Interesting Pattern In HDD Failures

[Gary Jarrel]

I probably should have added that it's a HP NW8000 notebook.

Cheers,

Gary

On 10/14/06, Gary Jarrel <garyjarrel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey All!
>
> Over the last couple of weeks, I've observed an interesting pattern of
> HDD failures on my notebook. I tend to use 100Gb 7200Rpm Seagate or
> Hitachi drives as they appear to be reasonably good performers.
>
> Over the last couple of weeks three HDDs (of which two were less than
> a week old) have developed bad sectors. I believe the first was Ubuntu
> installation 5.10 upgraded to 6.06, the second was a clean install of
> 6.06 and one which showed it's first bad sector the was edgy beta with
> all the latest upgrades.
>
> All the HDDs have used the ReiserFS file system across all partitions.
>
> The interesting observation which I've made, is that the physical
> corruption of the drives happens after I play MP3s, irrespective of
> whether I would use Rhythm or Totem the result is at least one bad
> sector. I.e. I've installed Edgy on Tuesday and it was working like a
> charm for a few days (no MP3 playing), last night I played one MP3
> track (thought I'd take the risk given the new OS) during play, I
> would get strange half second (or less) pauses approximately 6 or 7 of
> them, and then the music would come on again.
>
> I've restarted the machine, after playing just one track, went into
> the BIOS to do the HDD test and as I anticipated the test failed.
> Tried booting into Edgy, encountered an I/O error reading from a
> certain block of my HDD.
>
> At the time of writing this, I'm running SeaTools (seagate HDD
> utility) to remap the bad sector so that I can work through the
> weekend.
>
> I realise that the obvious solution would be to NOT play MP3s :) but
> perhaps someone can give me a few more ideas as to what the problem
> could be - at least it's reproducible, but I don't want to sit here
> all day reproducing bad sectors on my HDD :)
>
> Thank you
>
> Gary
>