Shattered Hard Drive Mystery

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Here’s a brain twister for you. Some guy swears that his new replacement drive simply shattered into a million pieces without any outside force or trauma to the drive. Is it possible? Read the story, check out the pics and see if you can figure out what happened.
 
the only thing I could think of would be temperature differences in extreme. but that is so remote. and really that would only be possible if the platters were exposed.
 
Random structural deficiency caused by contaminents in--I have no idea.
 
Bad bearings on the spindle probably. Spinning at high speed + high temperature + wobbling platter = (see image)
 
Thats crazy though as iv torn apart a few dozen drives in my time and tried to break the platters in one way or another....not to easy for the most part. Never did it the [H]ard way and shot them.
 
it's a raptor drive, during testing it spun up to such a high rpm the structural integrity of the platters were compromised and the platters literally destroyed themselves from such high inertia. Theres a youtube clip of a guy attaching a cd to the end of a high powered drill. The cd literally just disintegrated at a certain point.
 
this is simple - internal cracking in the plates due to manufacturing defect. drive spins up and boom. wouldn't take much of a defect at 10,000 rpm to send that drive to hell.
 
If the platter shattered at high speed, the inside of that hdd case would be destroyed. There are no marks at all. So it had to be removed first.

Sorry, I don't buy his story.
 
If they were glass platters ala the IBM deskstars i could see this happening from a big temp change or a mechanical/material failure.

If they are aluminium lord knows how they would "shatter".

I'd have to say they are galss though since I've taken apart quite a few drives to destroy the platters prior to tossing the drive when I still worked at Best Buy and the alu platters could take a screwdriver and hammer to the face and only bend, were as on the glass drives we would just drop it once on the concrete then shake it a bit to hear if the platters shattered.
 
He would never open the hard drive if it was on warranty. Or it was not, or he did something very extreme to the drive (regardless of what he said he did or did not do).

If it was a newly replaced drive, on warranty, why open it? He would have to pay for it!

It does not make any sense to me.
 
acanthis said:
I guess it goes in the same categories has the exploding CD :confused:
Click to expand...

That actually happened to me once.
I was installing win98, I stepped out of the room, then I heard a loud noise.
Ran back and found shards of the cd and the cd door on the floor with a "Can't read some file from cd" error on the screen.
 
My bad, I was using my infinite improbability drive.
 
Sacrilego said:
That actually happened to me once.
I was installing win98, I stepped out of the room, then I heard a loud noise.
Ran back and found shards of the cd and the cd door on the floor with a "Can't read some file from cd" error on the screen.
Click to expand...

Saw that a few times, but the time it happen to me was at 3 in the morning while playing sanitarium, damn I almost died from the sound of it... :eek:

As for the drive in the article is says that it's a MHV2040AH, that's a fujitsu portable 2.5'' Drive that runs at 5400RPM
 
I don't see why not. CD/DVD media can shatter in a drive if it's really poor quality, or has a manufacturing defect. These things are spinning incredibly fast, and the centrifugal force is probably pretty massive, especially if the drive plate is mechanically flawed. It's possible that this was just a really unlucky fluke.
 
Sacrilego said:
That actually happened to me once.
I was installing win98, I stepped out of the room, then I heard a loud noise.
Ran back and found shards of the cd and the cd door on the floor with a "Can't read some file from cd" error on the screen.
Click to expand...


Yeah I have seen it once as well, when you hit the eject button it looks like the drive is spitting out glitter.
 
I assume that at some point in the life of this drive, it has been shipped.

We've seen from [H]news itself how well UPS/Fedex people handle packages. Was probably thrown to his doorstep, or was in the wrong place on a dropped palette. It does sound as though it was broken before he plugged it in.


Who would actually try to mount a drive if it was making such a horrible noise anyway?
 
7200 RPM is a pretty high rotation speed for something with the diameter and weight of hard drive platters so it's not that surprising...
 
Dekoth said:
If the platter shattered at high speed, the inside of that hdd case would be destroyed. There are no marks at all. So it had to be removed first.

Sorry, I don't buy his story.
Click to expand...
I vaguely remember the Mythbusters episode where they did it with a CD drive, and aside from a slightly deformed outer metal casing, the drive didn't seem that damaged by all the flying shards.

They also did it with the ballistics gel dummy, and the shards didn't look like they penetrated that far into it.
 
JimmiG said:
7200 RPM is a pretty high rotation speed for something with the diameter and weight of hard drive platters so it's not that surprising...
Click to expand...

you you don't want to see my 60,000rpm 30KW sync machines I work with then :D
 
All the HDs I've opened up are all aluminum platters, these look like some kind of glass? The only way your going to shatter AL platters would be LN2 or some such, no manufactoring defect can cause aluminium to "shatter" at room temp.
 
I had a CD explode on me once. Was an education version of Office my sister had given me. Was installing, my CD drive humming along, and then BAM! Everything stopped. It killed the drive, too.

But a hard drive? That's intense :eek:
 
After hitting enough platters with a hammer I am conviced that it is not possible for a drive to shatter like this unless it was frozen but then surely the case would have suffered the same fate.

IMO, this guy's pictures are not good enough quality to actually tell if the peices are a disk platter or glass that he planted in the drive. Is it really that hard to take good pictures?
 
I read that HDDs had coated glass platters. I took a couple apart and smacked them with a sledge hammer, and the ones I had weren't glass. Maybe this one was?
 
Dekoth said:
If the platter shattered at high speed, the inside of that hdd case would be destroyed. There are no marks at all. So it had to be removed first.

Sorry, I don't buy his story.
Click to expand...

How would a plastic disk have marked up the metal interior of that HDD case?

Obviously a manufacturing defect in the disk and high spin speed of the drive.
 
could be from heat cycleing, as it would temper the metal and make it more brittle (kinda like razer blades and old school swords very strong in one direction so they hold and edge very well, but bend them in the other direction and the shatter like glass), then a slight vibration or defect in the material could cause it to let go. very rare indeed
 
however, looking at it more closly, the way it shattered is like glass, so it could have very well been a glass platter drive, however, i dont know of any 10k rpm glass platter drives, heat+glass=warping and glass can be tempered just the same as metal
 
Thor said:
could be from heat cycleing, as it would temper the metal and make it more brittle (kinda like razer blades and old school swords very strong in one direction so they hold and edge very well, but bend them in the other direction and the shatter like glass), then a slight vibration or defect in the material could cause it to let go. very rare indeed
Click to expand...

Not in aluminium, you'll never heat treat it to that brittleness. Hell, you'd have a hard time doing it with a specifically engineered steel alloy. That's completely shattered, not just a single crack. Just not possible it's metal.

Actually looking at this picture, it certainly looks like mirror glass.

http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?im...NfMV8xX2wuanBn

Notice the silver lines on some of the edges? The silver lines are areas where you are looking through the glass without seeing the mirrored back.
Click to expand...

It really really looks like mirror.
 
Extensive home made cooling solution gone bad?

Maybe he used liquid nitrogen, got it really cool, but it ended up making the platters brittle such that any tap with the heads could shatter it?
 
Yeah... like all drives that make their way to us have been kept in a sheepskin lined box, cautiously shipped with the utmost of care not to be dropped/impacted/breathed on wrong... so as to insure their absolute best performance...

*cripes*

The box was dropped, or the pallet was dropped. A platter (or likely platters if they were sequential in build use) had some defect in the material, the drop/shift/UPS soccer kick damaged the contents further...

Tech boi adds it into unsuspecting machine and fires up the 5400RPM spindle...

voila!

And, yeah, he opened it and voided the warranty.

As any of you know (or have wondered if something like this happend to you), "I wonder what was the problem?" and like any [H]ard enthusiast, you stripped that bad boy open like a field triage autopsy. You all know that if that drive was sent back sealed, there would be a replacement sent back, and nobody would know what the drive looked like or what precisely failed. The manufacturer certainly is not going to release the pics to the guy ("Hey, we know you're curious... here, look at how f**KED up our drive is! Cool huh?"... not...) explaining where they screwed the pooch in their production and QA.

I throw my hat in and say "platter material defect exacerbated by a hard fall during shipping"

You may now return to your toilings on this Friday (thought this day would never get here...)

;)

-=TD
 
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