Static electricity damage ?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Kostik
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Static electricity damage ?

Post by Kostik » Thu May 08, 2003 5:04 am

I bought a 120GB cuda V (PATA) drive 10 days ago, and it's been on since then. The drive is suspended, and doesn't touch the case. After a few days, some files became corrupted. Two days ago I rebooted my computer and it took 40 minutes to load windows (40 real minutes, i'm not making this up). Listening carefully to the drive, I heared that it was doing the same exact seek noise on and on, like "trr-trr-trrrrrr...", just like when you have a bad sector on a floppy disk.

I installed the drive as a secondary disk on my girlfriends computer, and tried to save what could be saved. Many files are corrupted, I get many CRC errors, and it looks like I have many bad sectors.

I am going to RMA the drive, but I would like to have your opinion, could I be a victim of static electricity ? Some people here say static electricity damaging suspended drives is urban legend, but what happened to me really looks like what's described on 7volts.com.

rpc180
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Post by rpc180 » Thu May 08, 2003 5:35 am

While I don't know if 10 days is actually long term enough for a HD to develope the static electricity necessary to corrupt files, my own experience has been that drive casings have built up static electricity over time. I have two Cuda IV's that were suspended with no metal contact with the case. Upon shut down these generated enough static electricity that I felt the shock upon touching them.

Because of the length of time that you describe, I would tend to believe more that you ended up with a bad drive in the first place rather than one that deteriorated due to static electricity. The scenario outlined through 7Volts at IBM sounds more like it occured over the course of many months. To be safe, however, I grab a spare wire and clear the ends and connect it to the case. 1-2 minutes and you gain peace of mind.

Marvin
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Post by Marvin » Thu May 08, 2003 6:35 am

Just a quick note on grounding your HDD. There are Two groud wires in powercable, and half of of pins in IDE-cable are connected to the ground, so I dont see any point of adding separate groundwire to it.

This has been discussed here plenty of times.
Rusty075 wrote:
Herb W. wrote:And make sure you ground your drivesto the drive bracket....
Grounding the drives to the bracket isn't necessary. They're already grounded via both the power connection and the IDE. If there is an internal short one of 42 ground wires in those cables will carry it. The only protection you lose by not having it grounded to the case is protection against an external short, such as touching the casing of the drive with a live electrical line. And when was the last time that happened?

Kostik
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Post by Kostik » Thu May 08, 2003 7:57 am

Ok, thanks.

Another question. May my problem come from the fact that my drive was not perfectly horizontal ?

I'm just wondering, because I wouldn't like that to happen twice.

rpc180
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Post by rpc180 » Thu May 08, 2003 11:34 am

May my problem come from the fact that my drive was not perfectly horizontal ?
Probably not, the liquid bearings are able to handle that issue to pretty extreme extents.

Here's what I came across reading teh forums regarding static / grounding wires.
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... atic#18564

Check the post by TerryW at the bottom.

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