WD1600BEKT HSA SWAP and strange HDD

[yan1982]

Hello everybody,

We've a problem with the following HDD:

WD1600BEKT-66F3T2
P/N: 531291-001
Date: 27 OCT 2009
DCM: HBCTJHBB

This HDD has 2 platters and 4 heads.

We have to do HSA swap.
We've ordered 4 donors.

1.) Donor 1
Exactly the same HDD
WD1600BEKT-66F3T2
P/N: 531291-001
Date: 06 JUN 2010
DCM: HBCTJHBB

It's very strange because this HDD has only 1 platter and 2 heads. So, it's not possible to do a swap HSA.

2.) Donor 2
We bought a WD3200BEKT
WD3200BEKT-00F3T0
Date: 14 JUL 2009
DCM: EHNTJHBB

We've changed the HSA on the patient with this donor but the HDD don't inialize.

3.) Donor 3 and 4 is WD1600BEKT-00A2T0 (DCM: HHCTJHBB) and WD3200BEKT-22A25T1 (DCM: HHCVJHBB) but there are only one platter.

So, we have search information about the same model of our patient HDD and normally there are only 1 platter and 2 heads and we've 2 platters and 4 heads.

Do you think this is possible that the patient HDD use only 1 platter and that 2 heads are disabled ?
Have you had a same case in the past ?

Thank you in advance for your answer.

[BlackST]

What tool do you use for diagnose and firmware work i.e. SD, Atola, PC3000 etc. ?

[yan1982]

Actually, we use Atola Insight but we've ordered the SD HD Doctor suite.

[BlackST]

I had this feeling...

You always need to check headmaps and overall compatibility between headstacks (based on DCM and hardware) FIRST either for patient (when possible) and donor , otherwise you need to do some work that don't know how to do (and even if it is possible) with AI or SD.

[msurgeon]

WD has a habit of putting different head/platter configurations in what would appear to be identical models. Unless you have a donor in stock you really have no way of inspecting its head map to see if it's a match. Unless your drive vendor has capability to give you this information (I don't know of any who do - or will) then you may have to rely on luck.

[yan1982]

So, we can not just rely on DCM informations for WD.
The same HDD with the same DCM did not have the same number of heads, it's great.

Does anyone have a tip for this kind of problem?

[Russwinters]

This does not always ring true, but likely because the drives where manufactured 8months apart, WD made the change to a single platter configuration in this time.

If you can locate a drive with xxf3xx made ~Oct 09 (preferably Oct or earlier) you have much higher chances of matching head map.


At this time the Atola has no way of checking head map, but I believe this feature is being worked on, as it is, as seen here; important to have.

[hddguy]

I've had some cases where head maps were wrong despite almost identical info on label. A disk of higher capacity usually does the job.

And we all thought it was just Fujitsu that made life difficult with this....

[Russwinters]

I shake my fist at fujitsu!


And yes, I have seen perfect matches (seemingly) with different head map