HDD Discussion

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

I am bouilding a nice gaming system for a friend. I ordered a WD Raptor with 74gig as System an gaming drive, and a 160gb samsung sata2 for the data... The reason for the wd drive is the amazingly fast data delivery, which will make a differenz in felt performance for a long time, compared with an to expensive GPU or CPu, which will be mainstream after few months.
I hope that those raptors will be of the SCSI quality i expect from them and stated in the datasheet, but for sure i will cool it active.
10.000rpm aren`t very new, the 74gb arre an very conservative desing and in SCSI drives this is a coomon drive konfiguration.

Tho thos maxtors i think, my problems with those Dimaond max 9 drives could be for sure an combination of PSu and hdd problem. I`ve read an article, whos stated that some of the early Dimaond max 9 motor interface chips are running realy hot. If an not so decent psu will increase the 12v line those drives will burn like my one. The other problems could be due bad packagin of one of the bigger online reseller in Germany (only the usual plastic case, some air filed plastik bags. No seriouse shock protection....)
before i had those problems i recomended maxtor to a lot of people, as they were fast not that loud an cheap. But for sure, all maxtors are runing realy hot (the chips) compared with samsungs. So in my opinion the important thing on hdd`s is cooling and again cooling. If you hold your drive below or at 45 to 50°c then i think maxtor an samsung are good hdds. But if i can choose, i will bay the samsung in any case. The good thing on maxtor is, that they stated 24/7 duty will not a problem for their drives.

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion



here is an example of how we get our drives here. the plastic cases i like. seagate were coming like that but the latest drives are back to the antistatic bags only like all other drives.

considering the amount of drives i receive in bags, it is suprisingly rare that i receive a drive which immediately tests with errors. therefore i wonder whether shock during transit is so much a problem. i am yet to receive a drive with obvious serious mechanical damage though.

anyway i would prefer to receive drives in the "SeaShell" packaging though because not only is it reassuring but it is useful to reuse.

regarding hdd cooling, i am also convinced of it's importance, especially in servers. i am testing the seagate 7200.9s at the moment to see if this noise is relative to temperature. they are quite hot drives. unfortunately i have seen even well cooled drives fail early so it is not a total solution.

power supply might be important also. on occasion i have seen unreasonable repeated hdd failure to be cured by replacing the psu with a more powerful and quality one along with replacing the hdd with a new one. whether this is just coincidence i dont know. whether it related to the watts of the psu and/or the quality of the power supplied i dont know either.

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

Yes, this bags and Boxes ar the sime like here, but probably they are surounded with any kind of foam or plastic chips.
In any way, i RMA`d some hdd`s direcktly to maxtor and to WD. In both cases, they statet that a HDD which will arive without any foam they will send back witout repair. They even said, that air filled plastic bags are unsave and are voiding waranty repair too. So who is wrong in that business? The HDD manufaturers or those careless seller? with that in mind, i am sure, that many hdd failures will be due to bad handling during transport. The packing, i`ve recived from WD and maxtor are both very very sophisticated. So i think they know, what bad handling will kost them in waranty servicing.

Ok, cooling can`t make bad hdd to good ones for shure. But if you read the datasheets of all comon hdd makers, then the temperature vs MTBF rating are leaving no doubt in htat way, that heat will kill disk. E.g. the mentioned maxtor drives with hot running driver chip will probably not burn that fast.

And regarding power supplies, i think one of the important thing is, that the 12v line is no´t to high, as IMHO all hdd chips are linear voltage regulators and can`t stand mucht heat (in most cases smt units).
In my experiences, in all cases wen a crapy PSu did, the hdd was always fried On the other hand CDrom units will often survive. I think that this is due to the larger voltage regulators (ive seen some common 78xx types) wich can sustain more heat.

[spaced<->out]

Re: DFI Lanparty 925X-T2 Motherboard

what is common failure mode of hdds due to poor power regulation?

I had an HDD issue which, on the evidence, may have been power related. I didn't exactly have a failure, but it was certainly a bit of weirdness that was very frustrating to troubleshoot.

I have two 200GB Seagate SATA drives: Barracuda 7200.7 (ST3200822AS) and Barracuda 7200.8 (ST3200826AS), set up as a RAID1 Mirror array using the Promise RAID controller onboard my ASUS motherboard. I set this up early this year (January) when I bought the 7200.8 drive (I had owned the 7200.7 for six or so months at this stage).

It ran fine through February, then in early March I started to get an erratic problem which seemed to be the drives running slow. When it was happening, the symptoms were that I'd hear unusual noises that seemed to come from one or both of the drives: a little electronic chirp (a midtone kind of "bip") and then the sound of the drive spinning up. This would happen repeatedly, usually at intervals of 10-20sec or so, but it could vary. While this was happening, what I'd see while using the computer was data access (read or write) become slow, sometimes excessively so - in particular causing Windows to take much longer to start up. It was very inconsistent though - sometimes I'd boot the PC and everything would run fine (no chirping and fast data read), other times I would be hearing bip...whirr...bip...whirr... immediately after POST, and have to wait a good few minutes just for Windows to load. Note though that for the most part, the PC still ran stable even when it was acting slow (a couple of times I did get errors reported by DSKCHK or failures installing my video drivers).

Unfortunately with the drives hooked up to the RAID controller, the SMART status is 'hidden' from most applications so I wasn't able to test their health in any great depth (I can interrogate the RAID controller for the SMART status of the drives but it only reports "functional", which is reassuring but not really helpful).

Eventually as I was trying various troubleshooting things I changed the way the power was connected up, and it seems to have helped. The kicker in this mystery may be that I acquired a 'new' (secondhand) video card at the end of February - I went from a GeForce4 4400Ti to GeForce 6800GT. The 6800GT requires a molex plug from the PSU for additional power. Now, my PSU only has molex connectors on two cables: I've heard all about the recommendation of not "sharing" connections between components like this, but I can't really maintain that with just two cables worth of molex connectors to distribute between all my devices. So initially, I connected the graphics card and the hard drives on the one 'line' (with my optical drives etc on the other); it seemed to run fine but after a while I was noticing the slowdown in data read and "singing" drives occurring fairly frequently.

I've since changed it so that my graphics card and hard drives are each on seperate leads, with my remaining devices distributed between them following a recommendation from another forum, and the good news is that it seems to have stopped the problem occurring. Around the same time I'd contacted Seagate and Promise technical support to ask what could be going on, and the Seagate tech basically confirmed that it could have been a power issue and that I may have solved it by reconnecting things (Promise have not replied). I've not had a recurrence of the problem in the two weeks since so it's looking like the power could well have been it...

[willawake]

Re: HDD Discussion

I would be hearing bip...whirr...bip...whirr... immediately after POST,

i had that on my office pc immediately after adding a third seagate hdd which was new and had passed tests fully on another pc. I changed the psu to a higher wattage and the problem dissapeared.

[Galvanized]

Re: HDD Discussion

Interesting thread. After reading threads like this, low flow fans were installed to service all 4 HDDs in the current build.
Saw this earlyer, not my pic so I'm not sure how long it will remain linked.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y12...z/P1010001.jpg The 5V serves the logic board and I was under the impression that voltage spikes could/would kill it. Something hit this HDD.

You may know it allready but Hitachi has MP3 sound files linked in the diagnotics section at thier homepage. iirc about 10 files of different sounds failing HDDs make.

I use to PM with this fella. http://www.theflyingpenguin.com/ He does comp repair from his self owned shop. Go to his Blog, scroll down to 9/05. He lost several HDDs in his main rig due to 5V spikes. I encouraged him to open his antec PSU on a guess. Beginner's luck on my part. *shrugs*

[Rainbow]

Re: HDD Discussion

Saw this earlyer, not my pic so I'm not sure how long it will remain linked.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y12...z/P1010001.jpg The 5V serves the logic board and I was under the impression that voltage spikes could/would kill it. Something hit this HDD.

That's Maxtor - some of them died like that (already seen at least 3 photos). I guess it's design problem.

[Rainbow]

Re: HDD Discussion

http://images.google.com/images?q=maxtor+burnt

[Tom41]

Re: HDD Discussion

In this country we tend to get hard disks in cardboard boxes, containing polystyrene or foam rubber to absorb any shock. The drive itself is usually in an antistatic bag inside the box, and some drives come with their own IDE/SCSI cables.

Not so long ago, I got a Quantum hard disk which seemed to be faulty. As an IDE 'master' the drive worked perfectly, but put the jumper on 'slave' and it constantly made a rattling noise (like the heads were moving back and forth constantly). After a couple of days running in my PC, Scandisk found a ton of bad sectors. Every day I would run Scandisk again, and it would pick up more bad sectors. Eventually the boot sector of the drive became damaged, rendering the drive unusable. Nothing for it but to throw away the drive - thankfully I got it second hand, for cheap

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

http://images.google.com/images?q=maxtor+burnt

this was exacklty the same with my my 80gb Maxtor drive. And as i stated above, i`ve read that maxtor has used some sensitiv chips, which are prone to that failure. The PSu, of course no quality unit, had no bulged or bad caps inside. But ok, the AMD Athlon TB 1000 could be a bit to mutch load for that yuankee unit. I put it out of service any way.
Since them, i had no more prolbems with Maxtors.

[Zorro]

Re: HDD Discussion

The reason for the wd drive is the amazingly fast data delivery, which will make a differenz in felt performance for a long time, compared with an to expensive GPU or CPu, which will be mainstream after few months.

What? A fast hard drive is useless are far as frame rates are concerned. You'll get faster level loads, and that's it. I have a 74GB Raptor, and against my other 7200RPM IDE drives, the extra few seconds it saves when loading games aren't missed when I'm using IDE and a good video card.

If you hold your drive below or at 45 to 50°c then i think maxtor an samsung are good hdds.

Anything above 38°C is bad. See attached at full load.

[tiresias]

Re: HDD Discussion

What? A fast hard drive is useless are far as frame rates are concerned. You'll get faster level loads, and that's it. I have a 74GB Raptor, and against my other 7200RPM IDE drives, the extra few seconds it saves when loading games aren't missed when I'm using IDE and a good video card.

I doubt he was referring to frame rates in 3D games - obviously a hard disk will make no difference whatsoever - unless you're running deep into virtual memory, in which case any disk will be atrociously "slow".

Still, the WD Raptor drives are indeed very fast when loading many small files (OS, office apps or games), due to their extremely low access time. Certainly if you're dealing with long sequential reads on large files (video encoding or editing, for example), a RAID 0 setup of standard 7200rpm drives will be far faster than a single Raptor.

[Zorro]

Re: HDD Discussion

Still, the WD Raptor drives are indeed very fast when loading many small files (OS, office apps or games), due to their extremely low access time. Certainly if you're dealing with long sequential reads on large files (video encoding or editing, for example), a RAID 0 setup of standard 7200rpm drives will be far faster than a single Raptor.

My Hitachi 7200rpm IDE drive comes within 5MB/s of my Raptor. The SATA-1 Raptors are an over-hyped bandwagon. SATA-II on the otherhand, my Hitachi can't hold a candle to it.

[gonzo0815]

Re: HDD Discussion

well sure, a raptor wouldn`t improve 3d framrates, for that i think a good grafix card will do the trik. But for working like doing some emails, office mp3 usw. and for switching between e.g firebird with 30+ tabs, some pdf and copying 20gigs from hd 1 to hd2 you will feel , or at least i feal a big perforamce hit from the raptor drive. Not to mention the fast boot up which is amazingly fast with a single raptor. Even the loading of levels in games like Doom3, BF etc. will be very very fast; for that nor 4gb of ram nor a high end sli gfx system will do anything for you better than a fast single HDD.
In my opinion, this kind of performance will be far more appreciated as some 100+ fps or some FSAA 8+.
In about 3-6 month any VGA will be very slow and outdated, so why buying some overpriced high end gfx?. Same is for cpu power, there are always a point where you won`t get mutch value foryour bucks.
A HDD with 10000rpm will probably in a few years a very fast pice of hw.
And of course, the cooler the better, but i think all below 50°c will still let the disk pass the 3 or 5 year warranty period.

[tiresias]

Re: HDD Discussion

My Hitachi 7200rpm IDE drive comes within 5MB/s of my Raptor. The SATA-1 Raptors are an over-hyped bandwagon.

I disagree there - sequential read speed (in MB/s) isn't the Raptor's strong point, as I said - it's the access time (usually expressed in milliseconds). Take a look at the specs, you'll see it really is indeed very fast in that respect.

I'm not saying the WD Raptor is a good deal in most situations, but it definitely does have its niche in which it performs very well.

[Zorro]

Re: HDD Discussion

Take a look at the specs, you'll see it really is indeed very fast in that respect.

Actually, it's not that fast. Those specs are marketing hype capitalizing on theoretical maximums. I have actual results, see attached. My Hitachi is running on an Epox 8RDA3+Pro with an 3300+ Sempron. The Raptor is on an Abit AN7 with a 3200+ AthlonXP. And, in this review:

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q1...d/index.x?pg=3

...you'll see the Raptor has an access time of 8.1ms, better than the access times on my AN7, but still slower than my Hitachi by 2.1ms.

Also, take note that even though my Hitachi has a much faster access time, the Sequential Read/Write of the Raptor is better, and gives it the extra 5MB/s I'd mentioned earlier... so, your information is backwards from all angles.

[tiresias]

Re: HDD Discussion

Actually, it's not that fast. Those specs are marketing hype capitalizing on theoretical maximums. I have actual results, see attached.

I don't want to get stuck on this issue too long - but I really have to disagree with you on that point.

Here, for example, http://tweakers.net/benchdb/test/31 you can see the access times as measured for hundreds of hard disks on various controllers, from the fastest SCSI drives to the most basic IDE disks. See where the WD Raptor stands, compared to the 7200rpm ATA drives (including Hitachi's models) - it really is considerably faster.

[Zorro]

Re: HDD Discussion

But for working like doing some emails, office mp3 usw. and for switching between e.g firebird with 30+ tabs, some pdf and copying 20gigs from hd 1 to hd2 you will feel

You said you were building a "gaming system." What you've just described is a faster than average SOHO system.

Even the loading of levels in games like Doom3, BF etc. will be very very fast; for that nor 4gb of ram nor a high end sli gfx system will do anything for you better than a fast single HDD.

I run Doom3 on my Raptor, and like I said before... it saves all of a few seconds in load up time. You're placing an inordinate amount of importance on 5 second level loads, versus 45 minutes of smooth game play.

In my opinion, this kind of performance will be far more appreciated as some 100+ fps or some FSAA 8+.

Good lord, man... See my above comment. And, see attached. It's my Timedemo Demo1 score in Doom 3 on Radeon 9500 128MB made more than 3 years ago. 19.3fps on high quality. On medium settings I hit 30+. 3 years on the same card that was considered mid-level at the time I bought it... if I'd bought the 9700, $50 more at the time, I'd be upgrading next year, as opposed to next month.

A HDD with 10000rpm will probably in a few years a very fast pice of hw.

What with SATA-III slated for 2007, probably not. It'll be outdated too.

[Zorro]

Re: HDD Discussion

I don't want to get stuck on this issue too long - but I really have to disagree with you on that point.

Here, for example, http://tweakers.net/benchdb/test/31 you can see the access times as measured for hundreds of hard disks on various controllers, from the fastest SCSI drives to the most basic IDE disks. See where the WD Raptor stands, compared to the 7200rpm ATA drives (including Hitachi's models) - it really is considerably faster.

There aren't any Hitachi 160GB ATA scores anywhere on that site. They list OLDER model Hitachi ATA drives that were still under the IBM designations, and that's it. My RECENTLY made Hitachi still has a faster access time than every SATA Raptor listed on that site by almost a full ms. You can disagree with me all you like, you're still wrong, and linking to benchmarks for a drive that's not mine proves nothing. The site does show you wrong on your claims regarding Sequential Read/Writes. The Raptor is significantly faster than the Hitachi, as I'd said.

[tiresias]

Re: HDD Discussion

There aren't any Hitachi 160GB ATA scores anywhere on that site. They list OLDER model Hitachi ATA drives that were still under the IBM designations, and that's it. My RECENTLY made Hitachi still has a faster access time than every SATA Raptor listed on that site by almost a full ms. You can disagree with me all you like, you're still wrong, and linking to benchmarks for a drive that's not mine proves nothing. The site does show you wrong on your claims regarding Sequential Read/Writes. The Raptor is significantly faster than the Hitachi, as I'd said.

But Mr Z... I honestly never said the Raptor was slower than the Hitachi in terms of sequential read speed, merely that a RAID 0 setup of any drive would almost always be much faster!

But anyway, regarding the access time issue, I think we'll have to agree to disagree.

...

PS. It would be great to have some other experiences/opinions from others though...