Wednesday, January 13, 2010

3 Hard Drives Die in 8 Days.



An earlier post about an editing place's dying hard drives never mentioned the type of HD that was dying. Turns out it was a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB PATA133. Model 6L300R0.

Actually, it turns out it was THREE of these drives. The first one, the one I recorded the sounds from (lets call it Drive A) died first.

Drive A was rarely accessed, but it was nearly full with only about 200MBs of room left.

Drive B died about 3 days later and was used for hourly secondary backups for a long time and had maybe 50GBs left on it.

Drive C died 4 days after that, yesterday. It's not exactly dead, but it's making horrible noises and access time is quite long. It was used constantly as a Render/Test Export drive.

So, three DiamondMax 10 PATA 300GB drives all dying within about 8 days. All on separate busses and two being on separate Macs.

All three were in external cases and all power supplies were attached to UPS's.

2 comments:

xbasket said...

I've had similar experiences. The UPS is very interesting b/c, after tearing apart the enclosures, I'm pretty convinced that voltage regulation inside the enclosure was done through only a single chip. I switched to the USB externals and have never had a subsequent problem. For example, a WD500 has lasted 2 years w/out flaking even when a bit warm. I don't run anything in room temps above 72 deg F.

Jon said...

This doesn't surprise me. I used to buy Maxtor drives because they were cheap. Unfortunately you get what you pay for. One lasted a year, the rest lasted a few months.