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My Hard Drives failed.....

1K views 9 replies 7 participants last post by  fivefeet8 
#1 ·
WEll, after almost 3 years of working perfectly fine, both my hard drives have failed or is going to fail. My 80 gig MAxtor Hd died a few days ago. Wouldn't show up in windows anymore. I got close to the HD and listened while the system shut down. A strange wheezing noise eminated from it. Luckily, I still had my 40 Gig MAxtor HD running fine. It's the hd with the OS install of winxp pro. Unfortuneately, it started showing signs of failure the next day. After 10 minutes in windows, the system would restart. After which, the HD would no longer be detected. I did manage to get it working after making sure the power cable and ide connector were properly seated, but still the problem persisted.

Ah well. No matter, I went to the local CompUsa and bought 2 seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm Serial ATA150 HD each with 160 gigabytes each. Set them up for a Raid0 array.. Been reinstalling everything all day. :thumb:

What's the best Raid configuration with 2 hds?
 
#4 ·
I have Raid but I've never used it, first, the performance setting (2HDs = 1 single faster HD) puts too much stress on the HDs and I don't feel like losing a HD again so soon (happened to me not so long ago too :p), and the second setting is pretty much pointless.
As for the best Raid setting, you won't see that on a home system, you'd need a SCSI card with a good number of SCSI HDs to enable Raid settings different from 1 or 0.
 
#5 ·
having 2 hdds working as one puts alot of stress on them, although it does cut game loading times off, but thats pretty much it. So I dont bother bother raid, but since seagate is a pretty good brand of HDDs I would trust it could outlast most conventional drives.
 
#6 ·
i wouldn't use RAID,...IMO you sacrifice too much. RAID0 is far less stable, but you get more speed (and i dont trust hard drives, i've had 5 of die recently). RAID1 is far more stable but you get half the space. i'd just use the drives independently.

my ideal setup is a (relatively) small drive as my main drive, like 40-80, and a larger drive for the main. before my hard drive situation went to **** i had a 80 (main drive with XP, programs, games, etc.), 120 (music, personal files like pictures, various things), a 250 (videos, movies, adobe premiere clips) and a 30 (backup, random crap, old install files). that was awesome, :wub:
 
#8 ·
I'd recommend you go to RAID-1 with only two hard drives. If you have any important data on your system at all, RAID-0 (using all of the drive's space) will lose everything you have should one fail.

I've actually been saved by linux's software RAID-5. One my my hard drives failed completely (wouldn't even spin up). Didn't stop me from booting. Noted the failure, powered off, popped out the drive, popped in a spare of the same model (I had about 10 spares), and started back up again. Told it to re-sync the array, no data was lost whatsoever.

Then again, I've also seen linux's software RAID-5 do bad, bad things. I eventually lost the whole array on /var for an unknown reason... though the other partitions were working just fine (they were all spread across the same hard drives, so I know it wasn't the drive's fault). What did I learns? Go out and spend $10 on a hardware RAID solution (that's the actual price nowadays).
 
#10 ·
Thanks for your suggestions. I'm gonna keep the raid configuration so I can test things with it. Divx encoding.

BTW, seems it was my IDE cable that was messed up. After replacing it, my 40 gig Maxtor hard drive is alive and well. I'm using it for backup purposes. ;)

Cypherswipe >> I've never had any seagate serial hd's before. But even with Maxtor Hd's I used, some people said they were very bad and would not last long. But they did. I'll have to use them for myself, but I'll keep your warning in mind.
 
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