Help identifying what the heck happened to my HD

[tallboy755]

Hello all ... i am the noob here, but i do have quite a bit of experience with hard drives.

Ill start out by telling you the setup i have here. I have 1 server that is running 3, 15bay raid towers. Two of the towers have 400gb drives in them and the other has 300gb drives, giving me a total of about 14tb of hard drive space.

I have had drives fail in the past, i usually wait until the raid drive has been rebuilt then i open the failed drive in an attempt to see if i can tell what went wrong. Every one that i have ever opened has looked about the same ... however this time i was in for a real surprise. I opened the drive and the inside was COVERED in a black dust, and all 3 layers of the drives core have DEEP scratches in the center, as well as surface scratches on the face of the drives. I am quite dumbfounded as to how this could happen, if anyone has any ideas ... please let me know.

ajc

below are super high-res images for your viewing pleasure

http://cadystudios.com/downloads/image1.jpg

http://cadystudios.com/downloads/image2.jpg

http://cadystudios.com/downloads/image3.jpg

http://cadystudios.com/downloads/image4.jpg

http://cadystudios.com/downloads/image5.jpg

 

[rvnguy]

Well that is really "BAD"...

The scratches as you probably know are from the heads contacting the platters. Along with the black dust particles being the oxide that was removed from the platters by head contact.

How this happened is anybody's guess. Could be a servo glitch, a bad bearing causing a micro-wobble(remember the head gap is minute) or any of many other causes.

Was there any noticible loose pieces upon opening?

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[Grenage]

Ouch. I am assuming that the black dust is carbon from the motor 'exploding', I suppose this could easily have jammed the arms onto the platters and causing deep scratches.

Bad power flow and/or a very faulty motor would be my guess.


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[edfair]

Head contact probably from one head breaking loose and scouring a platter. Once you had dust inside the other heads started scouring. The motor kept running with the platters dragging which led to the hub scouring.
Should have been an interesting sound. With the amount of debris I would suspect that it was no more than a second or two.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[Grenage]

That's true, it didn't occur to me that the dust might have been the residue from the platters being scored. Good call


Carlsberg don't run I.T departments, but if they did they'd probably be more fun.

 

[directlyconnected]

Inside of drives are also sometimes black plastic. If the scratches are in the center of the platters, the servo probably did fail, and it would only take a second for the motor spinning at 7200rpm (assuming SATA) to do all of that. That sounds like a manufacturing defect---even out of warranty, you may be able to get something back for it. Later.

Tim