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Tough month for hard drives

RichP

NAXJA Forum User
Location
Effort, Pa
Had a couple of 10gig'rs that were starting to give me problems I picked up a couple of 30gs, both failed in under 2 weeks, sheesh, 30gb MDT's, advertised as maxtors but very light weight. So much for bargains :anon:
 
where you buying from? I had an advertised 160GB 8Mb cache for 119$ after rebate......
Im running 2 maxtor's and a WD, never had a problem with any of them. Have you checked your power supply? I had a friend whos power supply started to go bad and put out too much power and fried several things.
 
I dont like buying bigger drives than my DDS3 and DDS4 tape drives can backup :D Most of my boxes are running 10-20gb scsi barracudas either in the cases or in external box hill arrays.
I was looking at that power supply while I was ghosting over from the first drive that went bad over a month ago, did a quick dvm check on it and it looked ok. Think I'll swap it out anyway with one of my antecs or sparkles, it's been in that tower for about 4 years and 3 mother board/processor upgrades.
Guess it's time for a new machine after I got 'The Look' from the wife when I told her all her email from the past two weeks is GONE :(
That drive won't even spin up, gonna stick it in the freezer overnite and try it again tomorrow.
Anybody know how to get two win2k drives that are both bootable to run on the same box, I just want it up long enough to get the netscape directories and the MS Money backup file off it if it spins up, they are both fat32.
 
Must be nice to have tape drives. I should prolly SAVE my money and invest in one (doubt it). So are you looking for pre-formated win2k HD's? or am i misreading that? If its a platform you need for a new HD, talk to me privately. Go with Antec, Ive been running them on 3 different machines, great product longivity.
Thats a smart idea about not buying huge drives. Where did you get your tape drives?
p.s. Why netscape? why?!?! j/k
 
how about bad year for drives? techs at my work are pulling their hair over machines out in the field with a mix of Western Digital and MAxtor drives, and all of us at the office are cussing out equally maxtor, western digital and seagate as the drives keep failing all over every 3 to 4 months.... The only upside is that my work machine is sporting now a huuuuuuge drive while I only used to have a 20 GB before :)
Downside is moving all the code and programs and everything over :(

Kejtar
 
Up until I went on my own I worked for a manufacturer as an SSE and Network designer, specialty on Suns, EMC, ADIC robotics the Extreme and cisco L3 switches as well as building and configuring Cisco 7000 series routers. Spent some time in the back on the workbenches with the production crews when 8 of us were cranking out 480 systems a week for the postoffice. As for getting those nice HP DD4's, what can I say, right place at the right time.
Here is the problem in a nutshell, the 5400rpm drives are the most reliable, when I find them in the 10-20gb range from maxtor I snap them up, WD and Seagates run too hot, eide or scsi and need alot of cooling. They run idealy in the antec cases that have the extra fan bay in the drive cage or like in my box hill arrays which have 3 fans in them, one in each tray and two in the cannister the tray slides into.
The problem I have is that if you say clone a drive running win2k to a new drive and reboot with both drives connected the system will hang and not boot off of either of them. I'm trying to figure out how to make the bad drive a drive that won't try to boot. I just discovered this last month but now I have an incentive to figure it out. Probably tackle it sometime this week but I have 4 new linux dns servers and 2 2600 cicsos plus two pix's I need to get up by friday for two customers and bring their new dual T's on line.
We did find out that out of all the drives, numbers wise, the maxtors were the least prone to failure. We also started adding an additonal fan to the cases for more air flow and routed our cables so as not to block air flow over the hard drives themselves, the $5 the extra fan cost was more than off set by the savings in, bench time, new drive and cloning, RMA back to maxtor or WD, packing and shipping on customer returns. Thats one of the reasons I hate buying in bulk, I buy retail pack on HD, MB, CPU, that way I get 3year manufactures warranty and dont have to eat it myself, I slipped up on these last hard drives, only came with a 30day and I'm 14 days over, we'll negotiate for for $30 ea I couldn't pass that up :D
 
if you are rebooting with the two drives, what are you set to boot from (boot order) in bios? and how are you drives setup Master slave on same cable(Channel)? or master and master on separate cables? or cable select and on same cable or separate cable
 
thats a very good question. You should be able to de-select the other "boot froms" to do what you need.....although i bet you already tried that :)
 
[assuming common Award BIOS; other machines may use different terminology in settings or be more flexible in choosing bot devices]

Assuming on-board IDE controller, usually it'll boot from "HDD-0," which is the first one it finds in order of: primary master, primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave. If you want to boot with 2 drives that both have an OS, put whichever drive you want to boot from on primary master, and the other drive anywhere else. You'll get the best transfer speed from drive to drive if each is on its own IDE channel.

If you're dealing with cable select, master = the end of the cable, slave = middle. Otherwise, have fun with jumpers - from the drives I have here, Maxtor uses a one jumper on/off for master/slave, Western Digital has a separate setting for single drive, and IBMs have about 20 settings for 15/16 heads, cylinder limiting, etc.
 
Turns out that no matter which is selected both win2k drives compete and neither wins, granted its on a asus p2b mb but the bios itself is up to date. Back of my mind just clicked, I think I vagely remember something about this, wasn't an issue till now, guess I'll let it percolate back there, it'll come. There are also some other files I want off of it, visio mostly.
 
Well, dare I say, if the info on the dead drive is that important, there is always the option of going to one of those extractors, unless you know how to do it (and just dont want to??) They gave me a quote of like 800 bucks to extract my info.....i said " it wasn't that important." Hope all works out.
 
Actaually it spun up after being in the freezer but would not boot, missing ntkrnl so I put it back till I have time to run it again, will do a quick reinstall and hopefully do a quick file copy to the scsi data drive thats on that tower. WE'll see. More of an exercise now than anything else.
 
I have successfuly used a freezer trick before myself but there is a very important warning: carefull of moisture and condensation!!!!! And especially if you take it out and put it back in carefull for ice forming!!!!!
 
I have never heard of freezing before.....How does that help in extraction/getting a dead drive to live?
 
Cooling metal contracts thus freeing up the heads or any uother potentially siezed components. Do not attmept this though until you have exhasted all conventional methods!
 
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