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writing garbage when the voltage dropswriting garbage when the voltage dropsPosted Jul 14, 2006 19:19 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Three comments by ncm Parent article: Crash-only software: More than meets the eye
there is an urban myth that many/most drives will use the motor as a generator to provide power to finish writing the current block and park the head. It is generally false -- all drives you're likely to encounter happily write random stuff if voltage drops while they're writing, even if they do park the head afterward. I can easily believe that the motor generating power is fantasy, but I always assumed there was a capacitor in there that could supply enough energy to finish writing the current sector. Why wouldn't there be?
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writing garbage when the voltage drops Posted Jul 15, 2006 5:21 UTC (Sat) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] I can easily believe that the motor generating power is fantasy, but I always assumed there was a capacitor in there that could supply enough energy to finish writing the current sector. Why wouldn't there be?Size, maybe? I'm just shooting the breeze here, but caps associated with power supplies tend to be immensely bigger than typical hard-drive components, and I'd guess that one capable of acting as a power-supply standin for even a few milliseconds would still be quite a bit bigger than the little surface-mount discretes used on drives today. But maybe I'm suffering from cranio-rectal impaction again... I hate it when that happens. Greg
writing garbage when the voltage drops Posted Jul 17, 2006 14:29 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] OK, I did some calculations. I think the drive needs less than 10 microseconds to finish writing a sector. In that time, it needs up to 1 ampere, and can work with at least 4v out of the 5v power supply. So a 10uF capacitor, which is the size of a pea, should suffice. The stored energy in the disk probably is relevant too, in that it keeps the disk spinning fast enough for an acceptable write 10 uS after the motor loses power.
writing garbage when the voltage drops Posted Jul 25, 2006 3:59 UTC (Tue) by barrygould (guest, #4774) [Link] I'd expect you want clusters, not sectors, ensured to be written safely.
writing garbage when the voltage drops Posted Jul 15, 2006 23:19 UTC (Sat) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Suffice to say that disk-drive manufacturing is a very cost-sensitive business. They'd be happy to make drives fail better if it didn't actually cost anything, but nobody is willing to pay if it does cost.
writing garbage when the voltage drops Posted Jul 18, 2006 15:40 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Now that I think about it, the atomic write in the case of power failure isn't all that useful, because if the sector doesn't get completely written, it can't be read back. The CRC in the trailer won't have been written. That means you can achieve the same thing by writing two copies of the critical sector: On readback, if you can't read the first copy, you just use the second copy, which is the complete old version. You'd probably want that redundancy anyway, because it's probably a really important sector and write failures happen even without power failures. For the benefit of those who are wondering why people think atomic sector writes at power failure are important: Some systems deal with the possibility of system failure in the middle of a complex disk update as follows: Keep the original data intact and write a whole second, updated copy. (Use copy-on-write if you have to for practicality). A single sector points to current copy. When you have a complete updated copy, update the pointer sector to point to the updated copy. Then delete the original copy. Any kind of failure before you update the pointer sector just means the complex update never happened. But if the update of the pointer sector itself gets interrupted, then you've got neither the original nor the updated copy.
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