Medion P6624 on Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial -- Ground loop audio issue?

After playing around with Windows 10 in various forms on the Medion P6624, I encountered an issue during one update that caused a blue screen loop. I couldn't resolve it quickly, so gave up and flipped to Ubuntu Xenial v16.04.

I really like it actually, and for most of my use it has everything I need.

I have discovered one thing though, that is again Medion P6624 related.

Put on some headphones, turn up the volume, and you'll hear a buzz that sounds a lot like a ground loop issue.

Not good.

If you touch the metal lining on the key pad buttons, it disappears like magic. So along with the BIOS issue that causes problems with Windows 8 and 10 installation and updating, it appears there are also grounding issues between the notebook motherboard and the analog audio out!

I'll have a think about how I can fix this, but at the moment, I'm happy with just reporting it here in case anybody else has a BUZZ when they plug some headphones in, and have sensitive enough hearing to detect it.

Medion P6624 in 2016, latest Nvidia drivers (361.43 WHQL) are working.

A quick update:
Windows 10 updates that require reboots which will notiously hang a Medion P6624 can, I can confirm, be assisted with the battery-out, pull the power cable trick as described previously (just do Step1, Step3, Step4 in the link, and it works).

Also, Filipe Lima da Cunha let me know that the latest NVidia drivers (finally) are working!

I can promise you all, hooray != goodbye in Australia. Not sure what's up there, Google. 

Get the 361.43 WHQL drivers directly from nvidia here (direct download link).
Install as Custom, install everything, and tick "Perform a clean installation".

Finally, in 2016, the Medion P6624 has the latest drivers. If only there was a fix for the USB3/bios thing that's nerfing the reboots during updates!

Hard Drive Failure Rates, ST3000DM001

Backblaze is a company that offers cloud storage/backup. To reduce costs, they use pods of drives stacked with consumer hard drives (generally) - and in a 24/7 (mainly data writing) business, that is extremely taxing on the disks. Backblaze publish all of their failure rates every 3 months, which offers a wealth of information about how well the drives that they are using are performing.

I've been the unlucky user of two Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB hard drives, both which failed last year, within 6-8 months of each other. The last one was so damaged, that no data could be retrieved from the platters after transplantation into a new drive; the head crash was that severe.

Backblaze also experienced a huge failure rate of these drives.

Of 4247 drives of these drives in service,

• 10.45% failed in 2013
• 43.08% failed in 2014
• 30.94% failed in 2015. 

That is an extraordinary failure rate, and is largely responsible for this graph that Seagate should be particularly embarrassed about:

Statistics Based on 49,056 Hard Drives

With the death of many of the ST3000DM001 drives by 2015 (as well as a few other poorly performing Seagate drives, check the Backblaze 2015 Q3 failure rate blog post for details), Seagate's failure performance rapidly improved.

For me? I was probably unlucky to lose two drives so quickly, but I've been bitten hard.
So now I've switched over to HGST.

Of important note, the 4TB drives (from all manufacturers), seem to be very good, with even 20,921 Seagate ST4000DM000 drives having a cumulative failure rate of just 3.06%. It just goes to show how much variability there is in the quality of drives even from a single manufacturer. But what it really highlights, for me, is the value of blogs like this to do mass unbiased testing for us chumps who would otherwise blindly buy pieces of crap like the Seagate ST3000DM001.