Do hard drives fail from open covers?

Why would you open all 3 in the first place? Was one not enough? Did you think the GIGs in the other drives looked different?? Hard drives use very precise floating head. they are very close to the plattens. As much as you feel you are in a dust free area when you open then, there is still alot of dust. It is possible that the regular airbourne dust in your place has damaged the heads or plattens. Or the controller boards have just crapped out. Check the connections from the board to the heads, as these are usually delicate.

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Yeah, they do.  

You may _think_ you were in a dust-free room, but as far as the
drives are concerned, when you opened them up they thought you were
throwing in a bunch of boulders.

It's just like throwing a shovel full of gravel on a vinyl record. Air is filthy. Harddrives are delicate. They are sealed for a reason.

Three of my 60-80 Gig Maxtor hard drives failed. First it will not look for datas. Later it will not format. Then finally it will click forever and won't boot. All three have the same thing in common, there covers were opened for a second in a clean, dust free room out of curiosity. Do hard drives fail from a quick cover removal?

Thanks

Maybe this is a troll, but...

In general, there's no such thing as a dust free room. Hard drive heads fly over the surface of the disk on a microscopic thin cushion of air, and even tiny bits of dust will scratch the surface. They are assembled and sealed in a *very* clean environment. Even clean rooms where you put on a bunny suit and go through an airlock are questionable for the level of cleanliness you would need to open a drive. More appropriate would be the glove box approach, but you would have to clean the drive meticulously first, or the dust accumulated on the outside of the drive from the real world would contaminate the "clean" environment upon introduction. There are ways and means to do it, but all are beyond the realm of "out of curiousity". Do not open working hard drives! Doing so renders them junk.

Does anyone have that diagram DEC used to include with disk drive user/service info? You know the one - it shows the heads flying over the surface of the disk next to a particle of dust and cigarette smoke, which looked like boulders in comparison.

And that was in the days where the flying height was

10 or 100 times greater than it is today!

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Yes. That's why it says: 'do not open' or 'warranty void if seal broken' on the sticker.

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Gerard Bok

Yeah. That's the 1st thing that came to my mind. I tried to Google it, but I'm not finding anything. It looked like this: : View in monospaced font (Courier). : ________ : / : / : / : / : / : / : / : __________ | : / \\ | human : / \\ | hair : / \\ | : / \\ | :============== | dust | \\ : |_____| ___ | particle | \\ : head | | | \\ : | \\ / \\ : air gap \\ / \\ : | \\ / \\ : platter | \\ / \\ :================================================================= :=================================================================

I accidentally broke the foil seal on one of my Western Digital hard disk drives. I tried taping it shut but it failed anyway. So then I tried spraying some WD-40 into it but that didn't do any good. So I sprayed a lot more in there and it just kept clicking and clicking. Heheh.

Yes, the fact you opened them and exposed the heads and platter, and then they failed is a good proof of what those who know will tell you. The required ultimate physical precision is probably why recovering data from a hard disk drive is so expensive. On the other hand, backups are cheap and easy.

Where did you find a dust free room? Did you rent a clean room or did you borrow a laminar flow hood?

That's the idea, but as Sam said it showed smoke and dust. (I'll add that it also included a hair for comparison.)

All the contaminants were shown as perfect circles to clearly demonstrate the relative diameters. It was a black & white line drawing IIRC.

See item #38 at:

The hard drives have gotten swifter since 1993. I'm not so sure about the users.

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But technology is changing so fast that indeed, a drive that appears similar on the outside may have a different bit density on the platters.

The contention that an older, lower capacity drive, may have more platters is certainly true!

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Important: Anyth>

But technology is changing so fast that indeed, a drive that appears similar on the outside may have a different bit density on the platters.

The number of platters has been decreasing for a while. New technology allows getting many more bits per unit area on the platter surface, reducing platter count reduces costs for the platters, heads, motor size, head drive coils, etc.

The BIOS settings for platter/head counts now are pretty much not reflective of actual hardware inside the case.

JazzMan

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and

You may get lucky once in a while, but opening the cover will almost always kill the drive. Sometimes it'll die moments later, other times it'll go a few weeks then start developing read errors but once the seal has been broken the drive should never be trusted again.

Now I know you're trolling.

Run along, little masturbation-boy...

JazzMan

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The image included on this page by any chance?

"Steve Lewinsky" wrote

The 20 Gig contains two platters. The 130 Gigs contains 3 platters. How could 3 platters holds so much data? Straight from its factory wrapper, I crack the lids open inside a large clean, clear plastic bag inside a hepa filtered closet which still doesn't help.

A hard drive of 100MB can be destroyed by exposing its innards to untreated air outside of a Class 100 (or lower) positive-pressure clean room. Considering that you're talking about drives with about 600 times that data density, the answer is a firm YES!

If you value the contents of a hard drive, and expect to have any hope of recovering same, never, EVER open the cover outside of the proper environment, with the proper clothing and the proper tools. Doing so, even in air that looks like it's "clean, dust free" to the human eye, can easily cause it to self-destruct in a very short period of run- time.

Whoever opened those covers is the one you have to blame for the sudden lack of functionality.

Keep the peace(es).

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