Moin,

last Friday afternoon I came back to my notebook and found the fan running on full power and the system responding very sluggish. First I suspected the system fan's bearing failing, but on further inspection the noise could be traced to the harddisk
It would still operate a bit, booting VERY slowly, but after power down it wouldn't come back up.
When the system pretty much hanged on everything that involved a disk access including shutdown, DTemp still showed the last measured temperature in the system tray (45°C). Is it a common problem with FDB drives that the fluid acts up when running at such temperatures for a longer time? According to specs, the MK6021 GAS should be able to withstand 55°C operational, but then it was running for over 2 years almost continuously ...

Really important stuff is mirrored on the server, or not on _that_ disk anyway, but it's still a nuisance. So I opened the drive under the cleanest conditions possible and had a look. The spindle turns only with much resistance. I then took apart a MK1214GAP to see how the spindle stuff comes apart (that one was failing anyway, having a lot of X'es even after Erase etc. in MHDD, so I didn't care about cleanness; consequently, the drive now fails (constant seek) after being put back together), but apparently there is no way to get to the bearing from the upperside.

Has anyone successfully removed the lid from the bottom of the drive, which is supposed to seal the FDB, and applied lubricant to get such a drive back to working? I'm thinking of a very small dose of MoS2 ...

MfG MOW

Hello,



Yes, it is possible to open the cover from the PCB side and put some lubricant (very little is enough). just use a sharp mini 'knife' to cut out the closing disc of the bearing!
after applying the lubricant U will have to replace this disc and fix it in a position that the spindle runs smoothly.

regards,
pepe

I didn't manage to get that disc off, seems to be a very tight fit.
However, all that prodding with the drive turned upside down seems to have convinced the bearing to work again well enough for the drive to spin up properly, if a bit noisy.
Then it was possible to copy (with dd-rescue) almost all of the drive onto a as-good-as-new IC25N060ATMR04-0 which coincidentally has exactly the same number of sectors. Only 382 sectors are bad. 368 of those are on the partition where browser and irc logfiles are, the other 24 on the system partition. No errors at all on the other 50GB. So the bad sectors are concentrated where write access occured at the time of failure.
Maybe these are even soft bads from the disk rotating too slow. Apparently opening the drive introduced no addidional defects, but I doubt I'll ever use that drive again for anything remotely important anyway =)


Makes me wonder, though.
Is it recommended to operate FDB drives upside down every once in a while to prevent the fluid from following gravity? The drive was in almost constant use, the notebook where it was in runs 24/7 most of the year. The power-on hours sum up to almost 3 years ... and apparently there was a load cycle almost every minute for all of that time ... even makes me wonder why the bearing failed first.


BTW, this is SMART after the big copy run, in case anyone is interested:
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 0
2 Throughput_Performance 0x0005 100 100 050 Pre-fail Offline - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 100 100 001 Pre-fail Always - 1446
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1099
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 13
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 0
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0005 100 100 050 Pre-fail Offline - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 039 039 000 Old_age Always - 24747
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 121 100 030 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 115
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 17
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 1376653
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 31 (Lifetime Min/
Max 15/58)
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 12
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 8
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
220 Disk_Shift 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 8286
222 Loaded_Hours 0x0032 059 059 000 Old_age Always - 16488
223 Load_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
224 Load_Friction 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
226 Load-in_Time 0x0026 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 376
240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0001 100 100 001 Pre-fail Offline - 0


MfG MOW []-)