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Hard drive static seize

D

DataTrain Elite

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Joined
Aug 21, 2009
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Hey I’ve got an old Seagate st-157a RLL 42MB hard drive and it’s been giving me problems with not spinning up. I know it’s because of static seize and the way I get it to work is by removing it from the computer and banging it lightly to unseize the drive but it only works for a short time like I a day after the hard drive is not being used it seizes again does anybody know about how to fix this static seize so it doesn't happen again or at least all the time.

Also the hard drive has memory errors on the hard drive once it was so bad it wouldn’t do anything then the next day it seized I unseized it and then it worked perfectly then it seized again and I unsized it and it had errors again so it wouldn’t access some or writes new files on the hard drive. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and the computer its running on has a 286 and 640k of ram so it would be nice to find a hard drive utility that doesn’t required a 386 to run. :)
 
Google "stiction" on the web for lots of information.

A drive that's showing lots of errors even after a low-level format is probably best used as a paperweight. The binder in the oxide coating on some drives just gets old and breaks down.
 
Yeah the format shows errors but they come and go each time I unseize either better or for worse. That what I don't understand one time it was working perfectly I was able to read and write anything and install anything I wanted. I also Google station it pretty much cause by the hard drive lubricant on the platters braking down and becoming sticky making the read/write head to stick to the platter and not letting it spin up. I opened the drive and I could see a brown layer im assuming the colour of the lubricant more concentrated in the center of the platters and its allot more silver on the outer rims of the platters.

Is there a way I can relubricate the hard drive platters?
 
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DataTrain Elite said:
I opened the drive and I could see a brown layer im assuming the colour of the lubricant more concentrated in the center of the platters and its allot more silver on the outer rims of the platters is there a way I can relubricate the hard drive platters?
Click to expand...

Unless you opened the drive in a Class 100 clean-room environment, I'd say that the drive's already pretty much contaminated. If you want to mess around with what is essentially a terminal patient, you might try some pure silicone lube on the platters (not silicon+oil, but pure silicone).
 
Hi
You could always try parking the head
past the last track. The surface there might
not be as smooth and might have less problems
from stiction.
Dwight
 
Possibly I did notice when I unsized when the drive was open I saw where the arms stuck to on the platter and when I freed up the drive the arms left two black smudges on the platter probably the cause of my hard drive errors coming and going.

Anyways I lubed the drive and in the process I basically smothered the terminal patient with a pillow and turned it into a big gold paper weight. The silicon lube didn’t really work it just made it allot stickier after awhile. Instead of continuing to try to fix this old drive I just bought another vintage drive off of eBay the guy said it works so hopefully it doesn’t suffer from stiction yet.
 
Don't know if this will help, but...

I've found that the larger MFM drives (bigger than 100 MB and full-height) tend to last a long time, more so than the smaller ones.

I've got Maxtor, Priam and MIniscribe FH MFM drives here that have been going for more than 20 years. They're not quiet and they drink power like it was Gatorade, but they're very reliable.
 
Scott Mueller, in one of his earlier editions of Upgrading and Repairing PCs, talked about him running one of these drives with the top off just to demonstrate the effectiveness of error correction. I guess that, compared to later drives, the dust problem is less important at these low data densities. People used to do culture transfers without a clean room, or even a hood, and managed to keep most of the plates uncontaminated. I've done it. In fact they would brag about their technique. In short, I do think one can take one of these apart and put it back together and expect it to work.

That said, I've tried a different approach. I figured that replacing the lubricant is a matter of first removing the old one and that seemed like much too difficult a task. Like Chuck(G) says: The binder in the oxide coating on some drives just gets old and breaks down. What I did then is bake the platters in a very even oven that I had made for photographic plates (hey, use what you got!) for a few hours at a relatively low temperature. That had the result of adding a few weeks to the life of the drive. I was very careful (mist the room first, use very slow movements etc.) and if there was a dust problem it certainly didn't reveal itself as such because the drive died in the same way that it did the first time. Unfortunately, as a life extension technique, not nearly enough life was added to make the procedure really worth while. Oh well, live and learn. :p
 
Chuck(G) said:
Don't know if this will help, but...

I've found that the larger MFM drives (bigger than 100 MB and full-height) tend to last a long time, more so than the smaller ones.

I've got Maxtor, Priam and MIniscribe FH MFM drives here that have been going for more than 20 years. They're not quiet and they drink power like it was Gatorade, but they're very reliable.
Click to expand...
It's been a while since I looked into it, but I seem to remember that the lubricant that was used in some earlier drives was found to break down, as you mentioned earlier. I think they then went to something where the lubricant consisted of spherical molecules that arranged themselves like marbles in a single layer. I don't know what they're doing nowadays.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Are stiction problems as common on drives with plated media (rather than oxide+binder)?
Click to expand...
I have way too little experience to have any idea about that and I haven't read anything. It would make sense that plating is superior, but if a lubricant is used then that, in itself, stands to break down and cause problems.

Regarding the oxide+binder, isn't it oxide+binder+lubricant? I had the idea that it was the three of them that made a sticky soup. At least that is what gave me the idea to "cure" it. I've been wrong lots of times. :)

It just occurred to me that metal and lubricant can, at least in some cases, also interact. I've seen problems with regular valve oil and nickel-silver valve cases in brass instruments - not that nickel silver would necessarily have similar properties to drive platters. Also, like I said earlier, modern lubricants are getting pretty fancy also, the knowledge base in the drive industry must be getting pretty significant. Do they even use lubricant on driver platters any more?

PS: I am not claiming any real expertise here. This is just something that I fooled with a bit once. My only claimed expertise would be in traditional musical instruments and flute playing - everything else is a bit thin. :p
 
No, the platters don't need to be lubricated, it's not like the heads "skate" on it, like a LP playing on a turntable. They float above the surface and induce a charge (or not) in the magnetic media.

The binder is what holds the oxide powder on to the substrate (glue, basically) and, if it leeches up to the surface of the oxide, it can glue the head (when powered down) to the platter.

The only places you would find a lubricant in or near a hard drive would be the head actuator arm and the platter rotation spindle.
 
Thanks dru.
No, the platters don't need to be lubricated, it's not like the heads "skate" on it, like a LP playing on a turntable. They float above the surface and induce a charge (or not) in the magnetic media.
Click to expand...
Would not a lubricant be helpful when landing - as in when power is turned off? It's been a few years, and I don't remember exactly what generation of drive was being talked about, but I've distinctly read about platter lubricant. Also the development of a lubricant that was based on using single molecule thin coating achieved by having spherical molecules. The idea being to get the heads closer without touching the surface. Perhaps this was a short phase in hard drive evolution.

The binder is what holds the oxide powder on to the substrate (glue, basically) and, if it leeches up to the surface of the oxide, it can glue the head (when powered down) to the platter.
Click to expand...
So, it does sound like baking it could be a suitable thing to do. Have you heard of anyone else doing this besides me? (don't laugh) :)
 
I was feeling less than confident, so I just did a bit of a lookup regarding hard drive lubricants. I couldn't find any in-depth information in a timely fashion, but here are some general quotes which are relevant:

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_failure
"Hard drive platters are coated with an extremely thin layer of non-electrostatic lubricant, so that the read-and-write head will simply glance off the surface of the platter should a collision occur."

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_platter
"In post-processing a nanometer thin polymeric lubricant layer is deposited on top of the sputtered structure by dipping the disk into a solvent solution, ..."

From: http://www.hard-drive-help.com/technology.html
"Technology for the latest disk surfaces includes special lubricants and protective coatings to help avoid a hard drive crash, but it cannot prevent damage altogether."

From: Upgrading and repairing PCs by Scott Mueller - 2003
"Most drives have special lubricants on the platters and hardened surfaces that can withstand the daily 'takeoffs and landings' as well as more severe abuse."
 
Oh, I'm sure some manufacturers tried it, at various times, and, most likely, it would "work" for a time, until centrifugal forces migrated it off the platters and on to the inside bubble walls.

However, lubricant is not going to go very far to keep a "flying head" on a hard drive from much damage when even glancing off a surface that is traveling at 5400/7200/10,000 rpm. I'm not about to calculate the number of Newtons imparted to the head (leaving G-force impact aside) but, I imagine that even a momentary contact with a surface traveling at those speed is not going to be helped much by a nanometer thick layer of lubricant.

As for the OP's original statement of removing the bubble top, well, I have an ST-225 (not the most reliable hard drive in existance at the best of times) that sat for 20 years, in a box with the top unscrewed and removed, in someone's garage.

When I got it, I replaced the top, screwed it back down and I've been using it for a couple of years now on one of my test jigs. Other than the two bad tracks listed in the defect list, it hasn't developed a single additional error.

I don't think taking the top off for a few minutes is going to destroy a hard drive of that vintage.
 
Well unfortunately there’s no room for a full height HDD in the DataTrain it’s a clone of an IBM 286 AT so it only has room for a 3.5 inch HDD I know the IBM XT's had full height HDD's. The drive I bought is a 112MB Conner CP3111 HDD. I would have just put a 3GB Maxtor IDE drive from 1998 in but my BIOS won't work with anything bigger then 114MB and I can’t find any BIOS updates for the computer.

I think stepper drives from the 1980s touched the platters that why they needed lubricant in the first place they only spun at 3500 to 3800 RPM so they could touch the platters and not break modern HDD's use air to float on the top of the platters and they spin at 7800 rpm I even saw the heads float when I opened a 80GB Maxtor while running that wouldn’t complete a format I also noticed that dust doesn’t stick to platters while its spinning its spinning to fast and there’s to much wind from the platters for the dust to stick so when I powered down the platters where just as shinny and clean as when I opened it. The same applies for the Seagate ST-157a the dust wouldn’t stick to the platters even at 3500 RPM and I saw the heads touching the platter while it was running.
 
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DataTrain Elite said:
Well unfortunately there’s no room for a full height HDD in the DataTrain it’s a clone of an IBM 286 AT so it only has room for a 3.5 inch HDD I know the IBM XT's had full height HDD's. The drive I bought is a 112MB Conner CP3111 HDD. I would have just put a 3GB Maxtor IDE drive from 1998 in but my BIOS won't work with anything bigger then 114MB and I can’t find any BIOS updates for the computer.
Click to expand...

That can be solved with a driver, if anyone cares to write one. Ever hear of Dynamic Drive Overlays?. There were a bunch of them--MaxBlast, Disk Manager, EZ-Drive.

Or you can "roll your own". Attached is the source code for one I wrote--it's a driver that's loaded at CONFIG.SYS time. It doesn't need a partition table and can even block sectors up into "super sectors" (1024, 2048, 4096 bytes) for getting past some of the limitations of FAT16 filesystems. I haven't touched it since early 1990, so I probably don't remember some of what it does.

Enjoy...
 

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Chuck(G) said:
Are stiction problems as common on drives with plated media (rather than oxide+binder)?
Click to expand...

Hi
First I'd like to state that the lubricants used on platters don't dry out or flow
off the platter. They used basically a teflon coating.
As for stiction.
I have a friend that worked for Segate when the entire
stiction thing started. The cause was that both the head and
the platter were too smooth. When sitting, all of the air would
leave from between the head and the platter. This made the
two stick together ( If you don't understand how this works,
get some machinist reference blocks and stack them together.
They are so smooth you won't be able to pull them apart ).
On drives that have had no issue with stiction but started
to do it, it is often caused by the grease leaking from the bearing
and getting under the head and drying out.
The two shouldn't be confused.
The manufactures solved the first problem by not making the
surfaces quite as polished that the air could all be removed from
between the surfaces.
Dwight
 
Hi Dwight--

That was my understanding--that it was molecular attraction, rather than any sort of a surface tension thing.

My first experience with true stiction was with a nearly-new drive (the brand escapes me, but it wasn't Seagate; maybe it was Tulin or Rodime). The recommended solution was to give a smart rap on the (long) side of the HDA.

So, would it be fair to say that with older drives, the inability of the spindle motor to get the disks spinning is most likely contamination, pure and simple? Coating binders also degrade, as anyone who has worked with old tapes knows. Do the by-products of the binder decomposition contribute to head sticking?
 
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