large hard drives dieing??

amigabill · n00b Joined: 05 May 2003 Posts: 59

OK, weird situation. I had a brand new 200gig hard drive die a couple weeks ago very shortly after buying it. It lasted long enough for me to get Gentoo installed with a usable KDE GUI, and suddently it was dead. One of them huge Western Digital things. Man, that sucks, but by now the replacement should be in the mail to me.

Now, a couple days ago I got one of them little Shuttle XPC things to rig up as a firewall with some bandwidth limiting and stuff. Didn't fit on my old 1.3gig drive so I put aspare 40gig in I had been saving for my next planned machine. A recent drive purchase as well. It went out during Gentoo install, starting to make ome odd clicking noises and now the maxtor floppy disk fails to detect the drive.

Now, I dont' want to go blaming Linux or Gentoo, but its an odd coincidence, as Gentoo is the only thing these two computers or hard drives have in common. Are there any known issues with Linux and big drives??

Machine 1: AthlonXP 1700+ motherboard with SIS chipset, 512MB RAM, Audigy2, Ethernet (don't remember if it's the Dlink or the Linksys card), USB2 PCI cards and an AIW Radeon 8500DV. WD 200gig HD.

Machine 2: Shuttle 41G, AthlonXP 2000+, 256MB RAM, everything else built in with the Via 266something chipset. Maxtor 40gig HD.

Bill Toner
from the "that's odd" depertment

Sgeorg · Apprentice Joined: 01 Apr 2003 Posts: 152

you said you installed gentoo! this means the maschine ran over 24 hours!?

So, have you attached some cooling (fan) to the 200GB disk?!

This disks can get very very hot in a closed environment as a computer box is!?

such a disk cannot hold more than 60°celsius during usage or they burn to death! Read the maxtor manuals.

my disk (scsi/ide) all from IBM are cooled with fans, so they stay at lower than 40°celsius while normal usage an reach a maximum of 45°celsius while havey duty.

install smartmontools or so to keep an eye on the temp. and the other smart parameters!

Georg

amigabill · n00b Joined: 05 May 2003 Posts: 59

I did have a fan for the drives, they were in them removable drive bays that have fans in the bay for the drive. I have another of the 40gig drives that is fine, and the one that died was fine as an extra Windows drive for some time without trouble. It was just that they both died right after/during Gentoo install that makes me say "Hmmm..." I had just thought I got a bum drive with the 200gig one, especially after hearing a friend say his server software company will absolutely not use Western Digital drives due to reliability concerns. But then the 40gig Maxtor went out. I'm trying very hard to not associate these drive deaths with Gentoo, but these drives are both quite new (the 200gig having been new out of box) ad the Maxtor was only a couple months old and similar Maxtor drives (40gig and 80 gig) are fine in the same environment for much longer than I had that one.

Someone at work mentioned the possibility of a virus, but I got my live CD image from you guys and it didn't live long enough to get anything other than Gentoo and KDE installed to get infected with. The 40gig didn't even finish gentoo install before death.

I'm just not sure what to do now, the replacement 200gig arrived today, but I'm almost afraid to install anything on it... I'd just like to have some idea of what's happening before I do something that might eat this one too.

karmakillernz · n00b Joined: 01 May 2002 Posts: 55

Were these drives both in the same machine? It may be power related. I'm not sure, but to have both drives die like that seems pretty odd. A Gentoo installation does push hardware to the limits but hard drives should be able to handle it without any trouble. Just a thought anyway...

Sgeorg · Apprentice Joined: 01 Apr 2003 Posts: 152

then I think it's a damn stupid accident! :?:

I only can tell, that I only lost once one disk (unforseen) an this was the "best" disk I had then.
It was an IBM scsi server Heavy duty disk with five years warranty! It never ran longer than 20
hours a day since it was in my room (noise while sleeping). Once I went out and let the maschine
do some film compressing (xvid, divix) with automated shutdown when finished.

Rebooting after a few days failed since my disk wasn't found by the controller!

But the joke is I had a smart daemon installed to watch over the disk! It's log was fine (was on an other disk) no predictions for any failure.

:arrow:

"sometimes the life expectation of HDs is strange!"

amigabill · n00b Joined: 05 May 2003 Posts: 59

>Were these drives both in the same machine?

Nope. The machine the 200gig died in is now running Win2000 again, the 40gig died in one of them little shuttle guys. Well, not IN it as it wasn't completely installed in the case but more sitting on top. Goin gto try again with a third drive, if that dies too I'm done with this stuff for a while, crossing my fingers...

Bill

amd · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 8:38 pm Post subject:

any ideas for laptops? My 20gb hdd died few weeks ago... (also strange clicking and then a lockup)

Timm · Posted: Wed Jun 18, 2003 9:04 pm Post subject:

I recently heard a lot of bad things about those IDE disks > 100MB. They seem to be heat sensitiv! Things like using a large disk without a proper fan or leaving the box open kills them very fast. And a gentoo install is very heat sensitiv, because of the CPU an Harddisk utilization.
_________________
Timm