Re: [OT] Hard drive opinions?

[Bruno Prior <bruno@xxxxxxx>]

Be careful of WD's bigger 7200rpm drives. I bought 4 Caviar 7200rpm Special
Edition 120Gb drives for the software RAID on my home server. One disk
would
"fail" and drop out of the array every 24 hours or so, and a
second would
"fail" around once a week, crashing the server if I didn't reboot
after the
first failure (if I wanted to have to reboot that often, I'd be running
Windows ;-) ).

I put it down to overheating and stuck the disks in a Lian-Li case with a
pair of fans blowing over the drive cage, but still had problems when the
drives were no more than lukewarm to the touch. I sent back the disk
that failed every 24 hours and was sent the updated version as a
replacement. This reduced the "failure" frequency to once a week
per disk,
but one or other would continue to "fail" with that frequency.

Someone eventually pointed me at this article on WD's support site:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_admin=1&p_faqid=913&p_created=1047068027

In his opinion (and mine too), they are also having this problem with their
120Gb drives. When they "fail", you hear a clunk, (which I take
to be them
parking their heads before going to sleep), after which you get a series of
IDE errors that all basically indicate that the disk suddenly decided not
to
respond. They work fine again as soon as you reboot, so it appears to be
not
so much a genuine failure, as a configuration glitch.

Interestingly, I moved them over from an Athlon/Via board to an Intel/P4
combination, and they haven't crashed since (but it's only been around 10
days). I understand from other problems I have had that Via chipsets can
have major DMA problems, so this may be connected or it may be coincidence.
But for myself, I do not plan to buy either Via-based boards or WD hard
disks in the near future.

Cheers,

Bruno


Dave McLaughlin wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>
> Watford have a 7200 rpm version for less than that on this page. I
guess
> the 5400 is more suited to the Tivo because of heat generation.
>
> http://www.savastore.com/category.asp?catalog%5Fname=Savastore&category%5Fname=Hard+Drive+%2D+IDE&Page=1&pid=1
>
>
> I would tend to favour Watford because of the recent problems I have
read
> about Ebuyer. I got mine next day for only 3.95 postage.
>
> Regards Dave... ----- Original Message ----- From: Paul Gordon To:
> ukha_d@xxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 2:33 PM Subject:
> [ukha_d] [OT] Hard drive opinions?
>
>
> Anyone have any opinions about this drive?....
>
> http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=32009
>
>
> TIA
>
> Paul G.
>
> PS, today is the LAST day of the free delivery offer on Ebuyer if
anyone
> is considering making any purchases in the near future....