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Comment by mpweiher | Hacker News Reader

I think part of it is that even problems that are small/unnoticeable at the individual level become big when multiplied by a huge N.

For example, I don't think I've ever had a hard drive fail in ~30 years in computing, well without being dropped that is, yet look at the Backblaze reports:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-20...

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That's just unbelievable. To even survive the Deskstar era blows my mind. Not a single drive?

That's not all that surprising to me, I've had supremely good fortune with drives. I have a Maxtor Fireball that still "works" (though its SMART has failed.) My current workstation still has drives in it from the three prior workstations; spanning back 7 or 8 years now[1], humming along well outside their warrantied operation. The first disk failure(s) I witnessed came while I worked at a computer repair shop, which would be "a huge N" compared to the number of PCs I've personally owned. My first disk failure on my own personal equipment didn't happen until I built out a home storage array - again a rather large multiplier of number of disks compared to a traditional PC. Even then that failure was because a disk controller got fried, the drive was mechanically sound and the data was completely recoverable.

Admittedly my own experience is probably a bit skewed since I don't have a personal laptop. By the time I got a job that provided me w/ a laptop solid state drives were already quite mature. In my experience doing repair work: laptops were a huge source of our failed drive & data recovery operations.

[1]: I should note these drives all operate nearly 24/7, no five-nines on my personal equipment though ;-P

Up until a couple years ago I could have said the same. I even have a couple deathstars on the shelf that were operational when retired.

In the last couple years I've had several HDDs fail starting with a 2TB Seagate (one of the "stars" in the Backblaze stats.) I've had others fail since, mostly multi-TB drives. I had one nearly ten year old 200GB drive begin to report remapped sectors. I've even had an SSD develop an unrecoverable error.

My dad managed to kill a 2 year old Samsung SSD; it wouldn't even show up on the bios. Tech support was so incredulous they actually had an Electrical Engineer on their staff call him.

I didn't believe him either. I was like "Dad, SSDs are designed to fail in a way you can recover data. What SATA cable are you using? Is the port dead?"

Turns out it was literally the drive.

Much like a poster above, I've got a walking graveyard of previous platter drives in my workstation from various old workstations and they're all fine, but (and I think mine was a Samsung too), my first experiment with an SSD ended in tears. It was fine for similarly about two years, then I had some weird troubles booting about 3 or 4 times, then it just disappeared completely.

I've been very wary of SSDs since then.

I recall hearing of similar failures early on. I don't recall the brand. Apparently the controller goes bad and it just stops responding to SATA commands.

Intel had a strategy that caused them to go into read only mode once they reached their rated lifetime write capacity. All data remained available until they were power cycled whereupon they would intentionally brick themselves.

In my case it is was a Crucial M4. It still tries to operate but will fail the long SMART self test.

Argh trigger alert, I bought four of those in a raid 10.

They even had the audacity to reject my warranty claim.

They sent me back refurbs that didn't work, I just gave up.

I have. Including things like the heads falling off and spinning around, grinding everything to junk.

That sickening click sound that a disk drive makes when it's on the verge of failure is ingrained in my head.

I tried putting one of those in the freezer once, and maybe it was a folk remedy, but it worked enough to boot and get my data off!

That must be one of the silliest hacks I've ever heard, right up there with oven-baking electronics to fix loose solder joints. I love it!

It works because of how hard drives work - the heads are extended by slightly heating the bar the heads are connected to. If you're head crashing, you need a little less length, hence freezer.

This isn't quite true, the heads are kept from crashing by air pressure and a crash does irreversible damage. The "clicking" sound is either the heads flicking back and forth as the drive tries to seek, or the central motor trying and failing to start platters spinning which are jammed on the bearing.

What freezing the drive may achieve is either un-sticking it from the bearings (see also the "bang drive on edge" technique), or lowering the thermal noise floor in the electronics enough for marginal components to make it through the boot sequence.

Ah, interesting! Thanks for the correction. I was off the project before we put in the drives obviously. ;)

When I worked for a small computer place years and years ago we'd sometimes "tap" a drive as it was spinning up if freezing it didn't work. Tapping it with a screw driver handle rarely worked, but it was always a last ditch effort to save having to send a drive out -- which most people wouldn't pay for anyway.

I did that with a drive in my computer fairly recently. Although I didn't so much tap it as shake it on startup. It did finally start spinning enough to insure that I had the last few bits of data transferred to a new drive, though. :)

While they may make legitimate points in the article, it's hard to consider someone that makes money on HDD recovery like the authors of the article having an unbiased viewpoint here.

Not OP, but I have had the freezer trick work more times than not. It's a last case type of deal, but when there's nothing to lose try it. Just make sure the drive is sealed up nicely.

Worked in HS for a local computer repair shop. One trick to improve success with the freezer method is to place the drive in a sealed plastic bag with some desiccant packs. Placing a bare drive in the freezer can kill it due to condensation. Leave the drive in the bag at least a few hours to give the desiccant time to work. Like others have said, this is a last ditch effort, and if you really care enough, don't do it if you are willing to send it to a specialist, since it can ruin a recoverable drive. But it does seem to work ~30% of the time (at least w/ deathstars) and I did have success on a clicking Seagate drive last year.

As a teen I managed to 'rescue' 1000's of £/$'s worth of graphics cards from eBay listed as spares/repair with this method. I recall this working about half the time; then again at least 3/10 cards from eBay listed as broken worked immediately when plugged in.

Did you have any "signals" you looked for on the listings to indicate they might just need an oven reflow, or did you just buy everything cheap and hope it worked?

Reminds me of the old Xbox 360 "red ring of death" fix where you could just wrap the box in towels and leave it running for an hour to overheat it, then reboot and it would work again.

Very recently I was able to get a bootlooping N5X to temporarily boot, long enough to recover pictures, by putting it in to the freezer for a couple of hours. Some folks have (claimed to have) had long term success from freezing the bootlooping devices.

There was a type of Seagate drive long ago (I believe mine was a 2GB) that would stop working, apparently because the spindle got stuck. But if you shook it in a rotational manner, it would unstick! The first time I sent it for warranty service and of course they deleted all my data. But the next time it happened I learned about the trick.

I can confirm the freezer trick worked too. This was back before multi-platter high density drives though. I tried it recently with a failed 6TB drives from a friend, and it didn't work.

Yeah this was many years ago. I think the one I did it with was a 250GB from the mid to late 2000's

You may be interested in this interesting archive of hdd-failing-sounds. Note: as it's about 10 years old, it requires flash. http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

It definitely works. I just did it a couple of years ago.

In fact, no matter how long I left it in the freezer, I couldn't get all the data off. I ended up freezing it in the freezer, then putting it in a small cooler with a couple ice packs, with the wires hanging out between the cooler and lid. That gave me just enough to grab all the data (well, really, a couple of not-so-small VHDX files).

It was much fun, like a science experiment in high school.

Well, you're exactly part of a huge N of people that appear on the internet, who combined over the years owned an even larger number of drives.

Even managing just a few hundred nodes, I see hard drive failures pretty routinely. Servers hammering on storage devices 24x7 are much different from desktop computers. I've never had a hard drive fail on my own desktop machine, though I know people who have.

That backblaze report is absolutely fascinating! I'm curious though what the statistics would be from a more consumer point of view, with regards to quantity of use, operational temperature and so forth. I imagine most consumer drives sit idle almost all of the time, whereas theirs are more likely in constant use.

That said, that paints a pretty handy real world picture of what one might expect.

I killed a hard drive when I swapped motherboards about 15 years ago. I suspect static electricity.

My guess is that you change disks often. I've had multiple fails over the years, either from overheating or more often from overuse for extended periods of time (aka more than five years). Although I've never had a failure before the guarantee expired.

Yesterday I lost 3TB Toshiba TD01* series drive 23,75 months in (home) use. Only 4800 hours powered on. And it started to seek fail, even SMART showed it. It failed one week before warranty ended. Ha!

I've seen a whole batch of hard drives fail: one-by-one the company's employees' PCs failed over a period of a week or two. They had all been bought together in a single upgrade.

I (on a Mac) was unaffected (and no doubt a little smug).

The only hard drive I've broken was because a let a pretty powerful magnet fall on the computer, right on the spot the HDD is. Never play with magnets next to your computer.

My N is just 10, yet I've had two failures :(

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