User keeps killing HDD's in T4x laptops

[Kidsmakeyoucrazy]

HELP!

I have a problem that I simply cannot figure out. I have a user that has killed over 6 hard drives this year. I thought it was something in the computer itself until I lent him MY T41 while I was waiting on the drive for his T42 last week. Well, he killed mine too.

So, I ship him out the repaired T42 (he was travelling) and he kills that one in less than 24 hours. I'm at a loss. Every time it has been the hard drive. Every time I get it back the drives are exhibiting the "click of death". Loud clicking grinding noises. So far he's killed IBM drives, Hitachi Drives and now a Fujitsu.

Any ideas on what he is doing? I've ruled out a problem with the machine since he's managed to kill drives in two different laptops.

[bill bolton]

Any ideas on what he is doing?

Pitching them to the left of the plate?

Seriously, it sounds like some form of physical handling issue.

Cheers,

Bill

[simms]

With that many HDDs dead? and on different systems? and different manufacturers of HDDs?

It's almost certainly a physical handling issue.. or maybe he takes a hammer to the lower right side of the laptop every night.

[Dead1nside]

As said above, he's obviously doing something wrong. Hard drives are pretty resilient these days, I don't have a clue what he could be doing to it. But with all the thinkpad protection, he must be doing something very wrong.

[Kyocera]

Maybe he just does not want to do any work.

[BillMorrow]

physical abuse of some sort, most likely first misuse to look at is: is he picking up the front of the thinkpad and dropping it flat on a desk or table while the machine is running..?

of course if he broke a T42 too, then this is probably NOT the cause..

for me, i would tell him, sorry, you are on your own with the next dead HDD..
and give him a working HDD and a spare clone to take along while travelling..

[Kidsmakeyoucrazy]

If he was an ordinary user I would have already had it out with him...but this guy is a VP.

Other than follow him around while travelling I don't know how I'll find out what it is he's doing. My guess is he's closing the lid and tossing it in his bag without waiting for it to power down, but that's just a guess.

[NS]

Just a few punches on the thinkpad palm rest right above the HDD will not cause the HDD to grind like this. I had damaged my R52 HDD before and some of you already know why --> physical abuse!!!

This type of grinding is because the read/write head of the HDD is broken or had come off and it is scratching the platters and that is how the grinding sound is produced...

Possible reasons:

- add a lot of pressure on the palm rest right above the HDD for quite sometime (at least 3-5 minutes of continuous pressure)
- accidently press on HDD cover

100% confirm= read/write head of HDD is broken... (if it is the other way round, NS willing to sponser a new HDD for him!)

*NS is making a swear statement here* ^100% confirm!

BTW: NS is now in singapore!

[grimmster]

There have been numrous reports of hd failure where I work with t4x systems when people carry them around with the lid up, system running, and carrying them hanging onto the palmrest only.

It puts enough pressure on the drive to kill it, along with the heads being bumped (this is on t42 and t43's with active protection also)

[christopher_wolf]

I can believe that; HDDs do not do well when running and having a flexing moment applied to them. Carrying a Thinkpad, or any laptop with it running by the lower right portion of the palmrest only is not a bright idea.

The HDD protection system is meant to ramp the heads during the event of sudden acceleration (in which there is an assumed impact imminent) to protect the HDD. It isn't meant to generate a force field around the HDD to stop any and all physical forces from affecting it.

[okey2k]

Is that the guy called HDD killer.
He must got some mental problem.

[NS]

Is that the guy called HDD killer.
He must got some mental problem.

I think thinkpad HDD abuser suits him well rather than labelling him as a person with mental problem.

[christopher_wolf]

HDDs lead interesting lives.

They are some of the closest things that most computers have to actual MEMs devices *and* they have to have long operational lifespans in all sorts of environs. Once one realize how low the head flies over the platters and how quickly it can jump back and forth, find the tiny data tracks, then pull off data from them in an error-free manner whilst the platters are spinning faster than most car engines do at idle, one gets the perspective of what HDDs actually do on a day-to-day basis.

[Thinkpaddict]

I agree. HD technology is really impressive. I think that purely mechanically based (with no flash-memory module) disks will be phased out within the next few years, since there's only so far you can take HD technology (meaning HD's with a read/write mechanical head). Wasn't it IBM which came with some way to apply nanotechnology to HD technology some years back? Something based on quantum mechanics even?

[christopher_wolf]

Yeah; IBM has also come up with even more dense tape data storage and a processor on a single molecule. There are also other avenues of storage included solid-state isomeric crystals which coud provide terabyte capacity storage devices around the size of CF II or SD cards today; one off-shoot concept of it has already proven it can work as a liquid based device. The trouble with such technology is that it would take tremendous real time computational ability to re-extract the data from such devices; hence the interest in using protein-like molecules to do that job.

[bill bolton]

since there's only so far you can take HD technology

Having personally observed the development of hard drives from the shoebox sized Fujitsu 20 megabyte SASI interface hard drive I started out with in pre-PC days, I'm not at all sure that we have ever really understood what the eventual limits on rotational magnetic storage actually will be.

Cheers,

Bill

[christopher_wolf]

since there's only so far you can take HD technology

Having personally observed the development of hard drives from the shoebox sized Fujitsu 20 megabyte SASI interface hard drive I started out with in pre-PC days, I'm not at all sure that we have ever really understood what the eventual limits on rotational magnetic storage actually will be.

Cheers,

Bill

Did you see those *massive* Fujitsu HDDs with the near-footlong diameters?

Actually, now that I think about it, I think we are talking about the same thing; one of those giants hanging around the labs is what we think is a Fujitsu with rather large platters, but it is a little larger than a shoebox.

Talk about power consumption.

[jdhurst]

<snip>
Did you see those *massive* Fujitsu HDDs with the near-footlong diameters?

Actually, now that I think about it, I think we are talking about the same thing; one of those giants hanging around the labs is what we think is a Fujitsu with rather large platters, but it is a little larger than a shoebox.

Talk about power consumption.

AS/400 drives were like that (so also were S/370 drives most likely). The drive cabinets were for 19" devices and as high as a modern server rack. They held 4 drives IIRC. You needed a crane to pull one out. The AS/400 guys carried a portable crane with them.
... JD Hurst

[tfflivemb2]

Is this user installing anything additional on the lappy?

I would tend to agree that it is a physical abuse problem, but still, he must be pretty rough on it. I'm not sure about the "closing the laptop and putting it in a bag" thing, because you would have most likely seen systemboard issues as well from the heat.

[Thinkpaddict]

Yeah; IBM has also come up with even more dense tape data storage and a processor on a single molecule. There are also other avenues of storage included solid-state isomeric crystals which coud provide terabyte capacity storage devices around the size of CF II or SD cards today; one off-shoot concept of it has already proven it can work as a liquid based device. The trouble with such technology is that it would take tremendous real time computational ability to re-extract the data from such devices; hence the interest in using protein-like molecules to do that job.

Fascinating, really. All those technologies almost sound like they came out of a science fiction novel. Probably the same kind of emotions that would arise in an early 20th Century person upon the description of a desktop PC, let alone a Thinkpad!

[Thinkpaddict]

since there's only so far you can take HD technology

Having personally observed the development of hard drives from the shoebox sized Fujitsu 20 megabyte SASI interface hard drive I started out with in pre-PC days, I'm not at all sure that we have ever really understood what the eventual limits on rotational magnetic storage actually will be.

Cheers,

Bill

Perhaps you are right. I don't go back that far. My first experiences with computers date to the mid 80's, when my dad bought an Amstrad CPC6128 (which didn't actually had a hard drive, and used proprietary floppy disks, some type of Hitachi format that could only hold 320K if I remember correctly, and which you had to flip over to access the other side of the disk.)

[Thinkpaddict]

AS/400 drives were like that (so also were S/370 drives most likely). The drive cabinets were for 19" devices and as high as a modern server rack. They held 4 drives IIRC. You needed a crane to pull one out. The AS/400 guys carried a portable crane with them.
... JD Hurst

That sort of lends new meaning to the word "power user"

[bill bolton]

Did you see those *massive* Fujitsu HDDs with the near-footlong diameters?

The first hard drive I encountered connected to a microcomputer was a Shugart Associates 27 megabyte drive with a huge platter (15" diameter IIRC) that was driven by a belt. In practice you had a 50/50 chance of the platter throwing the belt off at start up. Reseating the belt was a 5-10 minutes disassembly/re-assembly task, so you didn't ever want those things to stop once you had them started up! They were also very high noise drives!

A collegue bought one to use with the S-100 system that was running his inbound travel agency and having observed the belt throwing behaviour I decided that I wasn't going down that path.

The next drive to become available in the S-100 connectable market was the Fujitsu one I mentioned earlier. Even though it had a lower capacity, it was smaller, much quieter and had a direct drive, so it started up reliably. That was the point that I first personally engaged in ownership within the world of "small" hard disks!

Now a days I'm running SCSI-320 drives at 15K rpm on my home "server", which are in a direct technology descent line from that that Fujitsu drive and its SASI interface! They provide about 400GB of storage of redundent fast storage in about the same "shoebox" sized space!

If was building an array from new today, I could put 4 x 500G SATA II drives into even less space!

Cheers,

Bill

[JHEM]

Did you see those *massive* Fujitsu HDDs with the near-footlong diameters?

The first hard drive I encountered connected to a microcomputer was a Shugart Associates 27 megabyte drive with a huge platter (15" diameter IIRC) that was driven by a belt.

[christopher_wolf]

Darn it James, 42KB instead of the >50KB size I would have needed to roast that sucker.

EDIT: Is it just me, or is the guy on the right with the gun wearing his balaclava wrong? It looks like his nose is where his ear should, his left eye is showing through the right eye cutout, and his left ear is showing through the left eye cutout...Who are they? CS-rejects or something? (Actually, that would pretty sad to begin with ).

[mdarnton]

VP or not, you're going to have to convince him that he's the problem. I'd tell him he's got two more drives to figure it out, and then you're cutting him off, for his own good, so that he doesn't lose something really important some day. And I'd back it up with memos to his boss, even if that's only the pres. It doesn't make any sense for him, either, to be cycling through computers like that--I can't imagine that he's enjoying it.

[f1reverb]

There are other manufacturers. At least he can't mess up the platters with one of these . . .

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/su ... dex.x?pg=1

[christopher_wolf]

There's other manufacturesrs, but he can't mess up the platters with one of these . . .

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/su ... dex.x?pg=1

No, but he will probably manage to zap it with enough of a static electricity discharge to roast it; then you get more $$$ spent for less GB used and more GB totally gone.

[dsigma6]

James- how the hell did I miss the funniest post ever?

[ssm0003]

Listen guys, in the corporate world you don't go pissing off VPs anywhere. I suggest a more ruggedized pc since he's a killer. MIL spec his a** and be done with it. Consider the "Rough Rider III"

"The MIL-STD-810F certified Rough Rider III is the most rugged and heavy-duty portable computing platform available in the industry. It is configured with a 1.4/1.6 GHz Intel® Pentium® M processor, up to 2 GB DDR RAM, up to 60 GB hard drive, and up to a 14.1” screen."

http://www.ruggednotebooks.com/detail/roughrider3.asp