Is it possible that inside certain harddisks motion detectors are placed? I have a harddsk which works fine but as soon you move the drive (powered on and connected to pc) the head sounds as it wants to go in park, if i leave the drive alone it just works fine. IDE and power cable are ok. Not relevant for a repair but plain curiosity, i would expect it on a laptop disk but not a desktop.
Bart Bervoets
On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:05:22 +0200, Bart Bervoets Has Frothed:
I can safely say that no modern drive has any such thing.
-- Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004 COOSN-266-06-25794
Some laptops and external harddrives for laptops do have shock detectors but I don't know if they are inside the drives.
--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ:
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You should never move a running drive. It could crash.
-- 50% of all statistics are wrong. The rest don't matter. Clyde Crashcup
On Tue, 03 Oct 2006 15:24:23 +0000, Clyde Crashcup Has Frothed:
LOL that made me laugh.
-- Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004 COOSN-266-06-25794
Meat Plow spake thus:
Yeah, I guess all those people using laptops must just *imagine* they're moving their computer while it's on.
-- Save the Planet Kill Yourself - motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)
Most microdrives have this feature, but these are the tiny drives the size of CF cards used in many portable music players. Just moving it should not trigger it though, it takes a fair bit of shock.
Hi!
Anything is always possible. But I doubt that there is any such thing in a desktop hard drive. Laptop drives may have such circuitry in place.
Based on some drives that I've worked with over time, I'd say what you're seeing is likely a result of the spindle motor somehow changing speed slightly as you move it. The drive's controlling electronics can monitor the RPM of this motor and may shut the drive down if enough of a change is detected. The motor may be getting ready to fail or it may have worn bearings that allow a significant RPM change when you move it.
You can get most desktop drives to reinitialize themselves with a mild tap. I don't suggest trying that on a drive you depend upon. And while it generally does no harm to move a running hard drive, you should be careful not to drop, jar, shake or abuse it while it is running. If any one of those things were to happen while the drive was running, a head crash or other drive failure is possible.
William
One notorious 10 Mb hard drive Radio Shack sold would only start after a weekend if you first dropped it about a foot onto a desk!
I've seen many, many drives like that- it's called 'stiction'. The heads and platters are so perfectly formed and smooth that they can bond together preventing the drive motor spinning up the platters. Usually the motor can be heard pulsing and giving up after a few tries. The best way to release the heads from the platters is IME to hold the drive and quickly flick it in a rotational plane to spin the internal platters breaking the bond. Freezing the drive overnight can also do the trick, but the drive must be put in a completely sealed bag beforehand. Warming with a hairdryer can also help. Thumping the drive onto a hard surface should be a last resort.
Stiction is not usually an issue on modern drives, but it was common on the old MFM/RLL/ESDI style drives.
Dave
Seconded.
Morse
Hi!
William
You're going to crash your heads, if you already haven't. A hard drive should not be moved when running.
It's probably getting an error and recalibrating.
Yep, many do, to prevent head crashes when the drive gets jostled. Get the drive model number and look up the manual on the Internet (a set of tubes). It's there plain as day.
As a side effect, it turns out to be quite possible to set up an ad-hoc earthquake monitoring network, just with a little added software! Very clever!
Ancient_Hacker spake thus:
Sorry, you lost me there. "Set of tubes"; what is that?
-- Save the Planet Kill Yourself - motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)
One of our more cretinous representatives stood up and blathered in Congress about how the Internet is getting clogged up as one of his staffers sent an "internet" to him and it took four days to arrive. You see the Internet "it's like a set of tubes".
Ted Stevens of Alaska and the bridge to nowhere and secret spending.
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