Hard Drives

[FuzzButt]

My Main PC has killed 2 Western Digital 500GB hard drives in the last 2 weeks. Plus on top of that one of the 2 drives in my striped RAID 1, a 74GB Raptor, has data issues so bad that it no longer is operational. The 500's both lost their motors so were instantly unusable. I had a 4 day old image of the RAID Array so it was not too much of an issue except I could not restore to a non-RAID.Friday morning is when the 3rd drive let go. It was part of a RAID 5 array and once I removed the bad drive and put another drive on it's channel the rebuild took place over about a 4 hour period. Not too bad for recovering the parity data for 400GB's of data. While I was restoring the data I was also getting data errors from a 1TB WD Green Power drive that was on channel 4 as a JBOD array. I immediately started a clone of that data to a Seagate TB drive I just picked up the previous week. There were a few sector errors during the clone. I have since moved that drive to another cable and off my Highpoint 2310 RAID card. When I know the cloned data is good I will likely reformat and run some tests on it. Maybe I'll have to RMA eventually as well. All are under warranty still and I'll be filling out another RMA as soon as I can' The first 2 replacements are on their way form California. I think one will be plugged into my RAID 5 as a hot spare (I wish my hardware would allow seamless up grade to RAID 6 cause I would use that if I could but my card allows for 0,1,5,10 and JBOD only). I don't know what I am going to do with the Raptor yet. My PC is just as fast without the RAID 1. All told I lost 900GB of data when the first 500GB drive failed because it was part of a spanned dynamic volume and I simply could not back up that size of a dataset. The Raptor going out cost me a couple days of work reinstalling everything. The bright side of that is the clean install of just about everything seems to make my user experience better. I would have loved it if the backup of my Outlook data would have included all the mail account settings. So the moral of the story is keep things backed up if at all possible. You simply never know when your drives will give up the ghost. Also RAID 5's are great if you can implement them in hardware. I have had 2 separate arrays with drives that failed and both restored seamlessly.

[ross549]

That's a lot of data to lose! And to think I only have about 700GB.....Adam

[Grasshopper]

I recently had my backup, external drive go.It was an Acomdata product. I opened it up (not in warranty any longer) and found that it had a Western Digital drive in it. I've always had good luck with brand name hard drives up through and most times, way past the warranty.

[Gary]

It would be wize to determine what is causing all of these failures.

[FuzzButt]

Ya I was less than happy when in the same morning a 500GB WD5000KS let go and 1/2 of my boot volume had so many CRC errors it was not usable any longer. Then to have another WD5000KS go bad I am starting to get a bit uneasy about them. The 900GB lost was nearly entirely movies. A few weeks later and I am not really upset about the loss. Last time I had a data loss it was from a NTFS MFT that got corrupted some how but I was able to restore it with recovery software. I guess it was a good thing or I would have been out shopping for a replacement drive on Friday so my array would have been safe. I did pick up a new Seagate TB drive 2 weeks ago while it was on sale at that big blue box store. So I have the room again. Though I had to remove my old PCI-SATA add-in card because it does not work with SATA300 drives even if the jumpers are changed. So now I can use the 4 Marvell SATA/RAID ports on my Intel motherboard. I might mirror my 2 TB drives together. I don't think I'll do a RAID 0 stripe again but these redundant RAID's are pretty cool. It's always good to have a backup and in theory that sounds great but in practice backing up can be a real chore even if it is automated.

[Gary]

I have had good luck with Seagate Drives. I have had several WD drives goes bad.

[FuzzButt]

It would be wise to determine what is causing all of these failures.

Likely heat. The Raptors are fan cooled so I don't know why I had trouble with one of them. The others are in a rack on the bottom of my PC sitting on their side and they were a bit warmer than I would have liked. My Lian Li case is a bit warm with 10 drives in it along with 2 power supplies and a Q6600. I see case temps in the 127F range in the summer with ambient room temps in the high 70's low 80's. Now that there are only 8 hard drives in there I bet the temps will be a bit lower. All the drives except a pair of 750 Seagates are separated by a drive width gap now.

[Gary]

Why do you need 8 drives? Get a couple of these. 2 TB should be enough for anyone.http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...p;reqPage=Model

[FuzzButt]

Well it is a full tower case. Lots of room inside. There are 1x92mm and 1x80mm fans side by side in the front. Plus more passive ventilation above that. There are 4 80mm fans in the rear, 2 near CPU and 2 at the top above the main power supply. Lots of warm air comes out the back. My Q6600 does not run real hot but it does run hotter now that the fan on the MaxOrb I use broke. So I have the stock heatsink on there now and everything runs a bit warmer. There is a mid range ATI x1800 video card, a RAID controller and my SB Audigy2 on the Intel 975XBX2 motherboard. The 4GB of Corsair DDR2-8400 is a bit warm. All in all I would do a bit better if I ran more fans or a larger case or put it somewhere other than under my desk next to another warm PC and a really warm UPS. I actually ran across a real cool case that might work for me but it is all clear lexan and I already have enough problem with stray RF radiation here at the compound. I don't know who makes it but it is easily twice the size of the Lian Li PC71 I have used for the past 4 or 5 years. There are currently 8 drives in there. I boot from a 74GB Raptor. There are 3 500GB drives in a RAID5 that handle my main data set (My Docs, pictures, MP3's and downloaded shareware/freeware/purchases, ISO's). On my 750GB E: drive I have my TV captures on that one. The other 750GB is taken for backups. The WD TB drive has my DV stuff (Transfers from MiniDV tapes) on it. And the new Seagate TB drive has a clone of that DV stuff currently. (There were odd but nondescript errors from the RAID card for the WD TB drive but there are no SMART errors so I cloned it real quick to make sure everything is ok.)When you play with MPG's and AVI's that are 175MB to 1.4GB each it is amazing how soon you can run out of room. I got tired of running out of space so I went to big drives a year or so ago so I did not have to move stuff around again. Since there are 2.1 million files on my "D" drive it gets to be a real pain to copy it to another drive. The MFT gets overloaded in a real hurry. I suppose I could probably delete half of my data and not even notice it was gone. I still have downloaded files from the mid 90's on there. then there the pictures. I have scans of every 35mm picture I have taken in the last decade. Plus every digital picture that has come from any of our digital cameras. I have a "sickness" for downloading my favorite TV shows and keeping them. I think I have every episode of NCIS for instance. Then there is the 40+GB Top Gear takes up. My larges collection has to be that of Modern Marvels. I have captured with my TV cards over the years over 400 episodes. I figure that alone is nearly 250GB. I don't have the PC on right now so I might be off a bit. So you can see 4.5TB adds up fast but gets used pretty quickly if you have a habit of keeping everything cool you run across online. Likely 2TB would do fine if I did not include backups. It would go even quicker if I was into the "Apple TV" or similar like a friend of mine is. He just picked up a 2TB NAS enclosure just to store his iTunes video's.Gary that is the drive I just got at BB for $179 about 10 days ago. I figure when this is all back to normal and working the way I want it I might do a bit of cable cleaning inside the case again. I have more than a few SATA & Power cables that are in need of organization and tidying up. Who knows maybe I don't really need the 325W Ultra Add-on PSU anymore.

[goretsky]

Hello,Have you checked the volume of air moved by the various fans in your systsem to verify that the CFM brought in matches the amount being ejected? I am wondering if having them vary tremendously might lead to changes in air pressure inside the chassis which could cause problems with air becoming "stagnant" and "pooling" in certain places inside the chassis, increasing the temperature in certain areas. That is something of a guess on my part--I'm not sure if it is even possible to have measureable effects in a PC chassis.Have you checked the power supplies and the UPS to verify they are all functioning properly? I have read that repeated lightning strikes can degrade the surge suppression used on many electronics so they no longer work over time (mentioned in another forum here).Regards,Aryeh Goretsky

[b2cm]

Maybe one of those intake fans should be above (not alongside) the other. You can also use a desk fan near the back of the case to keep exhausted air (and the heat from the other PC and UPS) from being recycled back into the case.

[FuzzButt]

The design of the case does not allow for placement of fans in places except where they currently are. See the picture I have a link to here http://www.thefuzzbutt.com/chris/images/lo...ian-li-pc71.jpg it is easy to see the edge of the front fan and both the mid height rear fans. All the exhaust fans blow their rated CFM out the back. The rest of the PC can handle the heat. The drives get a nice breeze running across them.

[b2cm]

My bad. I confused it with the PC-76.

[tommyj12]

Fuzzbutt you are killing your air flow with all those wires everywhere. You really would see an improvement with some proper wire routing. It will take a while, and you will have to put in some thought to get it right. You could also add some exhaust fans on top of that case to get the hot air out. You will have to cut, but I would mayeb put in 2 120mm's up there. That case like a lot of Lian Li's are negative pressure so there isn't much air moving. Most time you will have to make cuts in the motherboard to route the cables behind the mobo. Here is my lian li mid tower showing how I routed the cables. And my antec 1200 full tower

[b2cm]

It already has 2 80mm exhaust fans just above the PSU.

[tommyj12]

Specs I see say 4 80mm's that would be two up front and two in the back? If you wanna cut the top I can link you a template for the 120's. IF you don't wanna cut you could use something like this or this to cool the upper drives better. Lots of options to get some more air moving. http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l2/g43/c241/g...html?o=title_az

[b2cm]

Actually, there are 2 80mm fans above the PSU (taking out air trapped at the top of case) and another 2 80mm fans below the PSU (taking out air trapped under the PSU). There are 2 80mm fans in front pulling in air to cool the hard drives and run that air across the mainboard.

[FuzzButt]

Sorry about the delay I was on a short holiday.Ya there are one 80mm and one 92mm fans in front low. Two 80mm (1 is a very high flow type) next to the CPU. Finally there are 2 80mm fans above the PSU (which has a 92mm exit fan and a 120mm input fan).I've dressed up cables real nice and pretty before and have found no difference in temperature but a serious difference in reliability. I'm going to clean stuff up again after I get my replacement drive in place and a replacement CPU Heatsink/fan. I might go so far as drilling holes and adding grommets but nice and tidy is fine. The picture I posted is about a year old so it is a bit more cluttered and at the same time a bit emptier as well. The 140mm fan on my Thermaltake HSF broke the plastic weld that holds it to the bearing and thus failed. Oddly unless I opened up the case I would have never really known there was an issue. I need a new HSF, 4 or so good quality short length SATA cables, Some SATA power cables that I can customize and a good amount of free time. Likely all this will get done after boating season is over. Right now I would rather be getting my burn on out on the lake. My data seems safe right now so I'm in no hurry. I need to format and reinstall everything on my Parents PC since a virus (I tried everything to fix it) seems to have broken windows XP. They have been waiting for me to look at it since the beginning of summer.

[patio]

Sweet !Tommy can i hire you to re-wire my new build ? ?

[tommyj12]

Of course. Wish I could do it every day, and really love case modding. Check out the complete work log on the 1200 here. I will have a mobo in this week and I will start my next project, my HTPC.

[FuzzButt]

Speaking of case mods. I just modded my Thermaltake Maxorb HSF with a new fan from Antec. So now my Max orb will be going back in to sit on my Q6600.And how about another hard drive going bad. This time it was the one in my Dish DVR. Not a total loss but it gave us an opportunity to upgrade to the top of the line VIP722 HD DVR instead of the SD 625 model from a few years ago.

[ross549]

Another one? Wow. My family always had that problem until we got an UPS on the computer. We also madesure to get one that conditioned the power too. Maybe you are having dirty power issues.Adam

[crp]

I've had good success with thesehttp://www.cyberguys.com/templates/SearchD...?productID=2144in cooling down systems.

[FuzzButt]

I have a APC Smart UPS 1400 on the PC's and a Smart UPS 1000 on the entertainment center. So far only a lightning strike is a problem for them. Power outages are not an issue.