Deep down and hiding within hard drives...

[yagga]

I am just curious as to how modern hard drives work and what sorts of problems can arise. Also, I'm curious as to if any "miracle disk saver" often found on eBay actually does anything special.

First of all, I know nothing about the software/bios/whatever-not-hardware that is making a hard drive function. This is what I am wondering about. I don't really need to know about the hardware details because it is sort of obvious, but if you wish to post something, hey maybe I'll learn something new anyway. :aol:

Relating to software, bios, code, or whatever, what is there when first purchased brand new? Can it get destroyed or corrupted? If so, how can this be fixed? Or isn't there anything? As you probable notice, I know nothing, so anything you'd like to post would help me learn something.

As with those software disks found on eBay, are they all just a scam? If they actually contain anything useful, what other ways can I do the same thing, or are they unique?

---Basically I just would like to learn a little bit here, and be able to solve a problem if something happened to one of my drives. Also, for some reason one of my Seagate drives refuses to let its Seagate formatter disk even start, it claims errors and moves to an a prompt. I have got the drive reformatted, but thorugh other methods, and the error still shows up. I have also had other problems relating to errors or something on a few other disks and it took me a long time :bawling: to finally get them fixed, and I still don't really know what I did.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

[topherice]

Check out this article, it does a pretty good job of desribing how disks work, heads, platters, magnetic principles, etc. http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk.htm

[Straight_Man]

Well, normally, the mfr utils and diags are best for the HD as far as fixing what can be fixed. Two things majorly can give problems, one is a bad data cable, one is bad power into drive. One for the enemies of a HD is extreme Overheating (minor O\H is not something likely to frack a HD quickly), and thick dust layers can really do a number on a drive's controller, the dust acts as insulation-- oops, not wanted-- the insulation, that is. Older Hds can be sensitive to long a mount screw, weirdly enough, particularly SeaGate older drives. Long screws can ground short something on controller card, sometimes simply putting in shorter screws will make a problem partly or mostly vaporize on a quite old HD. OR, putting a washer under head of a longer screw, on outside of mounting chjassis and not between chassis and drive (this last is a PITA to do, typically accomplishes nothing except to bend chassis frame or hava washer in wrong place).

A well made HD that is not a lemon should last 3-5 years if treated right. If you think you have heating probs, mount a HD in every other bay in a case, leave alternate bays open, and if needed vent the front panels on unused bays. If still heat issues, fan the HDs. Faster the HD spin rate, more likely you will need a fan to cool in warm to hot climates.

HD is more likely to get damaged from drops while running, static, or other environmental factors, not usually design in HD models that are mature(might be noisy, but should work to or beyond warranty or fail well before warranty timeout if you buy retail packages). BUT, Seagate did something wierd way back when-- they stuck a rubber sheet under the controller card to make it quieter. This sheet had the unwanted effect of trapping heat in the controller chips in the HD's onboard controller. Drives with that sheet in place lasted half normal life on average in southeast US, and 3\4 normal lifetime up in Northern US and normal life in Canada. Pure heat problem in most cases there.

[yagga]

Thank you guys, and by the way that is a nice site. But... I am still clueless in the software/firmware type way. Do the manufacturers just install a little code into the circitry to destinguish it from other manufacturers? And is this permanent no matter what?

[Tex]

The "firmware" is software that controls how the drive works. How data is accessed or written etc... Its a program of sorts. And each vendor has differant ideas about how to best optimize a desktop drive like IDE/SATA and the frrmware then effects the performance the user experiances.

A good example is their were major differances in the Raptors firmware from the early beta drives that were tested versus what was actually released in production to the public. Sometimes the final firmware is faster then early beta ones and sometimes it goes the other way and its slower on many tests. Remember that for a desktop PC in general they tend to do one thing at a time. It reads or writes a single file so optimizing the cache ans stuff for long sequential reads and writes pays big dividends

In much the same way "scsi" drives in general have firmware that is much more optimized for the types of data access experianced in servers and in particular in a multi user environment. Meaning more for random data access rather then sequential data access like a desktop. With scsi we actually have a number of tools that allow us to tweak or optimize differant settings in the firmware ourselves for our particular environment. Setting related to the cache used for reads versus writes and how it handles errors and retries on errors etc..

Tex