DIYEFI.org Forum

Well, a week or so back, Dave started the club. Little did I know that I would be joining shortly afterwards.

Today my laptop disk died whilst sitting still next to me on my desk not being used. 100% cpu all of a sudden and inability to launch new binaries were the giveaways. I ran a comprehensive backup on sunday night and only did some freeems stuff since then, nothing I can't do again. No major loss for me this time. I may get the few files that I would want to get out of it yet. I haven't tried. The last 2 disks I had die cost me zero files. I got lucky both times. This time I was prepared well.

If you haven't backed up recently, do so now!

My last laptop disk was fujitsu and lasted 11 months of heavy duty fred use. This one was seagate and lasted 15 of heavy duty fred use. The one I'm typing from has win xp pro on it and is hitachi, we could create a pool on it if you like, they have a 5 year warranty though, so perhaps 18 months?

Time to read though those threads, then dishes, then bed.

1. DaveBMW
2. Fred

Any other club members?

Fred.

Hey don't talk that way, you'll jinks me. I haven't had a hdd crash yet, right now I typically run 3 PC 24 - 7. The one I do KICAD stuff on is my DVR and runs fairly hard most of the day. So not a club member yet, and I hope I don't become a member.

I back up by posting to SF, so thanks for that option Fred.

Dude HDD failure is not an IF, it is a WHEN. Please realise that and at the very least back up your digital pics of your kids etc. A mate of mine just lost 4 years of kiddy pics like that...

Fred.

Yep I have just bought 3 WD5000AVVS drives to run in RAID 5 on my server. I'm a little nervous that the drive that is in there is about 4 months older than the one that died so I hope they turn up soon! I have all the data on DVD's but it so time consuming to dump it all back on there!
I cant wait to have 1TB of raid 5 craziness!

My summary of HDD's so far:

Fujitsu ARRRRGGHHH!
Maxtor
Seagate
Western Digital
Hitachi laptop drives
Toshiba laptop drives
WD Laptop drives

Oh yes and welcome to the club Fred

Did they have S.M.A.R.T capability?

shameem wrote:Did they have S.M.A.R.T capability?

Yes they all had smart capability, but that is a load of crap anyway its nothing more than a simple logging facility, there is nothing in there to predict when the motor controller IC de-solders itself, or when the ribbon cable from the controller to head gets open circuits or as in most cases the head amp chip on the head arm dies.
if you want to know how long the drive has been powered for or how many spin up and down cycles it has performed you are set. But the worth of this data is nothing more than a gimmick (IMO).
When a drive is old it gets noisy, if it gets hot it's more likely to suffer failure if you drop it, then you should be more careful. any of these conditions are met and you need to replace ASAP.

The fact of the matter is any drive can fail at any time for any reason, the best option and the only real solution is to reduce the risk by either regular periodic backups or a RAID array with either Mirror or Parity. I chose RAID 5 as you only lose 33% of your drive capacity as opposed to 50% with 1 or 01.

Good news : hdd is fine
Bad news : mother board or something in the thing is shagged.

RIP the debian laptop from hell. last uptime 135 days terminated by accidental suspend to disk never to be woken again.

3 years of fred use and abuse was too much for it. dead usb controller, dead keyboard, dead screen, worn through paint, cracked housing, dead power adapter, 2 dead disks, and who knows what else :-) it worked hard and died at a ripe old age.

Thing is, EEE != serial compat. I need a server box, and a cheap one. maybe an eee box ? or some other tiny pc that can drive a decent monitor

hell, id consider a mac cube thingy?

Any suggestions?

Fred.