Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
October 6th, 2009, 21:10
Hello all,
I have the above mentioned drive and am looking for info on what others have found...or if I am going in the wrong direction.
My drive begins to spin up and then appears to have trouble keeping speed ( i have read other posts concerning this problem and many believe that the Smooth Chip L6284 is to blame...and I have read a great many posts about replacing the chip...without any resolution as to their final conclusion and if or not it was correct)
I read the output of E50-E53 (output of this chip) while attached to the spindle motor and saw that there was a definate drop in voltage as the drive tried to spin up, corresponding with what I thought i was hearing. I also separated the motor from the output of the chip to see if the chip was at fault or the motor was causing the problem.
Unfortunately I do not have an exact donor to compare readings and have been forced to use other drives with a similar chip. It appears that the chip output is fairly consistant without the motor involved. The DC levels were different between the two drives but I attributed that to the difference in drives (age) and the power requirements of the WD Caviar SE 16 drive. The trend, however, seemed to be consistant.
My question ( sorry if too wordy)....has anyone actually figured out the actual cause of failure with this drive?...am I correct to assume that the problem is in the spindle motor, not the Smooth chip?
If it is the spindle motor, is it a bearing issue? I would like to avoid a platter replacement because I am still one of the many who is unable to get WD heads realligned after removing the cover.
Thanks for any insight you can provide.......and for all the other thoughts I get from the Gurus each day
October 7th, 2009, 2:48
Have you tried disabling all but H0 and/or H1? You'll need PC3000 UDMA for this.
October 7th, 2009, 6:50
I do not have the PC3K and cannot disable H0 or H1. I am not sure how that will help my issue...I am interested in your line of thought on this. Can you explain further?
October 7th, 2009, 9:01
Head failure is much more common than motor failure in these.
Quite often it is just one or two heads that fail, and so by disabling all except 0 and/or 1 (the heads pertaining to the platter with the Service Area on) we can check this.
If the drive ID's OK from head 0/1 then it's pretty sure-fire thing that one of the other heads has failed preventing the drive from calibrating properly (hence the spin up, quiet click and spin down).
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