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I'm not sure this is quite the right place to ask about this, since it's not quite a spec issue, but... Ever since the introduction of "aggressive" power management -- i.e. frequent automatic unloading on the heads -- by certain Major Manufacturers, we have started seeing extensive, widespread failures of disks around 6-9 months after they are deployed. The failure mode is almost (but not quite) always the same: the disk starts making unload/load noises and stalling more often, until finally it refuses to work at all. Has anyone here analyzed exactly what's going wrong with these disks? They generally have very high "load cycle counts" in the SMART data, and while inspecting one I found that there appeared to be tiny plastic particles -- presumably shaved off the parking mechanism -- on the head assembly. This used to appear limited to one manufacturer, but I'm sorry to report that it is not any more.
