HDD Questions

[jason69uk]

Hi,

What's the things to affct playback fo movies on a computer or to cause a hard drive falire i can so far think of this:

Over heating.
Fragmentation.
Bad Sectors.
Viruses,
System files getting cossupted.

Can anyone think of anything else that would cause bad playback of movies and for the hard drive to fail.

I didn't mention i know codecs can Also mess things up with movie playback but not affect the actual movie right?

Also can i have a recommendation on the best codec pack please im using k-lite codec pack the the mo and it's not that good..

Cheers

[SaSi]

A bad drive will obviously affect movie playback, in the manner that it affects data retrieval.

Of the issues you mention, overheating can be a reason for a drive to fail. Thermal expansion - caused by heat - will at some stage result in a head crash or mis-alignment.

On the other hand, bad sectors is not a reason. It's a result - a bad drive. If you have bad sectors you should perform a disk scan check marking bad sectors. Better yet to do a low level format with the relevant tool from the HDD manufacturer to mark the bad sectors permanently. If they are more than a handfull, discard the drive. If their number grows over time, discard the drive.

Fragmentation can make a drive slower - possibly to the extent of causing short breaks during playback, but that needs a very slow and very fragmented drive to show. Other than that, constantly working this drive with high fragmentation cause the head arm to move more than required and this can reduce the useful life of the disk. Have never - though - seen a drive fail prematurely just because of fragmentation.

An additional reason for HD failure can be a bad power supply. Especially if you load the system too much with peripherals (disk and RAM) and work for long hours.

Movie playback can be affected much more often by poor choice of codecs. No codec pack is good - by experience. Best deal is to install only the codecs you need and use them from trusted sources.

xVid and DivX can be installed by their own setup programs. Windows Media codecs can be downloaded from Microsoft - Media player will install any Microsoft codec on demand - and this seems to be the best way to install only what you need. HufYUV is another fine codec you might want and can be installed separately. Most codec packs will install old DivX versions along with hacked MS MPEG-4 codecs which usually cause a mess.

Audio codecs can be a pain. I have been given a couple of AVIs to convert to DVD and the audio was in some sort of AC3 that no known - to me - AC3 codec could handle. Apparently, importing the audio from the AVI to CoolEdit PRO was succesfull and then I could save it as a WAV to mux with the video portion to get to a playable AVI.

[jason69uk]

Thank you very much for this mate.

Spinrite seemes to be a good program for bad sectors anyway that was recommended by someone else on this forum, cheers!!

Now what brand of drive am i recomended to get here (the bloke who answered my other msg on the forum i think im guna decide on the hard drive mate ive had enuff hassle with dvds!!)
yeah anyway so far all i have is maxtors..
I heard the best two brands were Seagate and Western Digital.. what shall i get then an ATA isit?? or an E-IDE or something or IDE?? whats the best..

Basically i just want a drive thats often good at not
A: overheating
B: Hardly ne bad sectors
C: 7200 RPM and 8 MB Cache

Should i be getting an external or internal..heat isnt that much of a worry as the side of the pc is always off anyway!!

I also read somewhere theres this command u can do something like 'sfc /scannow' to check every file on the system to make sure its in place and working properly, Does this work??

Cheers

[SaSi]

You appear to be haunted by ghosts in this disk reliability issue. Can't blame you though...

Over heating and 7200rpm don't really go together.

I've had bad experience from Seagate disks so I never buy these. I've seen IBM and Hitachi (now) disks that don't get too hot even at 7200rpm.

On the other hand, I've not seen any HD larger than 120Gb that runs cool. Especially after lot's of work and fragmentation.

I would get a large disk with a 3 year warranty from a source I trust to honor the warranty. As soon as you get it, excercice it (with spinrite if you wish) for at least 48 hours. If it doesn't fail, you can feel safer it won't fail you. If it gives any indication of problems, return it before storing any valuable data on it.

I now have 8 x 200GB Western Digital drives, two of which are SATA the rest PATA (also known as ATA, IDE or EIDE). I only had a problem (I think so) with the 2nd drive almost 18 months ago. Returned it for replacement and no problems since.

You can choose between EIDE (PATA) or SATA disks. Basically, SATA is an option only if your m/b has a SATA controller. Or you need to buy one, which is not a good thing to do anyhow. So, if your m/b supports SATA, buy a SATA disk. Will be possible to connect it to new motherboards to come. Prices are now almost the same and performance is the same.

Regarding the filesystem problems, I've had such problems in the old, Windows 98 days with FAT32. I once got myself a partition with MP3 songs that were intermingled and all went down the sink. Ever since I switched to NTSF, I swear I never had a corrupt partition or lost files.

With Windows XP/2000, pay a visit to event viewer in control panel. Check the system logs for warnings or errors related to the disks not responding within the required timeout. These are typically the first symptoms of a disk related failure.

[jason69uk]

Hi,

So any HDD i get over 160 is going to get a lot hotter than ones under 120GB so therefore i will need a lot of cooling this house is like an ice box anyway and having the side of the pc off helps cool it down a lot.

I have a maxtor thats ATA or something it's FAT32 and took ages to defrag!! What is the m/b??

Ive never had problems with NTFS drives either they've lasted me ages they just seem to go on and on.

I've paid my visit to the control panel and cant seem to find the event viewer icon. How do i find it?
I'm running XP Home on this machine.

Thanks for the help mate

[SaSi]

m/b is motherboard.

FAT32 partitions larger than 20Gb will take forever to defrag and beyond 30Gb or so will not defrag (so I am told) due to a problem with the FAT32 design. (This is what a friend quoted from a Microsoft Knowledgebase article).

Now, for the event viewer, with Windows XP Pro, you go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools and then Event Viewer. For XP Home, I confess I'v never used them... (Do XP Home support NTFS partitions? )

[jason69uk]

Yeah i think so i partitioned an NTFS drive with partition magic and it seemed to work ok..defrags ok etc..

I'm using disk keeper to defrag, is this a tool you would recommend??

I'm in event viewer now in the system menu 2,319 events starting from 05/02/2005 i can see..well half of the list are errors and its that DCOM exploit thing with avast antivirus id imagine as it says dcom under source:

Antivirus menu:

69 events: with mainly warnings more errors than information.

application: there are 2,943 events
errors: id say about 200
warnings: about 20
normal things are the rest.

whats this telling me im in good or bad health here??
and isit telling me my AV is corrupt??

Have u ever run scannow/sfc and does it work??

This event logger anyway the errors it picks up isit possible to correct those errors??

isit normal for have a few errors though on service control manager and DCOM??