i wanna know
 

i wanna know if any of you guys have a 200 or 250 gb hds, reason being i have had alot of them but to my experince they tend to fail, is there something i should constantly do to maintain health, eg, keep the drive working hard, i have a 250gb maxtor 7200 rpm drive, chock full of music, and im just lost for words at trying to keep these thngs going. mind you i do run my computer hard, i leave it on for days at a time just downloading stuff, and encoding movies. its near a window for ventilation and i think it has ample fans and everything else, can anyone plz recomend something to elongate the life of my drive...holla back

From a personal prefference i would say don't buy Maxtor drives. I have a very high failure rate for maxtor drives, on average they last less than 8 months in my PC. I have both Seagate and IBM drives here that have lasted for 2+ years whilst i have gone through many Maxtors in the same period.

Tip's to prolong the lif of your drive are:

A: Buy a drive cooler, they help to keep the drive operating at a reasonable temp.
B: Defrag the drive on a regular basis to improve performance and lower seek\drive access times.
C: Use a program that can access the drive's onboard controller and set the drive to "quiet mode"- this slows the drive down but can prolong the drive's lifespan.

what program can i find to access my drives onboard controller so i can set it to quiet, recomend me a drive cooler please, post the url of it, that will be greatly appreciated

I 2. that.

All of the drives I buy, and use heavily, I stick to Western Digital.
In the current setup, I have 4*120 + 2*200 + 1*250 WD drives, running 24/7.
And untill now, I have only replaced a 120, when my S.M.A.R.T monitor told me it was accumilating some read errors.

But, I'm also running 1 Maxtor (300/5400) that a friend of me donated,
and it has been running well under heavy load.
So not all Maxtors are bad ( I hope....... ).

My main problem is with the Maxtor drives up to and including the DiamondMAX Plus 9 drives, i have had rakes of them die on me and my customers. Add that to the fact that Maxtor won't provide data recovery on their cr*ppy drives makes it important NOT to use them if you want your data to be safe. Will search for the app i had for setting the options on the drive's SIRCOOKS.

Cooling is probably the most important thing to worry about. From my experience drives which were hot to the touch tend to fail very fast. Thermal stress should also be avoided. A drive which runs at 60 deg C constantly probably has a better chance of survival than a drive which is set to spin down every 30 seconds and ends up warming up and cooling down a few times per day.

Secondly, try to ensure the drive is fitted in such a way that mechanical vibration is minimized. If the drive/case resonates/rattles theres a good chance it's unhealthy for the drives long-term operation.

Thirdly, if your data is important, consider some form of redundancy. If you can, set up a RAID-5 configuration. You'll feel a lot safer - any one of your drives can fail, and you can reconstruct all the data from the other ones. You need at least 3 drives for a RAID-5, and you lose the storage space equivelant of one drive (as it stores parity information). While this means you need to pay 33% more (if you want 500GB of storage), it's still a lot cheaper than having simple duplicates of all your data. Besides, it's leet ;)

HeHe nice, not to mention the speed increases. ;)

Use rubber screws. ;) They help with sound and vibration, a ton.

nice advice guys thanks so much, where can i get these rubber screws from, holla back

what program can i use that can access the drive's onboard controller and set the drive to "quiet mode"- this slows the drive down but can prolong the drive's lifespan

I've had about 4 Maxtor and 3 IBM drives go bad in the past 3 years. :( (a few were warranty replacement parts even)

no one blows up more hard drives than Dog!!

I too had probs with some older Maxtor; Seagates appear to be #1 now..
I also like Western Digital, as they are a bit less expensive than the Seagates...lots of cheap Hitachi stuff out there now also...

Came with my antec case.

Last I checked newegg.com had some:

http://www.newegg.com/app/Viewproduc...rc hFor=screw

But they look either sold out or not selling atm. :(

Though my local store, PC Corner had them as well.

Just ask your store for "rubber HDD mountings". ;)

Me too. I haven't had any of my WD drives fail yet (knock on wood). As far as cooling, I think as long as the case fans do a good job, it shouldn't be too big of a factor. I have a WD 74GB Raptor and a WD 120GB SATA on one computer along with numerous other "eye candy" in the case and no heat problems so far.

I have the following drives Installed....

Only ever used Maxtor, when I tried an IBM It failed after 6 months, and lost tons of data.....

I tend to back up things now on DVD, if any go down, which they haven't for a couple of years...It's not that big a deal now......

i agree cooling is critical with hdd as i had a few die on me untill i brought a temperature monitor unit (hardcano 12 ) that monitors the four drives that i have now and when they get hot it increases the fan speed ( which rarely does now as it showed me my main intake fan was failing

i use maxtor & western digital

Out of all the HD's I've ever had going back to my 286 I've had more Maxtor than any other brand. I've only had two drives fail and only one of those was a Maxtor. The Maxtor was about 5 years old and the other drive was a WD that was only 6 months old.

Main System:
Maxtor 5T040H4 [Hard drive] (40.98 GB) -- drive 1,
rev TAH71DP0, SMART Status: Healthy
Maxtor 6Y160P0 [Hard drive] (163.93 GB) -- drive 0,
rev YAR41BW0, SMART Status: Healthy

In my old system I have setup in my boys room as an internet backup machine I have another Maxtor running in it 10GB B)

:lol: Can you guess how old that drive is?

I would like to know DoG if you have your HD's to shutdown under your power settings. If so, what is your setting. I have always set my drives to stay on all the time and never shutoff. I think kicking on and off is hard on them much like our motherboards.

Just my $.02

The drives are all in cooled, removable bays and never power down untill i either have to change one of them or am shutting the system down for maintainance, like swapping graphics cards or mobo's etc
Incidentally i have a an old WD here that has outlived around 6 various model Maxtor drives :)

Guess I'm really lucky :D

I really do trust what all of you guys say and will seriously consider your ideas when I spend more $MONEY$ on another drive.

Honestly, i have nothing but trouble with Maxtor drives. I had a Maxtor fail earlier this month (or late last month), it's sat here on my desk next to my monitor. DiamondMAX Plus 9 160GB ATA/133. When i first bought the drive it worked for 27 days before it failed, i took it back to the store and they replaced it. That drive lasted 29 days before it died, took it back to the store and they replaced it. This replacement lasted 12 months and 18 days before it died, no warranty left on it so i had to add it to my pile of paper weights in the corner, i figure if i save enough of them i can weigh parts of them in for scrap to buy a decent drive!