Hitachi Deskstar hard drive

Oy,There's a reason those drives got the nickname "deathstar". I had one,until I tossed it out. :-(

I've got two 40 gig DeathStars on a Promise ATA RAID 1 controller inside a P3-800 box that I used to use for a work PC. It ran continuously for 2 years before being replaced by a Dell. Although I haven't fired it up in a year I have no doubt that it will work. I was under the assumption that the DeathStar laptop drive earned the reputation rather than the desktop drives, maybe I'm wrong.

I don't think the problems were (are?) limited to laptop drives.

I've seen the same number of faults with Maxtors. And Seagates. And Western Digitals. I can only conclude all drives are equal.

How much is the data worth?

I recall more failures with the laptop DeathStars being a popular drive several years back. I've got a 10 gigabyte 2.5" DeathStar that still works. My niece's boyfriend has a 20 gig DeathStar in his old Dell Inspiron. I gave a friend a 60 gig DeathStar 3.5" to replace his failed drive a year ago and he's still running today. Only drives I've ever had fail on me were a 40 gig 2.5" Toshiba, a 40 gig 3.5" Hitachi a few 3.5" Western Digitals and a few Fujitsu 80 gig SCSI drives from Dell Perc RAID controllers. I hjave an old Compaq Prosignia 200 with a

I've had maybe 5 IBM drives and never had a failure. Guess I'm the exception.

I have had this problem before a few times and have tried changing the logic board on the drives, NEVER with any success.

Hitachi says this is because you have to find a drive with the same FIRMWARE (whatever that means with a disc drive!) and in practice you never will. There are complex pieces of astronomically expensive equipment designed to re-write firmware, none apparently which do this to failed drives.

Besides, why are you so sure it is some part wihch can be switched?

The only real solution is to find someone like OnTrack who can take your drive apart in a Clean Room and read the data on the platters. The outfits which do this have a lock on the market and know they can screw users into paying any amount they choose to charge to do this. (because companies are usually happy to pay any amount to do this). As you have probably found out. These companies even have intricate programs which con you into believing that they can do this and are the only people who can. If it was so easy to get drives working again, dont you think they would be able to repair your drive?

When you do this, the next problem appears which is that the will send you DVDs with thousands of numbered directories and tens of thousands of (numbered, not named) files on them which will take you hundreds of hours to go through.

I have repaired many different brands of drives by replacing the logic board from a known good drive to a bad drive.Saved many 18GB WD drives back then. After i recovered the data, i replaced the boad back on the good drive.

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Do the WD drives have this curious and meaningless firmware number? I wonder if this 'firmware number' reason is genuine or if it is something put there to prevent users repairing their drives and making them buy new ones? Has anyone ever replaced the board on a Travelstar succesfully?

I am aware that lots of people have tried because sellers exist on ebay pretending that their drives may have bent pins etc where in reality they have tried to do eactly this and found that it doesnt work. I myself sold all my old Travelstar ones on ebay when I had established that you cant change boards on ANY of them but I wonder if anyone has ever found a drive with the same firmware and changed a board in a case where the board was at fault?

But surely you can change the firmware of the good drive? And you can do it with software, at least I just did it with a bank of Maxtor SCSI drives on a server.

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do it with software, at least I just did it with a bank of Maxtor SCSI driv= es on a server.

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ng a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.- Hide quoted text -

Interesting! i tried that and all I found was that to change the firmware on a Travelstar, you had to buy tens of thousands of dollas worth of equipment. And then there was no place to download 'new' firmware. (which was what made me think that this whole firmware thing was a big hoax: If there is something wrong or old or non-functional about firmware, why on earth would the manufacturer not want you to update your hardware which suffers from this old firmware?)

How on earth did you do this, where was the download site for the new firmware and does maxtor treat their drives any different from IBM/ Hitachi?

with software, at least I just did it with a bank of Maxtor SCSI drives on a server.

smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.- Hide quoted text -

The maxtor site will not hand out firmware, they say to consult the system manufacturer. In my case it was a Dell poweredge server, and Dell gave me the firmware (on a bootable CD). I think the difference is they are SCSI drives, and firmware is more important?

I've taken apart one of these drives and found that the plating on the glass platter has been partially worn off. Not as bad as in these photos, but still with an easily visible gap:

Head crash at its worst.

There are some other possible problems. See:

for URL's and refernces.

The "firmware" is actually on the first few tracks of the drive. It gets loaded into RAM on bootup. It cannot be easily re-written or replaced.

Methinks you will not have any success recovering data from a drive that exhibits the "click of death" problem. I once wasted about $300 only to discover it was hopeless.

Incidentally, nobody does backups until AFTER they've lost a massive amount of data and correspondly massive amount of time and money.

Try ebay. They turn up occasionally.

Graham

Ok, I now know what specific drive I need.

Hitachi Deskstar drive: Model HDS728080PLA380 P/N:0A31048 MLC:BA1468

Not I. I back up my hard drive periodically. When W2K "collapsed" several years, I had full backup and lost nothing.

... only the time to reinstall every single program. Does your backup care for the bookmarks of your browser, the mails of your emailer and so forth, which all happily sit somewhere else than in the "My Data" directory?

The only real thing is a disk imager, working and tested - for your OS, the hard disk size you use, and the file system you have :-). To have an incremental backup, too, would be fine.

Regards, H.

When I said "full backup", I meant full backup. I use Copy Commander 9.1. Unlike Ghost (and likely most other products) that claim to produce an exact copy, Copy Commander actually creates a bootable backup. I periodically copy the entire drive to a second hard drive. If the main drive fails, all I have to do is stick in a jumper and swap cables, then restart. As this isn't something I do every day, Really Important files are also backed up to a Zip disk.

My next computer will have integral RAID, and I won't have to manually back up again, ever. (Except possibly Really Important stuff, just to be safe.)

In message , William Sommerwerck writes

With respect William, part of my job is recovering data off failed/corrupted RAID sets. Do not rely on RAID to keep your data safe, if the chances of two disks failing in a RAID 5 set then I must be the luckiest (they weren't my RAID sets) man alive because I've seen it dozens of times in the past 5 years. If you value your data then back it up somewhere safe.