another dead HD, which do you use?

[Rene Tschaggelar]

martin griffith wrote:

2 HD's dead this month, googleling for "Hard Drive Reliabilty" gives
zillions of pages of adverts saying how reliable Our HD's are. Even
tomshardware didnt go into it in detail

What do you use?

BTW I notice that my latest drive must not be exposed to more than
350G's of shock. I'd accept 100G's if they lasted longer...

I go through 2 drives per year on average.
The main problem is heat. The hotter they get,
the shorter they last. In a notebook there is
not much you can do about, except choose the
slowest, choose the one with least capacity.

I found the 40GB 2.5" notebook drives to be much
more reliable than the 80GB ones. 60GB is also
a good choice.

The 350Gs are no joke. 100Gs are reached pretty
quick on hard surfaces. EG when the drives is alone
standing on the table on its long side surface
and flips to its top or botton surface, this
alone exceeded 100Gs. So instead of mounting
the drives in rigid mounts they'd better be
mounted with some shock absorbers.

Rene
--
Ing.Buero R.Tschaggelar - http://www.ibrtses.com
& commercial newsgroups - http://www.talkto.net

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

"martin griffith" <martingriffith@XXyahoo.co.uk> skrev i en meddelelse
news:gsm5b11u2mo2ok641hqu376mmfqh2bnk9v@4ax.com...

What do you use?

Whatever happen to cost below USD 150 for 120 G and is Silent. And Backups.

All PeeCee hardware is made in the same three factories and it is all crap
to begin with.

So it might as well be cheap to replace.

 

[Ben Bradley]

On Mon, 20 Jun 2005 02:09:07 GMT, "colin"
<no.spam.for.me@ntlworld.com> wrote:

Has anyone else had a problem with this, or noticed it? I would
have thought I would have heard "Don't put the monitor right beside
your computer case" if this were a problem. I haven't heard that, but
this appparently is a problem.

maybe interfering with the small signals coming to/from the read write heads
as much as anything or maybe interfering with the head positioning ?

Maybe so, I just know both drives now have lotsa bad blocks, and
this is coincident with having the monitor right beside the PC case.
The drives DO have a few (2 to 5) extra bad blocks with the monitor
two feet away, but not the hundreds it had before. I suppose there
were a lot of blocks that were made marginal, and some of them are
failing.

of course what would be asking for more trouble is the feild from the de
gausing coils.

Perhaps that too, though that's just a few seconds of 60HZ sinewave
from a couple of times turning on, whereas the deflection yokes are
sawtooths of maybe 80Hz and 30kHz, for hours and hours.

Regardless of the exact cause, these are pretty clearly 'soft
errors' (caused by improper magnetic data (bad CRC) recorded to and
read from the track, not from physical defects of the media). I heard
as far back as 15 years ago you're not supposed to do low-level format
of a modern drive (or shouldn't even be able to), but I don't see how
to fix it any other way.

Is there something better than Scandisk for W98? If a block can't
be read two or three reads, it should be marked bad Scandisk doesn't
mark a block bad until several seconds, and there are a lot of 'very
slow but good' blocks around the bad blocks.
I should look for another newsgroup to ask about this, any
suggestions?

Colin =^.^=

-----
http://www.mindspring.com/~benbradley

 

[Pooh Bear]

martin griffith wrote:

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 06:16:53 +0100, in sci.electronics.design Pooh
Bear <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:

Paul Hovnanian wrote:

I've found Western Digital drives to be quite flaky in one respect.
Their firmware seems to be particularly susceptible to damage from
certain combinations of OSs and applications.

I found this out when decommissioning some surplus systems that were
used to run Autocad. Any attempt to reformat the disk in preparation for
a new system install would result in a disk that even Western Digital's
diagnostic utilities could no longer detect. In order to verify the
problem, we purchased brand new WD drives, installed W98 and Autocad and
then attempted to reformat the drives just to see how they behaved. All
died. The variable appeared to be Autocad, as systems that never it
installed were still useable after a reformat. My guess is that the
Autocad license key installation somehow interferes with contents of a
master boot record or partition table that the firmware needs to set up
the disk. Once it is corrupted, the OS will run, but it can never be
re-formatted again.

Other brands (Maxtor, for example) did not suffer the same problems.

Did you try a *low-level* format of said drives ?

Graham

I'm doing (well the PC is) a low level format, writing zeros to the
drive, using a seagate Disk Wizard program, at the moment.

Next I'll do a high level format ,writing ones to the drive.

sorry, coudlnt resist

martin

 

[Pooh Bear]

martin griffith wrote:

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 06:16:53 +0100, in sci.electronics.design Pooh
Bear <rabbitsfriendsandrelations@hotmail.com> wrote:

Paul Hovnanian wrote:

I've found Western Digital drives to be quite flaky in one respect.
Their firmware seems to be particularly susceptible to damage from
certain combinations of OSs and applications.

I found this out when decommissioning some surplus systems that were
used to run Autocad. Any attempt to reformat the disk in preparation for
a new system install would result in a disk that even Western Digital's
diagnostic utilities could no longer detect. In order to verify the
problem, we purchased brand new WD drives, installed W98 and Autocad and
then attempted to reformat the drives just to see how they behaved. All
died. The variable appeared to be Autocad, as systems that never it
installed were still useable after a reformat. My guess is that the
Autocad license key installation somehow interferes with contents of a
master boot record or partition table that the firmware needs to set up
the disk. Once it is corrupted, the OS will run, but it can never be
re-formatted again.

Other brands (Maxtor, for example) did not suffer the same problems.

Did you try a *low-level* format of said drives ?

Graham

I'm doing (well the PC is) a low level format, writing zeros to the
drive, using a seagate Disk Wizard program, at the moment.

Ahhhh... recall the days of using debug to run a low level format ?

Something like..

debug
g=c:8000 < enter >

Next I'll do a high level format ,writing ones to the drive.

sorry, coudlnt resist

YW ;-)

Graham