On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 16:03:47 -0000, Dan Lenski
wrote:

>Hi all,
>I've just experienced a mystifying failure of a hard disk that was
>literally only one day old. It is a Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 (80gb
>5400RPM SATA) that came with my new Dell laptop. I had installed
>Ubuntu Feisty Linux, and everything seemed to be working fine, and I
>even checked the S.M.A.R.T. data for the drive and it looked great.
>
>I was playing around with drive power settings using hdparm under
>Linux, and I enabled "power-on in standby mode", which is supposed to
>enable staggered spin-up. No particular reason, I was just trying it
>out. I assumed the effect would be harmless in a single-drive
>system. Everything continued to work fine, until I powered off the
>computer an hour or so later...
>
>I tried to turn it back on, and BIOS reported failure of the first
>disk drive. I tried a variety of rescue CDs and boot disks, to no
>avail... I could not get the drive to respond. I then removed the
>drive from the laptop and put it in my desktop tower. Again, the
>computer was unable to communicate with it, ruling out the possibility
>of a drive controller issue. I tried holding the drive in my hand as
>it powered up, and I could not feel the characteristic hum of the
>motor!
>
>So I'm quite mystified. The coincidence is uncanny, and I've never
>had a brand-spanking-new drive fail like this. Is it possible that
>enabling "power-on in standby mode" destroyed this drive?? In my
>experience, drives in standby mode are still capable of communicating
>with the host, so I don't understand what the problem with this drive
>could be. Anyone have any advice/anecdotes/explanation?
>
>Dan Lenski

This is as expected. You need to send a

Power-Up In Standby feature set device spin-up.

command to spinup the disk, or a

Disable Power-Up In Standby feature set.

to disable the feature.
--
Svend Olaf