Followup to: <200412021147.12410.systemloc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> By author: TJ <systemloc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> In newsgroup: linux.dev.raid > > I do not think the deathstar incident was due to a firmware problem as you > describe at all. I had a lot of these drives fail, and I read as much as I > could find on the subject. The problem was most likely caused by the fact > that these drives used IBM's new glass substrate technology. This substrate > had heat expansion issues which caused the heads to misalign on tracks and > eventually cross write over tracks, corrupting data. The classic "click of > death" was the sound of the drive searching for a track repetitively. In some > cases a format would allow the drive to be used again, in many cases it would > not. It is my belief that formatting was inneffective at fixing the drive > because the cross writing probably hit some of the low level data, which the > drive cannot repair on a format. > It's also worth noting that there was extremely high correlation between which factory built the drives and the failure rates. Apparently some factories had virtually zero instances of this problem. -hpa - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
