[GLLUG] Dying Hard Drives

[Nick Kwiatkowski]

A couple things that I have run across with strands of hard drives :

  -  Check the quality of your airflow in your computer.  Are all the fans
working at their top speed?  Dust?  Cables?  Heat is the #2 killer of hard
drives.

  -  Check for improperly mounted drives.  Do you have all 4 screws in the
drive holding it to the case?  If you do not, when the drive is spinning up,
it can cause small vibrations (or large ones, if you did a duct-tape job!),
which can cause the spindle to loose balance over time.  This has been known
to cause bad sectors in the drive.

  -  Check the power supply, and the power coming out of it.  If you have a
descent motherboard, it will usually come with some sort of mechanism to
check the quality of the +12, +5.5 and +3 leads.  If you have sudden drops
(because of a refrigerator, garage-door, garbage-disposal, washer/dryer, or
a brown-out), it causes un-necessary stress on the electronic and mechanical
components in the drive.  Power is the number 1 killer of computers.  Well,
either that, or a bad operating system stuffed with spyware ;P

As far as the magnetic theory, I wouldn't buy it.  Chances are it will start
doing crazy stuff to your memory or Chipset/Bios before it damages your
drives, unless of course, you have a refrigerator magnet right on the drive
itself :P  Does your machine seem to do core-dumps at random times?

-Nick