Wierd question, it's just I went through 3 hard disks last year And cos I pay cash & tend to be utterly shit about paperwork (receipts), I've lost the money on all of em cos the shops won't take them back without a receipt or EXACT date of purchase (yeah, fuckin likely). Next one I buy I'll make sure to keep the receipt from, but I'd still rather not fill it with stuff just to have the fucker die on me again. So I wanna know why they keep fucking dying on me. First 2 kinda give a wheezy rattle if I shake them, suggesting summat has come loose (how the fuck does that happen in less than 6 months, I don't juggle the bloody things), 3rd one is just dead (the back where the cable goes stinks of burn though). Why ? Is it cos my room is freezing cold at night, and I've got a shite sash window that lets in the damp ? If so, what the feck do I do, there's bugger all I can do about the temp (can't afford heat on all night, even if the ceilings weren't too high for it to make a blind bit of difference). How do you insulate a bloody hard disk ? I mean that's all I can think of, the temperature, unless I give off some HDD-killing electromagnetic energy or summat. Not even the same make, 2 were Western Digital (and the tiny one I'm running off now is WD, and about 5 years old) and one was a seagate. How about external ones, are they any more reliable ? Sould I get a tiny, fast internal one for my O/S (cos the ones I bought last year were all big, 120-160 gig+, does that cause problems ?), and a huge external USB one for storage ?

ive never had one go bad tbh ..... but seagate and wd r the best makes im sure wot speeds r they ment 2 run at.... some go real fast

hi boojum

cant see it been cold or damp myself

me and a mate used to have a recording studio in a old police cell nothing ever went wrong with them in there (we had two pcs in there with a couple of drives in each)of course it had been damp proofed etc but it still got cold in there real cold to be honest i would sit at the mixer with a wooly hat on it was so cold

weird one this

peppi

Hmmm, looks like I've just been REALLY unlucky with dodgy harware.

Story of my life, I was born with dodgy hardware

Oh well, moral of this story is KEEP THE FECKIN RECEIPT

Should have learned after the 1st time

same here matey

if anything goes wrong in this house you can count on not finding the receipt

for sure

peppi

nah it sounds more like your power is spiking, try plugging the new drive into a different power plug on the loom

it's not your room m8, pcs are used in all sorts of extremes, warehouses and everything, temp controlled food places and such

never had hard disc failure in 7 years on the net, not wishing it on myself tho

Keep the receipt, but thats another story

always plug ur power supply direct into the wall and avoid multi plugs

That's why I thought it may be cold/damp related, cos prior to the hiatus in my life that saw me end up here, I'd never had a HDD fail either. But what dohped said could tally in with it, cos none of this happened before I bought my current base unit (which admittedly was cheapo from maplin )



Ah, it's on a multi plug too cos I've only got 2 plug sockets, none anywhere near my puter. Guess I'd best rearrange my room.

Bugger.

Which means tidying up.

Bugger and arse.

Cheers all for the advice

always plug ur power suply direct into the wall avoid multi plugs

if you can you wanna get one of those main spike plug things (cant remember the proper name for it )

peppi

In the many years I been fixing mates' PCs, I only ever came across 1 hard drive failure before, and that was the splindle...

As long as you keep your PC within operating temperature limits ( something like -5c to 50c) your bits should be ok...

I'd look to Power Surges, Static Buildup or Component failure for your answers, as the likelihood of you having so many failed HD without reason is not v high...

Surge-protector

The HDD I got in now occasionally locks up, there's an audible CLICK from the HDD, then everything goes quiet and the PC freezes up & needs to be turned off & restarted. Does that sound like a 'surge' or spike or whatever ?

sounds like a graphics issue...... but then again

Can of worms.. Been pissing about with my gfx card(s) for weeks, I got an inno geforce 6600 AGP that stopped working on anythinghigher than 640x480 resolution, swapped back to my old FX5200, tried the inno again today & it's working fine now.


I HATE COMPUTERS.

no point m8 they cant feel it, you can shout at them tho, threatening them works too

switch the pc off m8, crack the side off and swap the power plug at the back of the hard drive, there are plenty of spares.

the hdd shouldn't click, maybe check the ribbon cable too, and the jumper on the drive, make sure it is on cable select and that it is plugged into the plug at the end of the ribbon cable not the one 4 inches down the ribbon.

check the other end of the ribbon where it connects to the board

maybe check all the plugs while your there to be sure and blow all the shit out, just for the fun

not the plugs on the wall, the power supply is pretty capable of coping with power spikes from the wall, i'm thinking that the power plug connected to the back of the hdd has a dodgy wire in it

just looked at the topic tite and, fort it sed summut else
btw.. thats not the reson why i cliked on it ...


ill get back in my paper bag! ninja

Quote:

Unfortunately, from the symptoms it's difficult to say whether it's normal behaviour or a sign of imminent failure.

The most ominous clicking noises are loud clicks that occur when the computer is first switched on. In this case, the heads are searching the platter(s) until they hit the stops, and this is indeed a symptom of internal damage and imminent terminal failure. The next most ominous noises are scraping sounds that occur when the drive attempts to access particular areas of the platter(s). These noises usually indicate that there is damage to those areas of the platter(s) that have probably been caused by crashing of the search heads, and the damage will spread rapidly to other areas and therefore occur more often.

Fortunately, there is another kind of periodic clicking that is normal, which is caused by a process called thermal recalibration. The hard drive heats up as soon as the computer is turned on. It's bimetallic construction is designed (like a thermocouple) to compensate for any expansion of its components, but internal adjustments usually still have to be made to make sure that the read/write heads are in precisely the correct position over the platter(s). Normal clicking sounds are issued by the drive when it makes these adjustments. The noise is more obvious with some makes and/or models of drive than with others. Drives manufactured during the early to mid-1990s have to perform this recalibration frequently as the drive heats up. The process takes long enough to interrupt the real-time recording of sound or video streams, hence the later incorporation of data buffers on AV-rate drives that buffer that data stream during the thermal recalibration so that it can run smoothly during the interruptions. To some extent even the most modern servo drives still have to perform thermal recalibration. Occasional recalibration is normal, but if it is excessive, this is probably an indication of the imminent terminal failure of the drive.

Modern drives have data buffers that compensate for any interruption of reading and writing activities, therefore, if there is freezing, it is likely to be a faulty drive that requires its data to be backed up before it dies.

Hard disk drives dating from around 1995 are monitored by what is called SMART diagnostic software, which is activated at system start-up by the BIOS setup program. If it is enabled by a setting in the BIOS, it should issue a warning of imminent drive failure, so you should make sure that it is enabled.

Overheating could be the cause of the problem. - To make sure that such a drive isn't overheating, you should make sure that the drive is mounted in the case so that there is enough space around the top and the bottom of the drive to allow for the free flow of air. Moreover, a drive installed with its circuit board (on the bottom of the drive) in close proximity to part of the case, or another drive, can overheat.

This page may help you

Cheers man

Think I'll leave it til tomorrow (learned a long time ago not to feck about with my PC while drinking, frying a mobo cos I forgot it was only on standby was bad, getting angry and chucking the base unit at the wall was worse specially since it was still attached to the monitor )

A long shot here Boojum but have you thought about contacting the manufacter of the HDD? Some, not all, have a 5yr warranty period and will replace dodgy HDD's. If you type the part number into google it should come up with the age of the HDD.

I've heard magnets can screw things up but perhaps it would be worth replacing the power supply?

That's how I got my last drive replaced. I didn't need a receipt - all done online apart from actually posting the broken drive (they were pretty fussy about how it was packed though )

Doesnt really sound too healthy... maybe run a SMART test on the drive at bootup ? Not had a drive fail on me yet but deal with plenty at work...

For the price of 180gig etc drives nowadays I would buy 2, and use software mirroring for peace of mind. Window will mirror to a 2nd drive (if its identical in size or bigger) if you make it a dynamic disk, then follow the wizard... shout if your interested and one night when Im not stoned I'll write some notes.

Theres a small CPU overhead with software mirroring but hardly worth worring about.

A mirror, if you didnt know, is either a raid controller or windows writing a duplicate copy of the data as its wrote to 1 drive, onto another. If one drive dies (as you seem to be killing em quite often ! hehe) you can swap the master/slave pins on the drive and boot the 2nd disk... making sure you never lose all your mp3s (and porn prolly !) again