Destroying Hard Drives ??

[4mula]

I recently finished our website DVD, and was attemptimg to make a large amount of them on my Comp (see specs). After what the repair store told me I feel this new hard drive is gong down in a hard way also. Both were Western Digital 120 gig, 7,200 IDE's with the 8 meg cache. I'm using Ulead movie factory and creating discs from the .iso . I was able to make 23 DVD's at 2.6 gigs in an expanded period giving my proccessor time to relax (Burn Rate Is at 4X) Pioneer 106 . Yet after this, the hard dive is again making the same noise as it did before the previous failure.

Am I overdoing this, I know it's very intense to all the parts of my comp, but to be killing my drive so quick is beyond me.

Anyone else see any explanations for this problem, all help would be appreciated

[marvel2020]

I'm probably speaking out of turn here and i'll probably get flamed for this but western digital harddrives are the biggest piece of crap you could spend your money on.

A lot of my friends have had them in there PC's and 1 after the other they have all died.

You would be better getting a Seagate ( i've 3 installed in my PC), Maxtor or Samsung.

With regular Defragging with a proper defragger ( not the shit that comes with WINXP), something like Executive Software Diskeeper, all my harddrives have perform perfectly from the day i installed them.

I would suggest that if the harddrive/s are still under warranty, you
should return them to Western Digital, at least to get a replacement if nothing else.

[redwudz]

I would switch drive brands. Maybe look for a drive that has a 5 years warranty.

[irongang]

I had a Maxtor drive that was making a very unhappy noise. I took everything off of it (except one file that had bad sectors) and low-level formatted it. No problems since. I'm sure WD has some sort of utility on their website for reformatting or recertifying their drives. Try that out.

[johns0]

Executive Software Diskeeper is what windows uses for its default crappy defragging,i think its just bad luck that your hdd`s are going faulty,i hear from other people that maxtors are the worse.

[lenti_75]

the best hdd's are IBM and WD, samsung maxtor and other are just imitations.
i've been using WD for the last 10 years, and only 1 died, the first one, on me since then.....are you doing somehting wrong ??
try an IBM, don;t go for samsung or other, those are just imitations.

[northcat_8]

....western digital harddrives are the biggest piece of crap you could spend your money on.

ABSOLUTELY

Imitations or not....there was a thread a few months ago debating this very topic, and even though Western Digital was apparently a favorite religion for some nay sayers....there were about 30 people who had lost HDs and guess what brand they were??.....Western Digital. Not a single person who had lost a Seagate or Maxtor. Even the WD deciples admitted that drives they lost were WD.

I lost a HD...I had two 80 GB maxtors, 120 maxtor, 60 WD, 10 WD and a 4 Quantum. I lost the 10 GB WD and have had several severe problems with my 60 GB WD. I'll never buy another WD.

Seems though that I did convert the FAT32 file system to NTFS and most of my problems with it have gone away. But just to be safe, I used Norton Ghost and made a backup so when it does go out I'm not actually out anything.

You aren't doing anything wrong, the drive should handle it no problem. I crank video into and off of my Maxtors all the time. My WD is my OS drive, the 2-80 GB Maxtors are in a stripe 0 RAID array - it is my capture drive, and my 120 GB Maxtor is the finalized drive.

the best hdd's are IBM and WD, samsung maxtor and other are just imitations.
i've been using WD for the last 10 years, and only 1 died, the first one, on me since then.....are you doing somehting wrong ??

10 years and only 1 died...1 WDigital died....how many maxtors or seagates died in that time frame?

[sacajaweeda]

I quit buying Maxtor drives because of the incredibly high failure rate. I've purchased probably a dozen of them over the last 5 years and all but two of them have crapped out and had to be sent back for a replacement. I've been buying Western Digital drives exclusively the last two years and haven't had any problems yet. (knock on wood) Every time one of my Maxtors die I sent it back to them and when they send the replacement I sell it on eBay to recover some of my loss and use the money to buy replacement drives from Western Digital. The only Maxtor drives I've got that I haven't had a problem with were a 30 and a 40 GB. Seems like anything they make 80 GB and up is just crap.


That's been MY experience with hard drives.

MY $.02

[4mula]

Thanks so far guys, lemme ask a little more in depth question, should I add another drive just for the DVD proccess. I don't mind doing it if it will stabilize my whole system and keep this from happening again. I can move a drive I don't really need and just use the program for this purpose only. I know one of you stated that it isn't the amount of burning but most likely the drive itself. I did want the seagate, and am not to fond of Maxtor.

[redwudz]

I won't deal with the 'best drive' controversy, they all can fail. But if you are capturing to your boot drive, yes definitely add a second drive. And always back up your important files to non-magnetic media.

[TBoneit]

a. Go to "www.wdc.com" choose support and download their datalifeguard tool(s) they seem to have three now. Run those against your drive. It can tell you if you have a problem, surface test, write zeros to the drive if ti needs to be ruturned, map in spare sectors to replace bad ones etc.

You could be killing it with heat!

Check the drive temperature after a period of useage. Run for a while, quick pull the cover and feel the drive, is it hot?

Is it got other drives above an below it so it can't breath and cool?

I have a case where their are case fans blowing over the drives, they're cool to the touch. And even then they can still go bad.

I've got a Seagate, and a Samsung, and a WD that all went bad in the last year. one IDE, two SATA, At work I've seen Maxtor SATA not hold up real good either. 1 out of 2 in three weeks.

OTOH, the WD is easy enough to RMA, just slow. The Maxtor harder to RMA and slow. The Samsung Easy to RMA and back under a week.

Good Luck

[ZAPPER]

4mula Good looking site! I wish that I had more time to enjoy the roar of the race in person! Anyhow I ain't no expert, but here are some of my thoughts on your situation. First I don't really know why your drives are crapping out so fast, but I say that these things ain't so much a new technology as they are souped up old tech. And with anything souped up it is going to blow sooner or later. Why not get a smaller cheaper drive to hold the file that you want to make many copies of? Here is my twisted logic. If it does blow you ain't lost much. And not having to spin all the extra platters might make it last longer. I dont know how many disk copies you plan on making in the future but maybe a multi disk duplicator is in order (hey it is only money). I hope that you didn't lose anything else on your hard drives. This kind of goes toward the dedicated video PC thing. With all the things that can go wrong with video it is good to have a PC for the mundane things in life(like looking for support while one machine is in pieces). I have two old Maxor 40 gig drives and they are still spinning (knock on wood). Any how good luck with your next try!

[gmatov]

Any given drive can fail at any given time. The make doesn't matter except for the IBM Deskstar that was failing at super high rates a few years ago, and that was a result of bad components from a vendor, and enough to get IBM to sell its drive division to hitachi.

You aren't really spinning up all those platters on a new, large drive. Disk geometry says XXX Cylinders, XXX Heads, XXX Sectors, just because this is the way drives have always been delineated. When they could only cram XXX data to a given area, they added another disk, 2 more heads, doubled the size. When they got the areal density up to gigs per square inch, they kept the measurements as that is what computers have always used as their reference.

Most of these new drives have only one disk in them, but can write fantastic amounts of data to both sides of the disk.

Last I read, over a year ago, was 11 gig per square inch of magnetic media, probably more now. 300 gig might be a dual disk, but wouldn't even bet on that.

Cheers,

George

[4mula]

Thanks for the site compliment zapper, and I did think it was a souped up hot rod when I purchased it, but the drive failure has me baffled, I need to copy around 60 more DVD's in short spans, (I have no life, lol). I am going to at least get the datalifeguard tool. I did lose sectors the last time around. but nothing is operating abnormally other than the noise. I am taking all this great info in, and again many thanks on all the expertise !!