive was completely
>scanned and had 100 detected CRC errors (which could not be improved
>by many many read attempts).
>
>You can see in the picture, there isn't a lot in there that can make a
>noise.
>
>On a modern drive, there is a plastic landing ramp off to the side.
>I don't know if the arm can fall off the ramp and down beside the platters
>or not. I don't know if there is clearance for that. I don't have any
>landing ramp drives suited to picture taking. Everything above 250GB
>is still running (even if more of these landing zone drives are
>slowly on their way out, the 500GB ones). I think the secret to
>the landing zone drives, is to leave them spinning 24 hours a day.
>
>*******
>
>You should run the drive model numbers through Google, to see
>if any of the drives happen to be "notorious ones" :-) I've found
>field reports (of symptoms) to be quite prescient. If someone
>describes a certain noise a model makes, well damn if I'm
>not hearing that too.
>
>    Paul

1. I dithered for awhile, vainly watching HDTune and holding my
fingers on the drives when they shut down. Couldn't find a clue. So...
I threw money at it. Ordered a 2T Western Digital hard drive off
Amazon on the theory that the boot drive, with partitions to boot xp,
win7 and win 10 would be the most troublesome to replace if it REALLY
did blow up on me. The #2 drive, a 1T with 4 data partitions, I backed
up and will do so monthly now.  #3 drive is just a 1T backup drive,
that won't cripple me if it blows. New drive arrived without being
either GPT or MBR and DiscManagement let me choose MBR. 3 hours of
Macrium cloning and it was ready  to boot. Only real pain (fingers
crossed) was chasing the scrambled drive letters Windows picks out.
Now I guess I wait for a disk to fail, unless it really was that boot
drive. I couldn't see anything physically wrong with any of the ones I
was shuttling around.

Thanks again for the suggestions.