God Damn It. Thats Another Hdd Blown

[moz]

ive just got another HDD thats developed bad blocks, thats 3 this year.

x2 maxtor 1-2 years old
x1 WD less than 1 year old

all of the 200GB drives,

whats the most reliable IDE drive manufactuer?

 

[Quiest]

Just some bad blocks or many many?

 

[moz]

Just some bad blocks or many many?

​

the first 2 started with bad blocks then killed the disk, maxtor
managed to save all the stuff of the first maxtor, but lost 200GB of Video off the 2nd.

so im getting as much of the WD as possible.
ive just copied most of the stuff off the WD, but ive lost some of my VMware machines and a good 10GB of music.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

All hard drives have bad blocks, usually though the hard drive sorts them out itself and we never see them.

Were you getting read errors? Or are you running some surface testing software out of paranoia?

 

[moz]

All hard drives have bad blocks, usually though the hard drive sorts them out itself and we never see them.

Were you getting read errors? Or are you running some surface testing software out of paranoia?

​

Normal operations.

i noticed the bad blocks when i lost 10GB of audio files and MOM kicked up the alerts.
during the mass copy of data from the drive when it came across some bad blocks it caused the server to Blue screen, using the WD software it was unable to perform basic checks. trying to use chkdsk /f /r just BSOD the server again. The disk is beginning to fail, no point risking any more data if the drive is under warrenty.

I work with decent RAIDED SCSI disks at work all the time and the nearest hint of a bad block on a disk gets replaced asap, as i dont fancy having to restore a 200GB exchange server or having to sort out corrupt AD (again)

if the drives under warrenty and begins to fail then its off back to the manufactuer, after all i'd hate to lose mi roms

are sata drives more reliable than IDE?
SCSI im good IDE i havent a clue

 

[gp32rich]

What OS are you on?

I'd partitioned a 150Gb to 2x60+30, but when I filled one of the 60's it trashed the other partitions of the disk and the mbr

One format and repartition to 5x30 and all is okay now ... except for a little lost data


There is a fine tool called BootItNG that may help you recover some of your disks, but probably not the data :unsure:

 

[moz]

win2000, not to worry too much ive got a backup on DVD of the stuff i lost, i'll check out the util you mention i may come in useful another time

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

win2000, not to worry too much ive got a backup on DVD of the stuff i lost, i'll check out the util you mention i may come in useful another time 

​

From what you have described it seems like you have a faulty drive (but you already knew that). The question now is, why has another drive failed in your PC? It could be one of the following reasons:

1. It's another drive from the same batch, and it's a faulty batch.

2. You have a faulty power supply that is killing the drive electronics on your drive.

3. Your IDE interface has a problem that's killing your drive.

4. Your drive does not have adequate cooling and the drive is dieing through heat.

Answering another question:
SATA drives are not more or less unreliable from IDE drives. The only difference is that SATA drives have a higher data tranfer rate between the drive and your motherboard. Most generally have more cache too so SATA drives are much faster than IDE. appart from the speed, there's little difference.

I'm not a fan of SCSI drives myself. in all my years in computing, I have always had more problems with SCSI drives than IDE. To me, SCSI drives never feel as fast as IDE, even though the specs say they shoud be. Leave SCSI for servers, and RAID systems etc.

If your motherboard has an IDE style RAID option, don't use it. if you have problems you will find yourself in one heck of a pickle. You won't be able to drop the drive into a normal IDE system and retrieve the data.

 

[Quiest]

Is it bad to have partitions as big as 250gb?

Just asking, I want to build a mediastation (for watching movies/playing emus on the tv) with around a 500 to 750 gb harddrive space, but I don`t want to have that many partitions...

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Is it bad to have partitions as big as 250gb?

Just asking, I want to build a mediastation (for watching  movies/playing emus on the tv) with around a 500 to 750 gb harddrive space, but I don`t want to have that many partitions...

​

Well it all depends on the file system. FAT32 was not designed for larger file systems, it becomes slow with anything above 20Gb or so. If you're running Windows XP then use NTFS, and it's perfectly happy with single partitions into the terabyte region, so 250Gb is totally okay!

Edit:
By the way, I built a PC a few months back for that very reason, and have a 250Gb serial ATA drive, it runs like a dream.

Are you going to be using media center?

 

[markusdragon]

My parents' old computer used to deformat hard drives. Thankfully I've liberated their 160GB drive, and it seems to have recovered. Of course, the only way to check has been to fill it with downloads...

 

[Quiest]

...
By the way, I built a PC a few months back for that very reason, and have a 250Gb serial ATA drive, it runs like a dream.

Are you going to be using media center?

​

If you mean WinXP Media Center edition, definatly not. I hate it.
Just normal WinXP.

I have my movielist, selfwritten in html (450+ entries ), and I`m just gonna add
links to the movies so I can run them by going through the list and clicking on the titles

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, we had a lot of different hdds at our company.
Basically, we found out that most hdds larger than 120 Gig die after about 2-3 years.

We also had bad sector problems with Western Digital and Maxtor harddisks after a few months.
We never had any problems with Samsung and Fujitsu hdds.

 

[Steve-O]

got a 80GB Maxtor and a 40GB Maxtor and they have been going strong for 4 - 5 years now

 

[PinkSpider]

Well my disk melted, and quite literally blew, also it functioned as a light for about 10 seconds.

Excellent!

 

[Rico]

All this data loss stuff is making me paranoid? How often do drives die instantly as opposed to getting bad blocks? I had one 60gig go corrupt so Windows wouldn't boot - copied files over, formatted then used it in a PC months later with no problems.

I should probably start a home RAID h34r:

 

[EvilDragon]

I should probably start a home RAID h34r:

​

That's what I did a year ago... nicely rsynced Linux fileserver with double harddisks.
Mirroring every night.

 

[moz]

All this data loss stuff is making me paranoid? How often do drives die instantly as opposed to getting bad blocks? I had one 60gig go corrupt so Windows wouldn't boot - copied files over, formatted then used it in a PC months later with no problems.

I should probably start a home RAID h34r:

​

my first failure lasted long enough for me to get nearly all the data off it about 180GB, the 2nd drive within 30 mins of wondering where my files had gone and seeing bad errors in the event log lost the lot about 180GB

my last one and 3rd this year so far, 10GB of music and about 20GB of vmware server templates.

if the data is important make sure youve got it in 2 physical locations.

 

[trooper]

if the data is important make sure youve got it in 2 physical locations.

​

Yeah, Drive D: partition 1 and Drive D: Partition 2. .

Trooper

 

[moz]

if the data is important make sure youve got it in 2 physical locations.

​

Yeah, Drive D: partition 1 and Drive D: Partition 2. .

Trooper

​

just about better than nothing i suppose, a physically different device would be better though