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Suppose you had a server cabinet and the power was pulled on the whole thing (this just happened to us).

Now suppose you had a hard drive (3.5" SATA WD Enterprise) that was not previously in use. It was not formatted or anything.

Now, it was powered when the hard power pull occoured.

After the power pull, you do a full NTFS format (not a quick format) which goes cleanly.

Do you trust the drive is not damaged and why?

squillman
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SvrGuy
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  • Why should a drive be physically damaged after a power cycle? In other words, from the view of the drive, what would be the difference between a power loss due to a normal shutdown and a power loss due to some outage? – Sven Mar 07 '12 at 23:12
  • I can imagine a situation where bumping a power cable could seriously damage things. If the connection was lose, and you lost/regained power many times really quickly you can harm stuff. You are more likely to lose the computer/power supply though. If the drives are ancient (mfm) a power cycle could cause a head crash. This is all very unlikely though. If you are worried, just run badblocks or something against it. – Zoredache Mar 07 '12 at 23:30
  • @Zoredache: I don't think there are many 3.5" SATA WD Enterprise MFM drives out there... – womble Mar 07 '12 at 23:34

1 Answers1

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Yes I'd trust the drive.

Power loss doesn't inherently damage drives. The primary worry with power loss is losing cached writes or losing consistency of an array. Even those risks are about data loss, not drive damage.

Ryan
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