Hard drive life

[Keeper]

I have been trying to get the best clocks on my systems for several months now, ever since joining this Board. But I seem to be going through my share of harddrives.

What is the life of an overclocked HD?

I just lost a ultra 9 80 gig maxtor that was only 4 months old, it seems since I started overclocking RMA is a regular thing.

Is this just a symptom of the sickness or am I doing something wrong?

[Smizack]

I haven't really been able to see a link in what's good vs. what's bad. I think it's pretty much all an opinion/luck issue. I don't like WD's but there are people who swear by them.
Right now I've got a Segate barracuda wich I really like, and an IBM deskstar.
But I've killed every Western Digital I've ever owned wich is about 10 of them. And 1 IBM wich is damaged but still kicking.

I think you could be pushing it too hard or it's just bad luck.

[Tweaked!]

I've been having really good luck with Maxtor hdds (knocks on wood for running mouth), own four of them and not an issue yet. Of course I'm not a truly xtreme o/cer either;)

[Keeper]

I have givin up on WD, and lost a couple of IBM,s, this is my first Maxtor to go down, maybe I should turn these things off once in a while.

[felix88]

i've never had a drive of any brand die. i've owned a lot of IBMs too. although, my FSB has never been as far out of spec as yours. but a 39MHz PCI shouldn't be that bad.

have you checked your 5v and 12v rails? too high or too low could also be causing problems.

[TheDude]

Maxtor has been best for me (except the old fireballs) and WD worst...also good luck with Seagates.

[Tex]

Originally posted by Keeper
I have been trying to get the best clocks on my systems for several months now, ever since joining this Board. But I seem to be going through my share of harddrives.

What is the life of an overclocked HD?

I just lost a ultra 9 80 gig maxtor that was only 4 months old, it seems since I started overclocking RMA is a regular thing.

Is this just a symptom of the sickness or am I doing something wrong?

Are you getting errors or do they die completely? Have you tried a low-level ? Just curious... Hows your PSU's holding up? If they get good voltage and don't overheat etc... I don't see why an OC would kill them. scarmble their noogies yes. Kill them though?? How?

I don't OC to the point you guys do but I have not lost a ide in a year or so anyway and I have like 7 in the house here on my network right now and the Quantoms I bought back with my kt7a years ago and still purr along...

Tex

[Keeper]

This one died without warning. As a rule they give notice with errors, head noise, heat etc. TP550 PSU rails are not perfect but good. Low level failed 2 of three, sounded like hell on recal and gave an unknown error code. I tried to recover some of the data but no way.

I guess I got a weak one.

[felix88]

Keeper, maybe you could look into an Nforce2 motherboard. you can lock your PCI devices into spec with these boards, so you wouldn't have this problem anymore.

[Tex]

Realize I only ask these questions to help..... Are they away from each other? As in not right on top where they heat each other? have you tried added HD cooling?

And they are not near a cdrom drive either right? So many of the stupid fast new cdroms vibrate when they spin up so bad they can cause HD's installed nearby to also vibrate and cause damage to the disk surface etc..

I just don't see where a OC can cause physical damage in and of itself. Excessive heat ? Yep. Vibration? Yep. But a OC should only scramble a filesystem.

Tried low-leveling ever on a differant non OC'd box or anything? Thats probably silly considering you say it makes grinding noises but.... I had a PSU that was causing my drives to make clucking noises as it wasn't holding the 12 volt strong enough and I think it was dropping the fricking heads. I had several bad spots that I could not even format out at the OS level. A low-level and a new psu cured my woes...

Best of Luck always !

Tex

[TheDude]

Good questions Tex....I lost an ibm recently...so hot you could have fried an egg on it...it's replacement has a fan behind it that blows over and under it...stays nice and cool now.

[Keeper]

I use a full Antec tower, fan on the HD's in the lowest cage. Case temp have never seen 30C, my 12v stays at 11.74 and my 5v 4.92 under full load using MBM. When my new drive gets here I will put one at the top of the cage, and one at the bottom. They were close, my cage will hold four drives.

And ya, I tried it on another box, its dead; no question about that. Sometimes it will be found, but thats it.

And yes, I want an Nforce2. I am waiting on the the revised one and hoping it comes with onboard RAID.

[Tex]

My older 600 watt PSU would drop the 12 volt down below 11.71 but only when all the drives (had 4 in it) were trying to first spin up or when I did heavy disk access. Otherwise it was fine generally speaking.

But you could hear them slow down and and "clunk" is the only way I can describe the noise. Same sound as if I unplug the power cord from the psu when it was running. I always thought it was a drive failing ... I was wrong and a new psu that holds the 12volt better cured it.

btw... I know this is off topic sort of but... I nabbed a 600 watt Robanton psu off ebay. Brand new for 40 bucks and its maybe the best non PC Power&Cooling psu I have ever owned and in 20 years of doing this Ihave built a few thousand computers... And I generally use nice psu's for my personal computers also.

A quick way I use to get a idea of how good a psu is .... check the amps on the 3 volt line. The robanton is 40amps on the 3 volt line. Thats pretty strong. Not sure I have seen many PC PSU's with more amps on the 3 volt. I have not been able to get it to go below 5 volts yet on any of my boxs but I sure don't stress it like you serious OC guys do yours either...

Best of Luck to Ya !!

Tex

[Keeper]

Thanks Tex, I will have do do some shopping on e-bay.

[Smizack]

Good point tex. In the old days I could care less, but recently I've been paying more attention to hd cooling.

[Tex]

Originally posted by Smizack
Good point tex. In the old days I could care less, but recently I've been paying more attention to hd cooling.

Be very very careful using the addon hardisk coolers available now with fans on the bottom or mounting other fans too close to the drives.

Feel the drive itself. If you feel any and I mean ANY vibration on that drive you are killing it. many of these coolers have fans that are shaking the drive. Instaed of helping they are wiping them out.

The heads are gliding on thousands of an inch of air seperating them from the surface of the drives.

Sort of the equivalent of a boeing 747 flying around the world 100 times a minutes and doing it 1/8 of an inch off the ground and never touching.

I have seen a couple big buck aluminum cases that were featherweight ... sweet huh??? And when the cdroms spun up etc.. you could feel the case shaking with your hands on the outside. Man.. those heads are just chattering and pounding the crap out of the disk surface when this happens guys.

I got several old steel towers that weigh a ton with marginal cooling even and I have not lost a drive on my own boxs in a couple years anyway. And I have like a dozen ide's spining here as I speak. Maybe just a coincidense..... but I think not.

I gotta grimace when you see that one guy is just craoking a drive every month or so and the rest of us run years and never croak one.... It's a sign guys. Your not just unlucky... The environment in that case is killing the.

Tex