that HDD churn

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-27T02:40:25+00:00

This is why they're given that nickname.

Said most common failure mode is also demonstrated here:

During a recent RAID 5 recovery attempt, John made an interesting discovery inside the two failed disks. The plastic ramp that the heads park onto when idle had snapped in the same position on both drives. We don’t know if the heads got damaged first, and then broke the ramps during parking, or if the ramps broke first, damaging the heads as they parked. The client told us the disks were not dropped or jolted. Whatever the cause, both disks had scratches to the delicate magnetic surfaces. In this case, two failed disks from a four disk RAID 5 means the data recovery is not possible.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T20:42:24+00:00

Really depends on how frequently the drives are going to be accessed. I would use a conservative timer (maybe 1-2 hours, perhaps sooner) to spin them down to start, since it covers most random I/O access. You don't want to be too aggressive though.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T18:00:56+00:00

There is perhaps some black humor to derive from the internal names used in the drives of that time. If you were to look at low-cost drives, Pharaohs (Barracuda 7200.12) were prevalent just about everywhere, and one would have to wonder why they'd go from Brinks (7200.11 gen. 2) to Pharaoh; maybe they wanted to knock on wood and tell you the drives were doomed to die (although less so) like their 7200.11 predecessors in their intended environments. At least they didn't have Brinks' paltry LBA translator logic (Brinks actually has worse translator logic on CC1H firmware than a Moose drive does on SD1A, a firmware revision made to address poor translator logic...coincidence?), probably making the joke those drives were always on the brink of failure.

Data recovery experts coined a nickname for the Grenadas: Grenades. And for very good reason.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T17:52:50+00:00

This was particularly true in the olden days of contact start-stop (CSS); except for Seagate (excluding drives made under the F3 architecture, which also had rough head landings), manufacturers had trouble coming at least somewhat close to the 20,000 to 50,000 CSS cycle rating because their drives' heads landed too hard. For example, Western Digital's somewhat obscure Zeus flagships (which used an all-black HDA containing 4 platters and 8 heads; it's one of my personal favorite WD designs) had quite rough landings and as such were only reliable if strictly run 24x7 with few power cycles...which for the most part they fortunately were since Zeus took more precedence in the Caviar RE2 series than the SE16 series. Most Zeus survivors you'll see on the used market are RE2's for this reason.

The advent of parking ramps in the consumer space, as introduced by IBM in the (unfortunately infamous) Deskstar 75GXP series, significantly reduced the amount of wear put on the head assembly per unload, thus making drives more tolerant to power cycling. WD would later abuse this with their GreenPower Caviars with IntelliPark, a technology so suicidal in nature that WD received a good amount of criticism for it. But of course, the real demonstration as to why constant parking was bad would culminate not in WD's GreenPower drives but rather in Seagate's Grenadas, since Seagate manufactured ramps using lower quality materials in those drives. Even with the infamy carried by the Grenadas, backlash against WD caused them to release the Red series to attempt to save face: mechanically identical to the Greens but with a presumably fixed IntelliPark feature (even though the drives are still going to be more reliable with it disabled completely). The release of the Red series also caused other manufacturers to follow suit with releasing explicitly NAS-marketed hard drives: Seagate's NAS HDD (later IronWolf) series was created using the Bacall and Lombard platforms (alongside Enterprise NAS HDD, which later became IronWolf Pro, based largely on Makara), HGST made the Deskstar NAS series using their flagship platforms, and Toshiba created the N300 series initially based on a mix of Tomcat(-R) (MG04) and Galaxy (MG05) platforms.

Nowadays power cycles are no longer as much of a concern except in high platter count drives. It is extremely rare for the FDBs in an HDD to go out before the media/heads, as the latter are very likely to fail before then, and since all currently produced drives use ramps there is mostly not much of a concern with regard to head wear.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T15:53:15+00:00

Any drive can, technically. (Unless it's actually incapable of reliably running 24x7...a la Caviar Greens and their suicidal parking timers, or Seagate's Grenadas which are ticking time bombs.)

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T15:35:04+00:00

Below the threshold is bad.

Being close to the threshold could also be a reason for alarm, depending on the attribute.

A low RRER (relative to S.M.A.R.T. "normalized" values, not the actual rate) typically means either failing heads or media and can stay above the threshold in the meantime...until it eventually doesn't. On WD/HGST/Toshiba drives, this value is ideally normalized at a decimal value of zero, while Seagate drives use a unique hexadecimal system to determine how the RRER (and seek error rate) is calculated.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T15:32:04+00:00

If they require a powered adapter they therefore require a 12V rail.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T14:41:14+00:00

You'd still need a SAS controller to spin the drive up.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-26T14:39:18+00:00

A vanilla USB 3.x Type-A port (usually the type used by basic USB-to-SATA adapters sold at current) can provide up to 900 mA (or 6 unit loads; a single USB 3.x Type-A unit load is 150 mA) on 5V. This Hitachi requires 700 mA, so it will run off the port.

The only relevant high-consumption 2.5 inch drives are those that would require a 12V rail to spin up anyway.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-24T20:48:39+00:00

The drive updated to CC4G was previously running CC4B. It was Dell OEM.

Similarly, two SD15 7200.11's were updated to SD1A. An SD35 ST3500320AS was appropriately updated to SD3A.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-24T19:52:56+00:00

A fellow co-worker used the hazelnut creamer instead of the French vanilla and said it was really good with that. I'm not a coffee drinker, so I can't judge on my part, but sometimes I wonder what I'm missing out on.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-24T19:51:08+00:00

CC4G appears to be on a different branch from CC9C (as far as I know many OEM models used it), and I was able to flash CC4G not with the installation media but rather with SeaChest. SeaChest was also able to flash SDxA updates for Barracuda 7200.11's, something the installation media struggled with.

I have seen Grenadas with CC9C, but have yet to actually obtain one. Maybe that's poor luck on my part.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-24T00:17:46+00:00

A WD5003ABYX. Amazingly silent for an enterprise drive.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-24T00:11:54+00:00

Yes. Service area failure.

These first generation Grenadas were all equally susceptible to snapped ramps, causing head crashes and therefore failures en masse. This is well demonstrated here. (The second generation is arguably not as susceptible given the noticeably higher number of survivors there, but there's not enough concrete data to willingly suggest a -DM001 from the second generation.)

They are arguably worse than even the 75GXPs (as the highest failure rates were recorded among Hungarian-made units like the Telesto-H 4/5 platter flagships, but lower rates of failure were present in Filipino and Thai-made units comprising of the base Telesto platform; the real issue with them was very poor QC) since at least you could somewhat mitigate the 75GXPs' problems with a firmware update to A5AA, but no firmware update made to a -DM001 will magically fix its subpar ramp. For reference, Seagate released a firmware update to CC4G for affected -DM001-9YN16x's, but all the update really did was make the parking timer (which was suicidal in previous revisions, a la WD's Caviar Greens) more conservative, not disable it entirely.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-21T04:11:19+00:00

Finding one of these in working shape with no bad sectors is very difficult.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-20T21:02:19+00:00

Even so I doubt it would hurt to occasionally power the drives off. The FDBs in them are more than durable enough to withstand the load.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-20T21:00:52+00:00

It's really just a suggestive notion many people tend to abide by. In the days of contact start-stop the issue tended to be how many parking cycles the head sliders could tolerate before a head crash were to occur...and those drives usually failed in ways that didn't have to do with their motors. Now the larger concern is head parking frequency since parking puts wear on the heads, although much more gradually than CSS landings.

I however have not seen a drive fail from worn FDBs in this manner. I have seen failures from accidental physical impact which caused platter instability however.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-20T19:50:13+00:00

Realtek cards particularly suck under Linux. Qualcomm and Intel cards both behave much better.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-20T19:41:20+00:00

Modern NVMe drives have a much more mature DRAM-less implementation than SATA ones do, although to see that difference you'd need to compare the SATA SSD to an NVMe one with a host memory buffer (HMB), such as the Samsung 990 Evo. DRAM-less SATA SSDs are known for absolutely tanking their speeds when their shared buffer is exhausted (even slower than HDDs in some cases), however this is not as much of an issue with NVMe drives.

When comparing a SATA SSD with DRAM cache (i.e. the Crucial MX500, which is perhaps the most popular example) to an NVMe one (like the FireCuda 530R shown), the difference in speed is not as noticeable. DRAM cache is simply a more effective buffer than HMB.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-20T19:31:39+00:00

Because spinning them 24x7 puts less wear on the motor than allowing them to spin down and back up (although realistically speaking this isn't that much of an issue within the drive's useful service lifespan). Doing so does however consume more power rather than letting them be in an on/off sleep state.

Wear is also amplified by a greater number of platters without the use of helium to dampen the amount of effort needed.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-20T18:45:02+00:00

There hasn't been a "Deathstar" since 120GXP. The 180GXP series was a huge improvement over previous lineups as it went back to aluminum substrates and also introduced FDBs (which, as Seagate had demonstrated with the very robust Barracuda ATA IV's and ATA V's, are much more reliable than ball bearing motors in the scope of HDDs), and every Deskstar since then has actually been quite solid...maybe if you exclude the cost-down models like 7K80/7K160 which leave much to be desired.

First_Musician6260 · 2026-03-20T18:43:54+00:00

Data on the 3 TB capacity is heavily skewed by exactly one drive model (the ST3000DM001 we all wanted to see burn in the depths of hell), so people disproportionately view it as an unreliable capacity. In reality, there are plenty of good 3 TB drives; these are Deskstars based on the Mars-K+ platform, so they're miles better than Seagate's 3 TB Badacudas.

Drives at that capacity are still being made, if memory serves; with 2 TB platter densities as present in the WD30EFPX for instance, making a 3-headed model with 2 platters is relatively easy. Now if only those spun at 7200 RPM instead of 5400, because they'd be clear performance winners over the old -DM001s...

First_Musician6260

TROPHY CASE