MacBook Pro - Seagate Momentus 500GB Failure
Well, today we had a Seagate Momentus 500GB drive (not a XT hybrid version) fail in a MacBook Pro. (An Intel version about 18 months old). 3Gbps SATA, 7200.4RPM
The symptom on the Mac is a *Bong* sound, then a white screen and no boot proceeding.
Our mission was set: Attempt a data recovery, using all available means! With 400GB of data unaccessible, we had to try...
The model number of this drive type is: ST9500420ASG.
Note the little Apple logo on the drive label.
We removed the drive and were able to boot the MacBook with the Mac OS X v10.6 "Snow Leopard" DVD we had on-hand. This proved the machine was fine, and the problem was isolated to the drive or controller.
We removed the drive and tried to run it in a SATA caddy but it sounded like it was spinning up then stopping continuously. We packed it carefully in a zip-lock bag and stuck it in a freezer for 30 minutes and tried again with no change in operation.
We tried swapping the on-drive controller from another new drive we had on-hand but this caused the new drive to still spin up and shut down. This isolated the problem further to the drive internals itself.
There was some discolouration on a number of contacts on the old controller.
We also tried moving the old controller to the new drive, with a similar result (but a louder noise).
It appears the on-drive controller on the original drive may have gone bad, and killed the hard drive spindle motor. The other possibility is the spindle motor has gone bad,and killed the controller.
The discolouration was either humidity, or heat related, or possibly heat related from some kind of short.
After some Googling, we discovered a large number of ... comments.. about the Seagate Momentus by Mac users on Mac forums and what appears to be a very high failure rate.
The drive was replaced, and OSX Snow Leopard installed, and the new drive functioned correctly. Data recovery not possible with our limited resources. The only other step would be replacing the spindle/controller in a clean room or just removing the platter for data recovery from the dead drive.
Modern hard drives operate with 3-phase brushless DC spindle motors, which is quite cool. This gives the controller very accurate control over spindle motor speeds, but can make the controller work a lot harder as it needs to supply carefully timed 3 phase power signals to the drive spindle a LOT.
Some interesting (but somewhat un-related) info here:
http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery-seagate-barracuda-7200-11.htm
On the bottom pic, it was noted that there was discolouration on the pads on the bottom left and middle, also when the controller board was removed. The cause is unknown. These are normally either a silvery white or gold, but appeared burnished or tarnished by something.
I should mention that many controller PCBs for hard disks have a chip that is dedicated to supplying the necessary pulses to the 3-phase DC spindle, these do fail.
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