really big capacity hard drives?

[SIRCOOKS]

i have had 1 200 gb western digital hd (oem) and 2x250 gb brand new maxtor drives, and i have noticed that these drives dont last very long for some odd reason in my systems, is there somethign special im supposed to do to them constantly, ive downloaded that disk checking software from western digitals website, and i get nothing but passing remarks, then i see the little bubble saying windows write delay failed all information on drive may be lost.....even my 160gb wd hd is acting up now...someone plz give me some feedback on these frigging drives...cause im sending back the two maxtors a.s.a.p

[Treebeard]

Do you do a regular defrag or even a complete format every once in a while? also how ofen do you scan for viruses? virus scans are hard on drives since its reading every single file on them, I would scan more than once a week.

[rallynavvie]

One of the 200GB drives I have installed to my current workstation (as opposed to those I have in swap trays) has been acting up lately as well. It is two years old and has been used pretty hard as storage before backing up to one of the removable drives. The other large drives I've got have had no problems but they're not used as often as that one. The other thing that may have affected it is when it was in my last computer when it fried. Seemed to work okay in the new computer, and Norton doesn't see anything wrong with it. Any other apps that do disk repair?

[ViRaL1]

I have a 250GB Maxtor and haven't had any problems out of it, although it's less than a year old. On the other hand, I need to RMA one of my WD 200GB drives because it has errors and I need it fully functional for RAID-5. Although they're number 3 at the moment and I don't think they have an ATA drive over 200GB, you may want to look into Seagate. I hear they're moving their standard warranty to 5 years. The only other ATA drives offering 5 years are WD Raptors, and they currently top out at a measley 74GB.

[ViRaL1]

OR if you don't mind shelling out the money, get a Hitachi 7k400 (ATA or SATA) 400GB drive. They're about $1/Gb if you can find them, but the reviews are pretty good.

[rallynavvie]

You can't make a comparison to the WD Raptor, it's a 10k SATA drive so it uses platters similar to SCSI. That's also why it's pricier than drives twice its capacity. It's also built at better quality than most ATA drives, thus the higher price tag and longer warranty. I highly recommend their "measly" 74GB model. The only thing that performs better is SCSI.

My bad 200GB is also a WD. I wonder if it's still under warranty since I bought it OEM from Dell. Perhaps I can get it as a return since it was bought for the Dell system I have for internet use and still have a warranty on. I'll have to check that out.

[adam]

SIRCOOKS, what size power supply do you have? In my experience, there's nothing that will fry a hard drive faster then trying to trying to run it with too little power, or cutting off the power abruptly like during a power failure.

If your power supply is powerful enough, maybe try monitoring your voltage. I think most of the temperature monitors can scan for this as well. Its possible that your power problems are in your house's wiring. If your power goes out often then you should invest in a ~$50 UPS.

I went through three hard drives before I realized that my 350w power supply was really a 200w with a 350w sticker. Now I know not to just buy from the cheapest return on a pricewatch.com search.

[Jayhawk]

If your power supply is powerful enough, maybe try monitoring your voltage. I think most of the temperature monitors can scan for this as well. Its possible that your power problems are in your house's wiring. If your power goes out often then you should invest in a ~$50 UPS.

Good call, Adam most people just assume that if the drive spins up (or the monitor comes on) that the power is fine. The lack of constant "clean" power can cause a whole range of problems not only with computers but any electronic device (tv's, stereos). I would recommend a UPS rather than a "surge protector" especially if you have an air conditioner or other large appliance kicking on and off. They can be like minature power failures dozens of times per day.

[ViRaL1]

I hear the Raptors are great drives and I might end up putting a couple in my PowerEdge. I wasn't saying that they're bad drives, but considering that most systems have 2, MAYBE 4 SATA connections, you'd need to use at least 3 of them to come close to the storage of a single 250GB drive.

[SIRCOOKS]

cool guys, i really think that power scenario is somewhat close to my problem, lights ar always going off by me for some reason, but for some odd reason, when the lights go out, my ups i notice doesn't keep my comp on ...ill have to configure it correctly,anyway...ill tery my best..thank

[indolikaa]

My money's on a line voltage problem or heat...

[SIRCOOKS]

i also agree with that heat thing,im not saying i dont have much fans, i just think down here in the bahamas where i am, it gets really hot and that just adds to the dilemna

[indolikaa]

i also agree with that heat thing,im not saying i dont have much fans, i just think down here in the bahamas where i am, it gets really hot and that just adds to the dilemna

I think 'sauna' would be a better word to use than 'hot' in your situation.

I run hard disk coolers on my drives. Always have. My experience with hot hard drives goes back to 10K SCSI drives that you could make a grilled-cheese sandwich on. So I've always used at least a couple of intake fans in front of the drives.

[rallynavvie]

Hmm, doesn't solve the problem with my 200GB drive, I've got a 1500VA UPS on mine

[ViRaL1]

I wonder if there's a database out there that lists rough wattage estimates on popular computing components so that you can figure out what size PS you need to run what you have in your system. Would be even nicer if there was something that inventoried your PC through Window$ and gave you a number. If anyone knows of something similar, I'd love to hear more. I'm running my 4 (3 now) WD2000JBs on a 400W, but it's only a P3 with real basic components. Sometimes insufficient power is what leads to a number of PC woes.

[Jayhawk]

Here's a start:

http://store.aapspower.com/abpowsup.html

[Jayhawk]

Another good one and a pretty good article on power supplies in general:

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/power-supply3.htm

a important footnote here regarding "headroom". They recommend taking your estimated power needs (watts) times 1.8.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=power-supply.htm&url=http://www.pc...ndex_cases.htm

[Jayhawk]

AGP 50
And finally, a scary calculation:

One PCI Card 10
NIC 4
Floppy 5
CD/DVD Rom 25
Burner 25
Hard Drive 1 20
Hard Drive 2 20
RAM 256 16
RAM 256 16
Motherboard 40
Pentium / AMD 70
Total Watts 301

Times 1.8 541.8

[ViRaL1]

I've thought about throwing a 550 in that server, in case I decide to add another few large drives. Ideally, I'd like at least a terabyte. I could cram another 4 200GBs in there, but heat would be the greatest issue because it wouldn't leave much room between drives and that last thing I want to do is have them overheat while I'm streaming a movie.

[piano632]

Seagate is coming out with 250, 300, and 400 GB drives this fall and some will have 16 MB caches. Also Seagate is supposedly upping the warranty on their drives to 5 years! Can't wait to get one.

http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/releases/article/0,1121,2170,00.html

[Shard92]

Other things to consider with bigger drives. With windows xp you HAVE to have sp1 or you can have problems like this and also something that helps is a separate controller card if you aren't already using one.

otherwise the above mentioned..... PSU or bad line voltage is really hard on the drives not to mention the rest of your computer... same with heat.... You should have at least an exhaust fan and perferably an intake fan as well.

[piano632]

Try plugging all your computer equipment into a good surge protector like a Panamax. I've had all mine plugged into a Panamax for almost 4 years now and I have never had a hard drive failure or corrupted data. (Or maybe I'm just lucky that I live 2 miles away from a power plant, so I hardly ever have any voltage problems.)

[rallynavvie]

For the ultimate in hard drive storage into a mid-tower look at the Lian Li PC-60 variants. You can presumably fit 5 drives in the HDD cage on the intake fans, though the one gets really close to the motherboard and usually the IDE controller is right there, so we'll just say 4. Then you can get an adapter that turns the 3 external 3.5" bays into a 3 drive cage with a fan in front of it. Then you get one of the 5 drive bays that go into the 5.25" spots and you have 12 hard drive spots. I've got that set-up for my dual 1900 machine right now, just waiting on a new power supply after the last one took my previous board. I'm using SCSI in that one so I just have the one 39320 in there, but you'd need a couple IDE controllers to handle that many IDE drives. And one good 550w supply (Antec or better) can handle that many drives pretty well. You're doing the math wrong somehow if it says you need a 550w for that system. I only use 550s in each of my SMP workstations.

@other MN guy
I don't think you need SP1 for XP as long as the drives are NTFS formatted.