Hard drive failure during commercial flight

[crascott]

I recently experienced damage to the hard drive (Western Digital Scorpio Blue) on my 3-month old NC10 while flying on a commercial flight.

It worked for awhile and went into standby while I fetched another USB flash drive from the storage area. It would not start up again when I returned to it. All attempts to revive it through Samsung's recovery partition and the recovery console failed.

I re-installed the initial system with the two CD-ROMs that came with the computer. After a day or so, it failed to boot up again, which resulted in another re-install from the CD-ROMS.

So, now I've given up on the drive and I'm about to clone what I have to a new drive.

From what I've been able to read in various forums. Hard drives can be susceptible to damage in operating in high altitudes over 10k ft.

Any thoughts or questions on this?
Are there others with similar experience?

[jimcz]

I can’t imagine how the high height can damage HDD. After all, there is the same atmosphere (pressure) on the plane as it’s on the earth isn’t it?

[summertan]

Most probably the drive was faulty to begin with. Buy a samsung or seagate drive, WD are just crap.

[W.alter]

The HDD's spindle system relies on air pressure inside the enclosure to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disc rotates (¹). But as the aircraft cabin is pressurized the height you're flying won't affect you hard drive.
Do a

chkdsk c: /f /r

for all your partitions from the Recovery Console to check for defects.

[TCMuffin]

Welcome to the forum, crascott

So sorry to hear of your problem - I agree that the drive was probably faulty in the first place

[quote1247813461=W.alter]

chkdsk c: /f /r

[/quote1247813461]
FWIW /f implies /r, so you only need:

chkdsk c: /r

for each of your drives.

Microsoft support has more information:

1. *How to perform disk error checking in Windows XP
   *Windows XP Professional Product Documentation

[crascott]

Ok, I have now read various articles that dispel the change of altitude theory. Faulty drive it is.

I have already run a CHKDSK, that has confirmed many bad sectors on the disk. But the error correction doesn't seem to work. Perhaps there are too many.

I've already ordered a WD Scorpio Black as replacement. Maybe, I'll also get Samsung or Seagate and use the WD as backup.

Have there been any problems running hard drives that run at 7200 rpm?

[TCMuffin]

[quote1247825844=crascott]
Have there been any problems running hard drives that run at 7200 rpm?
[/quote1247825844]
Not that I know, but you will probably find that your NC10's battery life is reduced.

[crascott]

[quote1247828394=TCMuffin]
Not that I know, but you will probably find that your NC10's battery life is reduced.
[/quote1247828394]

Hmm yeah, and I'm also a bit concerned about the extra heat it will generate. Hopefully, the battery life reduction isn't too drastic. The long battery life was one of the main plusses for buying the NC10.

[TCMuffin]

I'm not sure that it's worth installing a 7200 rpm disk in the NC10 :?

I've installed Windows 7 RC and the Windows Experience Index is limited to 2.0 by the Graphics desktop performance for Windows Aero and the processor which rates at 2.2 calculations per second. The bog standard WD Scorpio Blue 5400 disd transfer rate gets a rating of 5.3. So the limiting factors are the Processor and Graphics performance.

If I replaced my drive (and I probably will) it will be for a 500 GB WD Scorpio Blue 5400

[Alfihar]

[quote1247828895=crascott]Hmm yeah, and I'm also a bit concerned about the extra heat it will generate. Hopefully, the battery life reduction isn't too drastic. The long battery life was one of the main plusses for buying the NC10.[/quote1247828895]
It may be a good idea to look up the wattage the 7200rpm drive is supposed to consume and compare it to the current drive you have.

For example the standard Fujitsu drive in my NC10 is supposed to dissipate:
Read/write: SATA 3G: 2.1W, SATA 1.5G: 1.9W
Idle: 0.6 W
Sleep: 0.13 W
Standby: 0.13 W

Whereas a western Digital Scorpio Black 7200rpm drive is supposed to dissipate:
Read/Write: 2.50 W
Idle: 0.85 W
Standby: 0.25 W
Sleep: 0.15 W

Which isn't that much of a difference,
heat shouldn't be an issue anyway and battery life shouldn't decrease by that much.


[quote1247829584=TCMuffin]I've installed Windows 7 RC and the Windows Experience Index is limited to 2.0 by the Graphics desktop performance for Windows Aero and the processor which rates at 2.2 calculations per second. The bog standard WD Scorpio Blue 5400 disd transfer rate gets a rating of 5.3. So the limiting factors are the Processor and Graphics performance.

If I replaced my drive (and I probably will) it will be for a 500 GB WD Scorpio Blue 5400
[/quote1247829584]
The Windows Experience Index isn't a particularly good way of testing things, though even if the hard drive isn't rated as being the slowest it can still be a bottle neck for many tasks such as opening/copying files and loading programs, as well as other disk intensive operations.

The 500GB drives are usually a better buy, not only because of the additional space but because the higher the drives capacity the faster the transfer rate due to the data being stored more densely. Meaning a slower spinning higher capacity drive can perform similarly to a lower capacity faster spinning drive. Additionally the 5400rpm drives will usually have a less noticeable sound.