VanLUG Email Archive
>I had a WD AC23200L hard drive go bad on me yesterday. About the middle
I've had an AC34000L running 24/7 for about 8 months now, with no
significant problems - Linux, DOS, and (ugh!) Windoze...
>When I turned on the power yesterday I heard some horrible clicking and
>clunking noises coming from the drive, then the PC couldn't find it. I
The only thing I found was that my system's power-on reset appears to
be too short for the drive - this sometimes resulted in the noises you
heard. Fortunately, I never experienced any data corruption because of
this. I've just made it a habit to hold the reset switch in for about
a second after power-up.
>The reason I'm posting is to find out if my experiences are typical.
>I have 3 WD hard drives and now two of them have had to be replaced
>over the last two years. Does Western Digital really suck? Or is
>it all IDE hard drives?
Nope, I have a couple of old Maxtors which are happily running on
an old 386 at the office - I'm using it as an internal news server and
(eventually) dial-up gateway....high speed is not an issue. Of course,
it's running Linux..... :-)
OTOH, I've had some bad experiences with Samsung drives, at least the
older ones - they didn't like being mounted vertically.....
I also have an IBM SCSI running in another Linux box at the office - it
didn't like spinning up unless it was physically hot ! However, it's been
running for about a year now non-stop, and seems to have "fixed" itself -
probably just a sticky bearing.....
>*Please* don't flame me over the IDE/SCSI issue ;^) My *next* PC *will*
>be all SCSI, don't worry. I've had enough of this drive dying crap!
I don't think it's a question of "IDE vs. SCSI"....most failures tend to
be of a mechanical nature (someone please correct me if I'm wrong !), the
data interface isn't really an issue....
Just had a thought....are your drives running hot ? Maybe check the
air flow around them...
**************************************************************************
* Geoff L. Kennedy ** Located on the WEsT Coast of *
* "Kennedy's Space Centre" 8-) ** Beautiful British Columbia ! *
* (pun definitely intended !!) ** Coquitlam, BC, CANADA *
**************************************************************************
* E-mail:
(NOTE: Only ONE "n" !) *
**************************************************************************
** Not affiliated with KSC in Florida, USA (though I'd like to be....!) **
**************************************************************************