TMPGEnc killed my hard drive

[shardison]

OK, slightly off topic, but good for those converting using TMPGEnc.

I thought it would be great to simultaneously re-encode two video clips using two running copies of TMPGEnc. Don't do it. Run multiple encodes with the batch mode. The thrashing of the disk back and fourth between programs killed the drive. I can still read the drive up to the sectors it was writing to, and then all I hear is seek noises forever. Not even Scandisk can get beyond the bad sectors. It won't boot; it seems that a whole platter is dead. Kiss my 2 year old 60 gig IBM Deskstar goodbye.

Now bow your head in silence for a moment, please.
Burial will be at 8:00 am this weekend in a garbage can out back.
Don't send flowers, just back up your drive today.

[wipeout]

your drive sucks....dont blame programs.....the drive head is always moving...

[shardison]

Still, knowing what I just described, would you risk running 2 copies of TMPGEnc for hundreds of hours on end, or would you just encode using the batch mode? The MTBF means half will make it and half won't. A hard drive won't last forever.

[marvel2020]

shardison...

Don't be buring it just yet.


There might be a way to resurrect it. "aka Frankenstein way" if ya know what i mean .

Goto www.filemirrors.com and in the search box there, do a search for

dft32-v340

This is a Drive Fitness test diagnostic tool Design by IBM, you copy the contents to a floppy disc, reboot your PC with the floppy disc in the drive and the programme on the disk will start.

Just follow the onscreen instructions.

What this does is it will scan your harddrive first, make an error report, then give you 2 options of either to Repair the bad sectors without deleting any data except for the bad sectors area, or do a complete format, formatting your whole harddrive fdisk and all, so you will have to fdisk again etc...

I had the same problems as you. Bad sectors on my IBM, i used this programme but i went for the full format option and now my harddrive is working again.

[hustbaer]

@shardison:

i would not run 2 tmpgenc copies converting at the same time.
but not because they are gonna damage my disk but because everything gets slower because of the heavy random access...

i dont believe that putting heavy load on disks should be a problem, only if the disks suck royal dick.
at work we have an old netfinity running 24/7 and there is no single second between 07am and 10pm where the drives are not working.
not a single disk-failure within 3 years of continuing operation.

and this is no exception, this is standard.

get a seagate drive.
if the drive will ever fail it will fail within 1 or 2 weeks, so you can easily get a replacement.
thats odd but it's true.

one other thing:
we lost 2 days work on our SAP system because 2 disks in our servers RAID5 array failed within minutes!
2 IBM disks that is.
IBM was avare of a flaw in one series, but they didn't care to inform us.

so much on harddisks 8)

have a nice day, bye,
--hustbaer

[SaSi]

Tmpgenc certainly didn't kill your drive. It just excerciced it a little more than leaving it idle.

Actually, Tmpgenc being slow and all, can't excercice the drive too much. Ripping programs and capture programs can. Especially if the drive is fragmented and / or very big. On large drives, >120Gb, writing to the end of the drive, i.e. > 80Gb area, is very demanding as the heads more back and forth to write data and update the NTFS directory structures.

I have had a 200Gb die on me after 10 days doing ripping, encoding and the rest. I certainly don't blame the s/w, just myself for not testing it more before putting it to normal use. The drive didn't have bad sectors. Any random sectors would start to appear unreadable after a few minutes of operation. More time if I let the drive get cold. I eventually managed to salvage a lot letting it cool-off, until I gave it back for replacement.

Of course your drive is 2 years old. Not enough to warrant a failure, and perhaps the drive hasn't failed. A detailed scan and recovery may prove to be all it takes. Bad sectors are something normal and we always had them in the past.

It's good to schedule a health check on drives every six months or so. Just a thorough write-read-compare cycle, both sequential and random, to run overinght. It will ensure a long life for each drive (until it fails).

Of course I'm not refering to fault-plagued batches of drives here; these are a totaly different story.

[Romanov]

It's not TMPGEnc; it's indeed the IBM disk... I had 5 (five) different IBM deskstars fail on me in a time frame of 2 years. Go with Western Digital, Seagate or Maxtor. Stay away from the IBM drives forever.

[BJ_M]

i swore always to use IBM drives at one time - but i have to say , i have not been to happy with them lately ...

i had a 10,000rpm scsi 36gig drive (IBM) die on me at home yesterday .. my boot drive .. it self destructed doing nothing at the time ... non to happy right now ... had others die also ..

[WeedVender]

IBM HDDs are not designed for people like us.

[matneaves]

true ibm drives are designed for people that say "640k base is plenty enough - Bill gates"

[monoxide77]

TMPGenc also killed my hard drive about a month ago. it was a western digital. i'm not sure if TMPGenc is to blame, but the drive went bad running that program. i was encoding Back to the Future when it started making click noises. it was never the same again. i only had the drive for about six months. good thing that western digital has a great waranty. they sent me a new drive 2nd day FedEx, before i even sent them the broken one!