This Seagate ST31000333AS 1TB drive suffered a head crash resulting in severe media damage. The contamination caused by the damage can be seen on the disc surface as well as the internal filter. The filter is usually white but is now silver metallic in colour as a result of the contamination. The customer did not have any indication that this was going to happen.
Seagate Head Crash ST31000333AS
Seagate ST31000333AS Filter
Last week we wrote about the Thai floods affecting hard drive manufacturer Western Digital. It now appears that the floods are causing problems for Seagate. Although not directly affecting their own manufacturing plants, the floods are causing problems in the supply chain, which could cause delays and shortages getting their drives to market.
Inside a broken hard drive today we came across some of the most damaged read / write heads we have ever seen. Below is an example of how the heads should look. Notice how straight they are at the ends.
Good Seagate Heads
Then below are the damaged heads. They are at 90 degrees to the discs (tomb stoning) and would have been scraping the inner disc surfaces to pieces. Bad times!
Bad Seagate Heads
The Register today reported of expected supply problems for Western Digital, due to the severe flooding in Thailand at the moment. We are already having problems getting hold of certain hard drives, and this is sure to make the situation worse.
We at Dataquest have been aware of the problem with 1TB Seagate drives for some time. It is pleasing to see that Apple are also recognising the problem and are offering their customers a free swap out. These drives are mainly seen in iMacs, but you may also get them in the Mac Pro so make sure your back ups are up to date.
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Some tests carried out by the “Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory” have revealed some serious flaws with SSDs ability to be securely erased. When using standard tools designed for spinning disks, the results were understandably bad. They also tried the built-in “Security Erase Unit” command and the results of this were generally not good. After being securely erased, most of the SSDs still contained some large fragments of the test files.
Some secure erasure software would be similarly inefficient for hard disks anyway, as things like remapped or bad sectors can still contain readable data which may not be erased during the process.
The simplest solution for securely erasing any data is to completely destroy the storage media. For hard drives this means making a real mess of the platters, for SSDs it means wrecking the whole PCB, data chips and controller chips.
We have received two of these failed drives recently in succession. Further clean room examination has confirmed that the spindle stack has detached itself from the motor base and coil. When first handling the drive it becomes quite obvious that this has happened as you can actually feel the pack rattling. Surprisingly we cannot see any physical damage on the media or contamination and fortunately the clamp has kept the pack secure. We would not recommend spinning the drive up in this condition. The only rework available is to transfer the pack into a good Seagate donor as part of the recovery process. Pack alignment is a critical part of this process.
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Our address is Dataquest International Ltd, 24 Domum Road, Copnor, Portsmouth, Hampshire, PO2 0QZ, United Kingdom.
There have been some new reports of drive issues in the new MacBook Pros. It seems that the updated Seagate 7200rpm drives are getting a bit noisy at times and clicking. No reports that this causes anything particularly sinister, but after the (still ongoing) MacBook headcrash fiasco, it’s bad news to see another problem between MacBooks and their drives. There are suggestions that the new 7200.4 G-Force drives are noisy due to some new anti-shock technology. It sounds obvious that a drive spinning at 7200rpm is going to generate more noise than a 5400rpm drive. We’ll see what happens with this one. Updates to come I’m sure.