Interesting Pattern In HDD Failures

[Gary Jarrel]

Hey All!

Over the last couple of weeks, I've observed an interesting pattern of
HDD failures on my notebook. I tend to use 100Gb 7200Rpm Seagate or
Hitachi drives as they appear to be reasonably good performers.

Over the last couple of weeks three HDDs (of which two were less than
a week old) have developed bad sectors. I believe the first was Ubuntu
installation 5.10 upgraded to 6.06, the second was a clean install of
6.06 and one which showed it's first bad sector the was edgy beta with
all the latest upgrades.

All the HDDs have used the ReiserFS file system across all partitions.

The interesting observation which I've made, is that the physical
corruption of the drives happens after I play MP3s, irrespective of
whether I would use Rhythm or Totem the result is at least one bad
sector. I.e. I've installed Edgy on Tuesday and it was working like a
charm for a few days (no MP3 playing), last night I played one MP3
track (thought I'd take the risk given the new OS) during play, I
would get strange half second (or less) pauses approximately 6 or 7 of
them, and then the music would come on again.

I've restarted the machine, after playing just one track, went into
the BIOS to do the HDD test and as I anticipated the test failed.
Tried booting into Edgy, encountered an I/O error reading from a
certain block of my HDD.

At the time of writing this, I'm running SeaTools (seagate HDD
utility) to remap the bad sector so that I can work through the
weekend.

I realise that the obvious solution would be to NOT play MP3s :) but
perhaps someone can give me a few more ideas as to what the problem
could be - at least it's reproducible, but I don't want to sit here
all day reproducing bad sectors on my HDD :)

Thank you

Gary