dying hitachi deathstar

S

Shilohj

n00b
Joined
May 12, 2010
Messages
28
I was in the process of copying my files from a 400 gb hitachi desktar drive using one of the esata ports on my new computer, and i noticed the xfer rate was dropping to a super slow speed ( 5 mb sec ) . I thought it may be an issue with a port i was using, so i powered it down, and moved it to the esata port on the back and powered it back on and it spins up and once it gets to full speed it starts clicking.

it is no longer recongized by my computer, and will cause the boot to go really slow when plugged in.

I tried the freezer trick ( in a ziplock bag ) but that had no effect and actually ended up killing the drive controller due to it pulling the condensation from the air.

I was wondering if anyone had experience with a similar drive failure where the clicking was simply caused by a bad controller or mechanical failure, i did open it and didn't see any scratches on the platter.
 
Several years back before IBM sold their disk drive business to Hitachi I had two identical deathstar drives fail within a matter of hours apart. Back then drives were still fairly expensive. I have never purchased another IBM/Hitachi drive again. Remember, its not if your drive will fail but rather when it will fail. Hope you have a backup.
 
sorry I guess I should reword that, I was wondering if anyone was able to recover data from a similar state by swapping the controller, or swapping platters to another drive?
 
wingfat said:
Several years back before IBM sold their disk drive business to Hitachi I had two identical deathstar drives fail within a matter of hours apart. Back then drives were still fairly expensive. I have never purchased another IBM/Hitachi drive again. Remember, its not if your drive will fail but rather when it will fail. Hope you have a backup.
Click to expand...

Zero correlation. None. "Deathstars" were IDE, the OP has a SATA drive. Hitachi bought IBM's line in like, 2001. This drive has been produced since then.
 
Blue Fox said:
You opened the drive, so you're pretty much screwed at this point.
Click to expand...

I know it is risky to open the drive outside a clean room, i just wanted to see if had actual scratches in the platters. since this is not the case i was wondering if I could try swapping the platters to another drive in case this was a mechanical failure and not the platters magnetic signal getting to weak to hold the drive head up.
 
Clicking is not the same as heads hitting the platters. It means the heads are snapping back to the parked position. Heads hitting the platters sounds like like an angle grinder and tends to be rather loud. Swapping platters isn't really something you can do yourself either.
 
You know just the other day I wondered if the hitachi drives were still called deathstars lol
 
Shilohj said:
I know it is risky to open the drive outside a clean room, i just wanted to see if had actual scratches in the platters. since this is not the case i was wondering if I could try swapping the platters to another drive in case this was a mechanical failure and not the platters magnetic signal getting to weak to hold the drive head up.
Click to expand...

About 18 years ago I took out the platters (4 or 5) of a full height 5.25 inch drive. I put them back in and it worked fine for months/years and the environment was definitely no clean room. However with that said platters / heads were much larger than they are today. It would be very difficult to not damage the platters or heads in the swap.
 
Is there any reason why the heads would keep parking themselves? is it possible its the controller and not the mechanical part of the drive? I am wondering if I should try buying another drive for the controller for 50 or just go with professional recovery. I found one place that would do it for 499.
 
should i be scared about my 1tb hitachi then? serves up 4 platters with 333gb per i think shouldn't be that bad. although 16mb cache probably ugh what does hitachi hold up for now?
 
should i be scared about my 1tb hitachi then?
Click to expand...

I do not think you should be any more scared about any other mechanical disk. I do not think this was a bad batch. With that said, any hard drive can and will die at any time. At work this means 1% to 5% of our drives die annually. Some of these are 1 year old some are 6 years. Between 6 months and 3 years there is a lesser rate of failure but that is dependent on batch. I can say now that we have had too many failures with seagate 7200.11s.
 
yeah i think this was kinda random. Was just bad luck because I was telling myself to transfer everything last week to one of my other drives i am transferring. so I would not have to even pull it from the last case

I also may have jinxed myself because I told a friend 2 weeks ago I have never had a drive die on me . ( I still have 4 wd drives 200, 250 and 2x 320 gb from 8-10 years ago that work fine )
 
Shilohj said:
I know it is risky to open the drive outside a clean room, i just wanted to see if had actual scratches in the platters. since this is not the case i was wondering if I could try swapping the platters to another drive in case this was a mechanical failure and not the platters magnetic signal getting to weak to hold the drive head up.
Click to expand...
Check HDDguru.com forums and numerous YouTube videos.

You should have tried a regular SATA port first and then, if your data wasn't at all important, the circuit board swap.
 
a little late in reply , but i tried both the onboard esata port and the esata port that just connect to the sata controller, so it is no different than opening the computer and attaching directly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top