dropped hard drive onto concrete...what to check for?

[Idontcare]

Was carrying my backup spindle-drive out to the car (where I keep one copy of my backups) when it inadvertently slid out from the Styrofoam pack I keep it in (forgot to hold it right side up! doh!) and so the drive dropped from waist-height straight down onto a concrete sidewalk.

The drive struck the concrete on a corner of the drive (topside, opposite the sata/power hookup to be more exact) and second contact came from soft landing in the grass.

I haven't powered it up yet, but it doesn't make any noise if I gently shake it back and forth (no broken glass sounds that I'd expect if I shattered a platter).

If it was a 500GB or 250GB I'd have no qualms over just tossing it and never taking my chances but t is a 1TB Hitachi drive, would cost me about $80 to replace so I'd rather not just assume it is compromised out of the gate.

So...assuming this sucker does power up and doesn't make any funny noises or such...what sort of diagnostics should I run on the drive to determine if it is still usable to any degree of confidence?

Edit: adding pics

 

[GlacierFreeze]

If you don't hear anything moving when you shake it, I think it'll be okay. Platter should be okay and the heads go into a safety position when off I believe.

I've had to take a hammer to some work HDs several times a piece before we could hear broken platter fragments moving around.

 

[VirtualLarry]

3' drop onto concrete? It's dead, Jim.

 

[RebateMonger]

The last time I dropped a Seagate 7200.7 on concrete, it never worked again.

You can run a couple of "chkdsk /r" scans and see if there's any reallocated sectors. If it reads at all.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I had a 1tb drive (Samsung F1) fall about 11 inches onto the next level of my desk when it slipped off a game box where it was sitting. Doesn't sound like much but that fall snuffed my drive. If yours fell farther, and landed on concrete no less, I'd say your drive is toast. Let us know what you find out.

 

[RebateMonger]

I had a 1tb drive (Samsung F1) fall about 11 inches onto the next level of my desk when it slipped off a game box where it was sitting.

I knocked my Dell server off the chair it was sitting on. All three Hitachi 1 TB disks were running at the time. It fell onto a carpeted floor...but stil...

I am shocked that the disks are still running with no reallocated sectors.

 

[Idontcare]

3' drop onto concrete? It's dead, Jim.

Confirmed. The drive turned out to be a redshirt.

Makes load clicking noises on power-up, attempts to spin-up but it sounds like the arm is banging around inside. Drive is recognized but areca controller says "failed" and I am inclined to believe.

Oh well, at least it was just the backup to the backup drive, sucks to be out the replacement cost though.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Oh well, at least it was just the backup to the backup drive, sucks to be out the replacement cost though.

Wise man. You sound like someone who has lost valuable data in the past?

 

[Idontcare]

Yep. Lost my honeymoon photos. Luckily have one hard-copy but yeah am forever peeved at having lost the original digital versions. That and nearly all of the data that went into my doctoral thesis. I could live without the data (already had the phd at that point) but the photos were truly irreplaceable.

 

[jimhsu]

The thing about backups -- you never realize how valuable the junk on your hard drive that is "too big to back up" is until you lose it. That's why I am trying to backup *everything* - every last scrap of data - onto the cloud. Upload bandwidth is a killer though.

 

[RebateMonger]

That's why I am trying to backup *everything* - every last scrap of data -

I' think that somewhere, on one of my current XP hard drives, I've still got copies of files from my 1987 version of Windows 2.x.

 

[taltamir]

Yep. Lost my honeymoon photos. Luckily have one hard-copy but yeah am forever peeved at having lost the original digital versions. That and nearly all of the data that went into my doctoral thesis. I could live without the data (already had the phd at that point) but the photos were truly irreplaceable.

I hear data recovery is only 300$ nowadays.

 

[pjkenned]

The question is... 1 egg for these drives on Newegg time?!?! "Drives were unable to hold up to my burn-in that included a short drop!"

j/k I have a bunch of Hitachi's and they all work great. That being said, I have yet to drop them on concrete.

 

[Qbah]

dropped hard drive onto concrete...what to check for?

Check for how much a replacement costs on Newegg?

 

[Idontcare]

I hear data recovery is only 300$ nowadays.

This was 10yrs ago, when the cheapest quote I got was $1600 (for them to look at it, more if the job turned nasty once they got there)...other quotes were $2k and above. And at the time even if it was $300 I didn't have $300 to spend, things were rather lean then.

 

[taltamir]

This was 10yrs ago, when the cheapest quote I got was $1600 (for them to look at it, more if the job turned nasty once they got there)...other quotes were $2k and above. And at the time even if it was $300 I didn't have $300 to spend, things were rather lean then.

The drive in the picture is dated 2009.. what do you mean 10 years ago?

And I remember it costing thousands of dollars. That is why I was so surprised when I learned that nowadays you can get it done for 300. (at least, so I was told)

 

[jvroig]

The drive in the picture is dated 2009.. what do you mean 10 years ago?

The drive in picture is recent, which is just a backup of a backup.

The data he recounted that was lost (honeymoon + data for PhD thesis) was from an incident 10 years ago, gone forever, and which taught him to have backups and backups of backups, one of which he dropped on the concrete in the present time.

already had the phd at that point

Do people actually call you Dr. Phil?

 

[killster1]

i call hitachi shitachi but thats when i refer to the dvd drives =P guy on here does data retrieval (he is in the thread titled puff of smoke) if you still have your 10 year old hd.. he taught us all about the volt regular chips on the hd that you can remove ifyour hd fried. (i might try it) never killed a hd from dropping it even yanked a xbox1 off the desk and it fell to concrete was even on and playing at the time.

 

[Idontcare]

Do people actually call you Dr. Phil?

heh, indeed I do get my share of teasing over that...to make the matters worse my wife's name is Laura and yes she is a Dr as well. Was all the more ironic that my career path included being an assistant professor at UNT (Phil McGraw's alma mater) so the UNT grad students liked to poke fun at me over that, lol good times.

 

[taltamir]

heh, indeed I do get my share of teasing over that...to make the matters worse my wife's name is Laura and yes she is a Dr as well. Was all the more ironic that my career path included being an assistant professor at UNT (Phil McGraw's alma mater) so the UNT grad students liked to poke fun at me over that, lol good times.

tell them you are the real deal. That the show is based on your life, that you sold the rights to reproduce to it the producers of the show

 

[jimhsu]

The drive in picture is recent, which is just a backup of a backup.

The data he recounted that was lost (honeymoon + data for PhD thesis) was from an incident 10 years ago, gone forever, and which taught him to have backups and backups of backups, one of which he dropped on the concrete in the present time.


Do people actually call you Dr. Phil?

Ok, that makes more sense.
< Reading comprehension fail.

 

[Idontcare]

I must say, given how little external physical damage the drive took from its drop onto the concrete these drive manufacturers are clearly waaaaay over-engineering the shell on the drives.

If I can drop it 3ft to concrete and the internals of the drive are dead then the outside of the drive can be equally destroyed for all that it matters.

Why design the shell to be capable of surviving plummets of doom (just adding production cost) that will render the internals destroyed anyways? Just sayin...

 

[jvroig]

The best I can imagine is that perhaps it protects from other kinds of trauma. For example, it might very well survive being hit and having heavy objects fall on it, even though it spectacularly fails to protect the internals when it is the one that falls, such as in your case.

But with the use case that hard drives have, I can't imagine that being useful even if true.

However, I do remember something posted very recently here in the memory and storage forums, where one poster mentioned something within the lines of "your hard drive would probably survive a fall unless it unfortunately impacts squarely on one of its corners", so perhaps the cases are actually engineered to be as shock-resistant as possible, except for "corner" cases. Again, when I think about it, that's also not very useful.

Or, another likely explanation perhaps is that the companies just chose an inexpensive material for the case, and that material turned out to be rather heavy and strong.

Or, they (Seagate/WD/Hitachi/Samsung) just want the product to feel very sturdy, giving the consumer a sense of safety and the product an air of reliability.

I'm out of ideas.

 

[RebateMonger]

The basic shell probably needs to be pretty stiff. There's lots of high-speed, but precision stuff going on inside the drives, so the base where everything is mounted needs to not be moving around, too. If you are engraving the head of a pin, you don't want your chair bouncing around.

 

[Russwinters]

It's the fluid dynamic bearings they are using.

Small shock throws them off balance, causing the platters to "wobble"

heads can't properly detect servo information from platters, and cannot position themselves.


The clicking is them basically resetting over and over trying to watch for servo.



I would have to look at the drives internals, but normally my company charges ~$700-1K for this type of job, as the tools and procedures for this job are pretty tricky. You can't just pull the platters out one by one and stick em in a new drive, you have to move them all as one, without letting them shift more then a few microns (if that). Sounds fun, right?


Regards,