Hard Disk Drive Myths Debunked

[Dashken]

This guide was written in response to the numerous fallacies about the hard disk that are still being propagated in many forum discussions. Although many articles have covered these topics, it is apparent that hard disk urban legends are still more popular than the simple truth.

So, let's get down to basics and examine some of these common fallacies or myths and debunk them!

Link : Hard Disk Drive Myths Debunked

[m0dD3r]

Wow! Awesome guide man! This has answered a TON of questions I had about HDD's. I have forwarded to all my computer friends for reference. I look forward to this being updated even more.

Also, let's say I had a computer that was running a torrent client so it constantly had new files being added to the hard drive every day. Would it hurt the hard drive to defrag it every 3-7 days? I would be using perfectdisk 7 if you need to know.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by m0dD3r

Wow! Awesome guide man! This has answered a TON of questions I had about HDD's. I have forwarded to all my computer friends for reference. I look forward to this being updated even more.

Also, let's say I had a computer that was running a torrent client so it constantly had new files being added to the hard drive every day. Would it hurt the hard drive to defrag it every 3-7 days? I would be using perfectdisk 7 if you need to know.

Thanks!

Nope, even defragging that frequently should not hurt it at all. In a way, frequent defragging is actually less stressful because each defrag session would take much less time than a long-delayed defrag.

[chunkie]

That's a really useful guide!

Oh.. You mentioned that formatting does not help increase the PC's performance. But.. if defragging does not improve the PC performance... should I format the PC then?

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by chunkie

That's a really useful guide!

Oh.. You mentioned that formatting does not help increase the PC's performance. But.. if defragging does not improve the PC performance... should I format the PC then?

Actually, the article didn't say that. I only mentioned that formatting won't kill your hard drive. Neither will defragging it.

[charge-n-go]

Originally Posted by chunkie

That's a really useful guide!

Oh.. You mentioned that formatting does not help increase the PC's performance. But.. if defragging does not improve the PC performance... should I format the PC then?

Formatting can increase ur PC performance when there are too many junks hogging ur system and u dunno which one is the culprit. Formatting just make ur PC having a clean start again.

[Brian]

well, what about the myth of drive temperature vs failure rate?

extracted findings from this page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6376021.stm

The authors wrote: "We expected to notice a very strong and consistent correlation between high utilisation and higher failure rates.

"However our results appear to paint a more complex picture. First, only very young and very old age groups appear to show the expected behaviour."

A hard disk was described as having "failed" if it needed to be replaced.

Hard drives less than three years old and used a lot are less likely to fail than similarly aged hard drives that are used infrequently, according to the report.

"One possible explanation for this behaviour is the survival of the fittest theory," said the authors, speculating that drives which failed early on in their lifetime had been removed from the overall sample leaving only the older, more robust units.

The report said that there was a clear trend showing "that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates".

"Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend."

But hard drives which are three years old and older were more likely to suffer a failure when used in warmer environments.

"This is a surprising result, which could indicate that data centre or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment containing disk drives," said the authors.

comment: unfortunately, very high temperatures isn't defined, but I would think of it at being above 45-50c

The report also looked at the impact of scan errors - problems found on the surface of a disc - on hard drive failure.

"We find that the group of drives with scan errors are 10 times more likely to fail than the group with no errors," said the authors.

They added: "After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors."

well, it's always argued in forums that no one has a sufficient sample size to make generalisations, but surely google would have a large enough sample size to say with some confidence that this is possibly the case?

edit: link to the report itself: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

edit no 2: looks like the low temperature part appears to be higher in the report because it includes a larger range of temperatures from 15-30c while every other category only has a range of 5c, but this still does not explain the minimum failure rate for the first 3 years at the 35-40c level

it looks like the 30-45c region(well, i'm extrapolating this to only apply to malaysia's temperatures) is the optimal temperature to store the drives in from the report itself

[Adrian Wong]

Hmm.. That's in reference to server hard drives, which by default, are designed to be a lot more robust than desktop drives. Also, it refers to server room conditions where systems are kept cooled below ambient temperature.

Since we are mostly desktop users, it's unlikely for us to achieve lower temps like 15oC unless it's winter and we refuse to turn on the heat.

When I wrote about heat killing hard drives, I was really referring to high drive temperatures, not high ambient temperatures. Drives are more likely to die if they are continuously operating at a high temperature (around 70-80oC?).

The point is not to achieve a temperature that's below ambient but to lower down the drive's temperature to as close to ambient as possible. I would personally be happy if I can keep my hard drives below 45oC.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by Adrian Wong

Hmm.. That's in reference to server hard drives, which by default, are designed to be a lot more robust than desktop drives. Also, it refers to server room conditions where systems are kept cooled below ambient temperature.

Since we are mostly desktop users, it's unlikely for us to achieve lower temps like 15oC unless it's winter and we refuse to turn on the heat.

When I wrote about heat killing hard drives, I was really referring to high drive temperatures, not high ambient temperatures. Drives are more likely to die if they are continuously operating at a high temperature (around 70-80oC?).

The point is not to achieve a temperature that's below ambient but to lower down the drive's temperature to as close to ambient as possible. I would personally be happy if I can keep my hard drives below 45oC.

the thing is, simply quoting from the report:

The disks are a combination of serial and
parallel ATA consumer-grade hard disk drives, ranging
in speed from 5400 to 7200 rpm, and in size from 80 to
400 GB. All units in this study were put into production
in or after 2001. The population contains several models
from many of the largest disk drive manufacturers and
from at least nine different models. The data used for
this study were collected between December 2005 and
August 2006.

and while it may be true that there are those RE(enterprise edition series by western digital) editions and stuff, somehow i believe that they're referring to the hard drives that are used by us consumers as i don't believe there are any RE editions of hard drives which are 3 or more years old

i don't dispute the 75-80c level, but i'm just questioning the logic of worrying about temperatures say, for a typical system in malaysia, 40c-50c for hard drives and people recommending others to get hard drive coolers as it will supposedly lengthen the lifespan of the hard drive while this report points out otherwise

edit: drive temperatures are taken from SMART

[64bit]

The guide did not mention the type of format used. There's a "Quick" and "Full" format in Windows. As I know, quick format does not detect bad sector. Does quick format erase the location of the bad sectors previously detected? Which type of format is recommended when doing a reformat?