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)