ka-chnk… k-chnk… k-chnk…. rrrrrRRRRrrrrr…. rrrrRRRrrrr… …. hweeeeEEEEeeee… TOC…. k-chnk….
(11 votes, average: 3.91 out of 5)
Loading...If the weird title of this post seems strangely familiar to you, even though you wonder how, then it is possible you’ve already had a dying hard disk inside your computer 
It seems that two of my hard drives have been slowly dying since a week, and today is their final goodbye 
Paranoid as I am, I’ve got all their contents backed up, and I received yesterday a new WD Caviar Green 32 MB 1.5 TB SATA drive along with a nice dual IDE+SATA controller card 
Extremely useful advice : if you’re running windowsXP or lower as an OS (recent macs and linux aren’t concerned), do NOT buy the new disks with a 64 MB cache, they contain new internals only partially compatible with your OS, you’d better stick to 32 MB disks even at the cost of the loss of a small potential performance gain. More info here – the crucial info is on page 2.
All that to say , I’ve unplugged every bloody IDE disk from my tower until I have time to plug back the last functional one and install my newest disk, give me one more hour and today’s posts will be published ^^
If I’d know that your hard disks were dying I would of recommeded that you get Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB hard disks as there the dogs bollocks. Fastest hard drives available, quiet, smooth and reliable like nothing else. Not sure what Western Digital’s are like but its your choose man. Also would of said have a look at Seagate Barracuda range as they are also good. Anyway best luck & hope the problems sorted soon and your back up to full hentai power.
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When will you all realize that S.M.A.R.T. is not a luxury since 14 years it exists it saved me a lot of annoyances about possible data loss but im sure no one activates it in the bios or has a background program or at least a tester to look at it from time to time
get one its not a joke its extremely helpful and better than hoping to hear when it will go down could like a friend of mine cost you 980 euro to get the data otherwise for an old 2 gb disk .
of course it also works to have raid or a backup running in parallel but its easier to know before you have to take off all your hard disks and so on . Only ,im hoping, a helpful tip especially that now programs like crystal disk info and such are free
HOLY MOLLY! 1.5 GB?! WOW!
Seriously, don’t you mean TB? :3
Aaaargh lol, and I thought I had read my post twice ^^;;
Yeah, TB, lol, thanks for the notice
About smart, I don’t know at all if that is activated, no idea… What interest does it offer, say ?
What about tape backup? The format’s archaic and old, to be sure, but some off-site back-up may come in handy.
I’m sorry, are you running your server as a WINDOWS server? O.O May I inquire why?
I haven’t had a dying harddrive since the 90s, but I automatically figured that that’s what the title was a reference to. Tough times man.
ahh the most devistationg noise to hear from a computer, my other comps 500gb has been on and off for a while now. Im not a fan of the green drives tho, apparently they only run at 5400rpm so for now i stich with the 1tb drives.
Thank you for the info man.
Seriously, I’m going to check my HD, I don’t want lose it.
BTW: anything new of Kemonono? =^_^=
Lucky you. I saw a Maxtor IDE 40GB and Samsung SATA 160GB to die without a groan (not at same time of course). It only turn off at night and next day when turn on: “no disk” (the HD didn’t appear in the BIOS). I have two nice brick paperweights on my desk. According to internet comments, there are more than a few HD (any brand) that fail in a few months with or without SMART warning. I want to buy a 500GB HD and i am crossing my fingers…
Hahaha, jeez I’ve never had a dying harddisk, I only had one that keeps going up and down in rpm, like a car’s engine that has one cylinder unbalanced, the sound in rpm goes up and down, up and down. It’s a 250 Hitachi Deskstar, and amazingly it’s still working. But now I’ve 4x2TB WD Caviar Black, 2 Stripped, backed up to the other 2. Oops 64mb cache lol, but I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate and there isn’t any problem on it, (knock on woodx3)
But I know why you got 1.5 instead of getting 2TB because that extra 500GB doubles in price.
I remember reading about the new Advanced Format in some tech trade article, and Western Digital claimed that the drives would work fine with XP, depending upon case. If I recall correctly, transitioning from your old hard drive to the new AF drive required you to run the WDC installation software before performing a drive to drive copy, if you were directly copying files and partitions for example. As an external drive, like a MyBook with its own controller, you don’t necessarily need to do anything. For instance, you can use XP with RAID to assign 4k sectors. And although there is a chance that data corruption may occur using AF with XP, it really depends more upon the disk controller and its firmware, and how well it interpolates commands from the OS. Most external AF drives with enclosures direct from the manufacturer, should specify if XP or older compatible, since the prototypes will be tested before being put on the market. Internal drives can end up being hit or miss since you can’t guarantee compatability with all motherboard controller chipsets supporting the new AF, let alone the operating system. This is one of the reasons why manufacturers such as Hitachi have agreed to the new standard, but have yet to make the drives publicly available. The downside, complaints and returns, could outweigh the benefits at the present point in time.
about smart its a Self Monitoring Analysys who verifies the most important parts like how it spins up the reading times the temperature and such and compares it with the stocked values in HD bios if it starts to deteriorate too much it warns beforehand of a coming drive failure and after using it for 10 years with of course the first ones being a little over prudent:) it works quite fine since ata 130 and very good with sata drives as for the green caviars they run at 5400 to 7200 depending on the load needed.http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608&lang=en for those needing official proof:)
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=608&lang=en
Damn you! ;p
The day I read this my laptop’s drive starts making the same noise! I probably won’t be able to fix it until monday.
WD is the the best^^ and caviar green seriers is the best of WD, they also are low energy consumption low heat emission, and oft are not shitty like seagate or maxtor, that actually bough part of the seagate industry.