Hey, Is Hard Drive "Sticktion" Still a Thing?

[Anderton]

I remember at one point if you put a hard drive on the shelf, and tried to use it years later, it wouldn't work. Roger Nichols used to spin his "storage" hard drives up every now and then so they wouldn't stick.

 

I mentioned this in an article, and someone wrote me and said this isn't a problem with modern hard drives. So...I have a bunch of old hard drives sitting around, like 80 GB and such, which would be ideal for something like backing up four years of album projects. But can hard drives just sit around until one day, when I need to pull data off of them? Does anyone know if "sticktion" still a thing, or not?

[zeronyne]

I"ve heard that the lubrication systems have improved dramatically and the read heads no longer 'park' near the platters.

 

That said, SSDs are REALLY cheap these days, as is cloud storage.

 

 

I have a funny, name dropping anecdote for you. Back in the 90s, I worked at what would be considered a boutique music store outside of Chicago (Pro Tools installs, Fairlights, Yamaha digital consoles, etc). One day Billy Corgan (Smashing Punpkins) walks in and wants to talk software. I sell him Studio Vision, and with it, I lend him a 2 gigabyte SCSI drive while we wait for his to ship. A week later, he calls and asks me to come to a weird location in Chicago to help troubleshoot his install. I go to the address, and there, in a warehouse, is a makeshift studio, is D"Arcy laying down a baseline with FLOOD producing and Chicago Recording Company"s Chris Shepard manning the console. I was starstruck in every direction, but I got to troubleshooting. Apart from Billy creating several thousand aliases inadvertently, everything was okay. He pointed out that my loaner drive seemed to not be spinning. I said 'oh!' and slammed my fist down on it as hard as I could. It was my personal test drive, and it had been acting up. Everyone froze.

 

And that"s how I ended up giving a 3 minute lecture about sticktion to Flood, Chris Shepard, and half of the Smashing Pumpkins.

[David Emm]

In loose anticipation of taking up a new Mac, I've been cleaning house and unearthed two rather elderly hard drives. How elderly? How about 250 and 500 gb? Its amusing to review parts of it and dust off a few lost sheep I can apply in the Now. They're big old wheezing Seagates with honker power supplies. In 2021, I can outperform them with a small pocket full of flash drives. So no, I didn't get walloped with sticktion, but I did encounter some fetid newbie stinktion from my first DAW and workstation days.

[Anderton]

I"ve heard that the lubrication systems have improved dramatically and the read heads no longer 'park' near the platters.

 

That said, SSDs are REALLY cheap these days, as is cloud storage.

 

True that. But if I can keep using the hard drives, they won't become landfill

 

And that"s how I ended up giving a 3 minute lecture about sticktion to Flood, Chris Shepard, and half of the Smashing Pumpkins.

 

Cool! Someday I'll tell you about the time I horrified an engineer (I was producing) by splicing a 2" 24-track to shorten an overindulgent solo. It's good to scare people from time to time.

[Mike Rivers]

I have several 20 and 30 GB hard drives from around Y2K, any of which has played when I've tried them. The most important thing, as someone mentioned, is that the heads are now all lifted off the platters when the drive is powered down, so they don't get glued in place like they used to.

 

But there's no free lunch. In the days of the 20 GB IDE drive, you got a real solid piece of hardware. While I've personally never had a mechanical failure, the 120GB and larger drives are just not built quite as solidly as the old ones, and there are more "series" drives some with warranties as short as 3 years, which should tell you something about the confidence the manufacturers have in their product.

 

My philosophy about backups is that I've never needed one, so I some day I do need one and it doesn't work, it's probably not that important. I've never recorded anyone who has enough money to sue me if I can't come up with their recording from 20 years ago.

[Theo Verelst]

I just got rid of a 300MB external drive that wouldn't spin up anymore. Spin up count is a drive lifetime parameter, I do not know how many spins are max for a certain era.

 

T

[Nowarezman]

I had a really bad HD crash last year. Cost me a lot in time and $900 went to the expert disk recovery outfit.

 

Turns out, with some Western Digital drives, the drives have a hidden partition into which bad sector data is shuffled. Ok, not a bad idea, but it's a relatively small partition and when it gets full, the drive just stops working, bam.

 

You'd think it would be nothing at all to program a warning as the hidden drive approaches full status....and some sort of utility you could run in BIOS to clear it up....but no.

 

It's an easy fix if you have the right utility software to simply reformat the hidden partition.

 

The WD drive was about 9 years old - so, yeah, old for a hard drive. Old but not dead yet - like me!

 

nat

[MoodyBluesKeys]

MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) on HDs has been 5 years (this is for better quality). My first HD was one of the first 3.5", with a whopping 10MB of storage. Was still working years later when power supply on the 8088 computer died. That was in the days of MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.0. I remember having a separate command control to park the drive before shutoff.

 

I do know from handing a large commercial client that the 20MB or so drives back in that day (think Tandy 1000 or IBM XT) were tied to a single brand/model controller, each controller formatted differently; and they usually didn't last much longer than a couple of years.

 

I had a K2000VP and K2661 at one time, still have a 9GB IBM SCSI-1 drive in a Sun housing. Probably still works. Also have some smaller, 4GB. In IDE drives, still some 40 to 120 GB used on the shelf (just in case some ancient piece of equipment MUST be fixed. Have a brand new 500GB (largest offered) Parallel IDE. Don't really have anything myself that it fits.

 

Every single machine, whether Windows, Mac, or Linux that I have has SSD primary drive, either 500GB or 1TB. Just the speed increase is worth it. The primary computer, with over half of the 1TB drive filled, also has a SSD for image backup.

 

Still mostly using spinning drives for my image backups. I do have a couple of 1TB USB3 SSDs, one of which does my monthly data/patch backups, then unplugged for the month. In the event that ransomware succeeds, I can get a recent copy of any of the files.

[techristian]

I remember at one point if you put a hard drive on the shelf, and tried to use it years later, it wouldn't work. Roger Nichols used to spin his "storage" hard drives up every now and then so they wouldn't stick.

 

I mentioned this in an article, and someone wrote me and said this isn't a problem with modern hard drives. So...I have a bunch of old hard drives sitting around, like 80 GB and such, which would be ideal for something like backing up four years of album projects. But can hard drives just sit around until one day, when I need to pull data off of them? Does anyone know if "sticktion" still a thing, or not?

 

 

You just have to WHACK them with the butt end of a screwdriver at boot time. I recently had to do that with an 80 gb drive.

 

Back in the day when a 65 MEG RLL drive cost an arm and a leg, I had a drive that required that kind of TLC on a regular basis.

 

 

Dan

[RABid]

Nothing that I want to keep forever will be trusted to an old HD.

[Mike Rivers]

Nothing that I want to keep forever will be trusted to an old HD.

 

And nothing that I would want to keep forever would be trusted to any computer data storage device. Printed paper copies are good, phonograph records are pretty good, analog tape fair to excellent, digital tape lousy.

 

SSD? You can't get one of those working by whacking it on a table.

[Anderton]

Nothing that I want to keep forever will be trusted to an old HD.

 

And nothing that I would want to keep forever would be trusted to any computer data storage device. Printed paper copies are good, phonograph records are pretty good, analog tape fair to excellent, digital tape lousy.

 

SSD? You can't get one of those working by whacking it on a table.

 

I understand there's some new technology called "stone tablets," with an estimated shelf life of several millennia. But it's probably just some Apple fanboi rumor.

[Mike Rivers]

 

I understand there's some new technology called "stone tablets," with an estimated shelf life of several millennia. But it's probably just some Apple fanboi rumor.

 

It worked for Moses, so they say. Predicted lifetime was better than the paints that cavemen used.

 

When I was working for the Naval Oceanographic Office, we had a very early version of GPS aboard the survey ships. The CPU was a DEC PDP-8, and data I/O was with punched mylar tape. It doesn't absorb moisture, a big plus aboard ship, and the program was small enough so that it only took a few minutes to load.